At one point, she reached across the table, brushing a crumb from his sleeve.
A moment. Nothing more. But it lit him up from the inside.
He remembered the night Delia first told him she loved him—in a storm, soaked to the bone, kissing him like it was the only language she spoke. And the night Charlotte had stitched his wounds in silence, her hands trembling, love unspoken but known.
He wanted to reach across the table. He longed to say the words.You loved me first. You always did.But it wasn’t time.
So he just said, “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For this. For making space for me, even when I don’t deserve it.”
“You’re wrong about that.”
They finished dessert—vanilla custard and burned sugar, the caramel bitter-sweet and perfect—and stepped out into the humid dark. The Quarter had shifted into its evening personality: louder, looser, jazz bleeding from doorways, tourists moving in laughing clusters, the street performers setting up for their night shifts.
Bastien caught a glint in a storefront mirror as they passed. Just a flicker.
His own reflection . . . lingered. One heartbeat too long.
He turned away.
Delphine didn’t notice.
He slipped his hand to the small of her back, guiding her gently as they walked toward her apartment. She leaned into the touch, just slightly, and he felt the warmth of her even through the layers of clothing between them.
For tonight, he would pretend he was just a man. Not a fallen thing. Not haunted. Just someone lucky enough to walk beside her before everything unraveled again.
They walked in comfortable silence, the kind that didn’t need filling. The kind that came from people who felt at ease with each other, even when secrets lay between them like land mines waiting to be triggered.
At her building, Delphine paused at the door. Turned to face him. In the streetlight, her eyes were dark and serious.
“Thank you,” she said. “For tonight. For being honest about being dishonest. That’s . . . more than most people manage.”
“I don’t want to lie to you.”
“I know. That’s why I’m not pushing.” She reached out, squeezed his hand once. “But when you’re ready to tell me the rest—and you will be, eventually—I’ll be here.”
Then she was inside, door closing softly behind her, leaving him on the stoop with the weight of centuries pressing down and the knowledge that every moment of happiness was borrowed time.
He turned toward home. And in every shop window he passed, his reflection watched him with eyes that knew too much.
Chapter
Nine
Bastien had been at his desk since dawn, working through the information Delphine had given him and figuring out how to get ahead of Gideon. A full journal filled with notes—timelines, locations, cross-references between the Shadowglass Mirror and other Lacroix holdings. His second cup of coffee had gone cold an hour ago. The third sat steaming at his elbow, forgotten while he traced connections across a map of the Quarter.
The office wasn’t much. Located on the floor of a building on Dauphine, the windows faced the street, and morning light cut through shutters in amber slices. His desk dominated the space—scarred oak that had survived a century of use before he’d bought it. File cabinets lined one wall, each drawer warded against magical intrusion and labeled with dates that would mean nothing to anyone who broke in. The other walls held maps of the Quarter, marked with symbols only he would recognize. Red pins for locations where the Veil grew thin. Blue for properties connected to old bloodlines. Silver thread connecting points in patterns that revealed the network Charlotte had built without meaning to.
Or maybe she had meant to… He wasn’t sure anymore. That was the question he kept coming back around to.
Street sounds filtered up through the windows. Delivery trucks navigating narrow streets, diesel engines growling. A café owner hosing down the sidewalk three doors down, water hitting concrete in steady rhythm. Someone practicing trumpet scales in an apartment nearby, the same phrase repeated until muscle memory caught up with intent. The Quarter waking up. Ordinary morning routine layered over everything that moved beneath.
Bastien drew another line connecting two addresses on his largest map. The Lacroix family had owned property throughout the Quarter in the 1700s—warehouses near the river, townhouses on Royal Street, a workshop in what was now the Marigny. Every location corresponded to mirrors she’d commissioned. He’d found seven so far. If the pattern held, there would be more. A dozen, maybe. Enough to create resonance across the entire district.
If he was right about Charlotte’s network—if the mirrors formed a geometric pattern rather than random distribution—then Gideon didn’t need to activate them individually. Sacred geometry would be at play. Amplification through arrangement. He could trigger the entire system simultaneously, turn every reflective surface in New Orleans into a node in his surveillance web.
