“Fifty livres.” Delphine tapped the figure. “That’s furniture money. Quality furniture. Nobody spends that on a mirror unless it’s . . .” She looked up at him. “You think this is connected to your case.”
“The Archdiocese buying occult items isn’t standard practice.”
“No, but they confiscated them regularly. Especially mirrors used for divination.” She pulled the ledger closer, her fingers tracing the margin notes. “There’s more. See this?” She pointed to faded ink barely visible along the edge. “Someone added a notation later. Can you make it out?”
Bastien tilted the page toward the lamp. The writing was smaller, cramped, added decades after the original entry. “Shadowglass. Sealed per Bishop’s order, 1791.”
“Shadowglass.” Delphine repeated the word slowly, testing its weight. “I’ve never seen that term in any of the other estate records. What does it mean?”
He wanted to deflect, but her eyes held the particular focus that meant she’d already started building theories. Delphine was too good at her work to feed comfortable lies. “It’s a type ofmirror that reflects more than physical appearance. Allegedly shows what someone tries to hide.”
“Soul mirrors.” She sat back, expression shifting from curiosity to concern. “I’ve read references in grimoires. They were supposed to reveal truth—the kind of truth people build their entire lives avoiding.” She met his gaze. “That’s dangerous.”
“Very.”
“And someone brought one to auction last week.” Not a question.
Bastien didn’t answer, which was answer enough.
Delphine exhaled slowly, then reached for the second ledger without breaking eye contact. “Then we need to find everything the Archive has on Charlotte Lacroix. Because if she owned one of these mirrors, she probably documented how it worked.” Delphine already knew Charlotte was an ancestor of hers and was “special” but they’d silently agreed to continue researching without bringing up the connection.
They worked in comfortable silence, an amenity from spending enough time together to not need constant conversation. Delphine found connections he might have overlooked—a property transfer here, a business partnership there. She had an archivist’s instinct for patterns, seeing how information scattered across decades might connect.
Bastien provided context she couldn’t access through documents alone. When she found a reference to “celestial motifs” on a commissioned mirror frame, he explained how those symbols appeared in divination practices. When she questioned why the Church would pay premium prices, he walked her through ecclesiastical politics without making it sound like a lecture. All the while, Bastien watched out of the corner of his eye any reflective surfaces, and how reflectionslagged by moments only he could detect but were certainly present.
She reached across the table for a third ledger, her hand passing over the Lacroix family crest embossed on the leather cover. The green-shaded lamp steadied, its usual flicker smoothing into constant light. In the glass surface of a nearby display case, their reflections sharpened—movements synchronizing perfectly where Bastien had recognized they’d been slightly delayed before.
Delphine didn’t notice. She was absorbed in a property inventory from 1773, tracking mirror purchases through the Lacroix household accounts, most of which were ordinary household mirrors.
Bastien noticed. The contamination spreading through the city’s reflective surfaces had calmed in her immediate vicinity, settling into normal function. Not magic exactly, but something in her presence stabilized what had been corrupted. He’d suspected it since the auction house, but seeing it here, watching glass remember how to reflect honestly while she worked?—
“Here.” Delphine pointed to an entry. “Another mirror. ‘Newly commissioned, celestial designed frame, twenty livres.’ That’s six months before Charlotte’s death.” She looked up. “She was collecting them. Building a set, maybe?”
“Or experimenting.” He kept his voice neutral. “Testing different configurations.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know yet.”
She studied him with an expression that meant she knew he was holding back but had decided—for now—not to push. “You’re buying me more than beignets at this rate. I’m thinking Commander’s Palace.”
“Ambitious.”
“I found you mirrors in eighteenth-century estate records. I’m worth it.” She smiled, brief and warm, and Bastien had to look away. His desire to pull her into his arms like he had in other lives washed over him.
His hand reached for the same ledger she was closing. Their fingers brushed—brief contact, nothing deliberate. Delphine stilled, and for three heartbeats neither of them moved.
Then she pulled back, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear in the gesture she always used when trying to look composed. “I should pull the correspondence files. If Charlotte was documenting her mirror work, she might have written about it.”
“I’ll photograph these entries.” Bastien withdrew his phone, grateful for the excuse to focus on something other than the warmth still radiating from where they’d touched.
“Ten minutes.” Delphine stood, gathering the ledgers with movements that suggested someone buying time to steady themselves. “The older files are in the climate vault.”
She left the reading room, and the lamp resumed its faint flicker. The reflection in the display case lagged again, just slightly out of sync.
Bastien photographed what he knew as the Shadowglass entry from three angles, then added notes to his documentation. Location, date, description, Church involvement. The same methodical record-keeping that felt inadequate against what he’d just confirmed. Delphine didn’t just correlate with stability in the mirror network. She generated it. Her presence normalized what Gideon’s work had corrupted. The question was . . . could Gideon see that? Did he know?
Delphine returned with two more ledgers and a folder of loose correspondence. “I found letters. Personal ones, not business records.” She set them down gently. “CharlotteLacroix’s private papers. The Archive acquired them in the 1960s from an estate sale.”
