The door closed behind her. Bastien stayed on the stoop for a moment, breathing the heavy night air. The Quarter hummed around him—music, voices, the perpetual energy of a city that never quite slept. But underneath it all, the mirror network pulsed quietly. Stable. Functional. Charlotte’s design operating as intended.
They’d done it. Stabilized the network. Purged Gideon’s corruption. Preserved what Charlotte had built.
And Delphine had made her choice in front of the entire magical community. Had seen Gideon’s worst interpretation of their relationship and chosen to stay anyway. To try.
What that meant—what they would build from here—remained uncertain. But tonight, exhausted and sore and depleted, Bastien felt something he hadn’t felt in decades.
Hope.
Chapter
Twenty-Eight
Bastien walked home alone through streets that had emptied somewhat. Past midnight now, even Bourbon Street’s energy had dimmed to a manageable hum. Street cleaners worked their way down the sidewalks with industrial-sized push brooms, clearing the debris of another night. The smell of garbage and spilled alcohol mixed with night-blooming jasmine from someone’s courtyard garden.
His burned palms throbbed with each pulse of his heartbeat. Burns that would blister by morning. His throat felt raw. His muscles ached from maintaining position at the altar. The celestial resonance that let him interface with magical systems felt depleted—would probably take a week to fully recover. He’d pushed himself harder tonight than he had in decades.
But the network was stable. He could feel it beneath the city as he walked—the steady rhythm of Charlotte’s design functioning properly. Gold and silver frequencies woven together, no more purple corruption. Preserved for whoever needed it next.
And Delphine had stood at that altar and spoken truth through a mirror that amplified honest choice. Had broadcast her decision to honor the bond, not because it forced her butbecause she wanted to understand what they had. Because she was choosing to try.
Bastien stopped at the corner of Royal and St. Philip, looking up at the iron lacework on a second-story balcony. The metalwork cast intricate shadows in the streetlight. Beautiful in its complexity, each curve and spiral deliberate.
Charlotte had approached magic the same way—with precision and care, building systems that were elegant in their function. She’d been right about everything. Connection could exist without compulsion. Choice could be preserved even in the presence of a bond that transcended lifetimes.
And Delphine had proven it. Had chosen clearly, with full awareness, while confronting the worst possible interpretation of what that choice meant.
He started walking again. A cat darted across the street ahead of him, disappearing into an alley. Someone played piano in an upstairs apartment, the notes carrying through an open window. Chopin, melancholy and beautiful.
But before he could go home, before he could rest, there was something he needed to verify. Someone he needed to confirm had truly left.
Bastien extended his awareness through the mirror network, searching for the frequency that had been fighting against Charlotte’s design for weeks. He let his consciousness sink into the glass veins beneath the street, following the paths of gold and silver light, looking for any trace of purple corruption that might still be hiding in the system.
Nothing.
Gideon’s signature was gone from the city completely. Not dead—Bastien would have felt that, the way you felt a string snap under tension. Not severed either, which left a specific kind of ragged edge in the network. Just absent.
But absence wasn’t the same as resolution. Bastien needed to see what remained. Needed to understand what happened to a man who’d built his entire identity around a philosophy that had just been publicly, devastatingly disproven.
He changed direction, heading toward the Marigny. The address had been in the doppelgänger’s fractured reflection—a glimpse of Gideon’s workspace that Bastien had filed away for later investigation. Esplanade Avenue, a renovated shotgun house divided into rental units, the kind of place that attracted artists and academics who needed affordable space in the Quarter’s orbit.
The building was dark when he arrived. Three units, stacked railroad-style. Gideon’s was the middle one—accessible through a side entrance, a separate door painted green that had once been charming but now just looked weathered.
The door was unlocked. Not broken, not forced. Just . . . open. As if someone had left in such a hurry that securing the space behind them hadn’t mattered.
Bastien pushed it open carefully, extending his senses first to check for wards, traps, defensive magic. Nothing. The space was magically inert in a way that felt deliberate, like someone had systematically dismantled every protective spell before leaving.
Inside, the apartment was exactly as the doppelgänger had shown him, but worse. So much worse.
One wall was entirely covered in mirrors—dozens of them, different sizes and shapes, arranged in overlapping patterns that created a dizzying mosaic of reflected light. But they weren’t reflecting the room as it currently existed. They were frozen, each showing a different scene from the past weeks.
Bastien and Delphine at the Archive. Walking through Jackson Square. Having dinner at the restaurant. Every moment of their developing relationship captured and preserved in glass, arranged chronologically like a surveillance timeline.
But what made his stomach turn were the annotations. Written directly on the mirror frames in what looked like grease pencil or wax crayon—words scratched with increasing desperation.
“Choice is an illusion.”
“She doesn’t see the cage.”
