She set the frame down and reached for silver wire thin enough to bend with fingertips. She wrapped it around the frame’s edges—reinforcement disguised as decoration.
“They’ll call it obsession.” Her voice dropped. “Love this deep looks dangerous to people who’ve never felt it. ButIknow the difference between connection and control.”
She paused. Hands still. Eyes lifting to stare at space where she knew he watched. “I love you enough to let you be what you are. Angel or fallen or whatever you become on this earth. I love all of it. I won’t accept cosmic law getting final say over how we exist together.”
Tears pooled in her eyes but didn’t fall. She didn’t wipe them away.
“So I’m making mirrors that remember. Embedding our connection in glass that outlasts us both. When I return—whatever form death permits—these mirrors guide me back.”
The workshop collapsed.
Bastien stood in the conservation room. Afternoon light through windows. Mirror fragment cooling against his palm. What Charlotte had created resonated beyond her lifetime, but this moment in time occurred before she stopped the process. He needed to find that imprint. How did she learn it would become dangerous, or rather, that itcouldbecome dangerous.
His reflection stared back from the glass surface. Not Charlotte anymore. Just him, rendered in amber lamp light. But something in his expression had changed. Something the vision had put there that he couldn’t hide.
He started to set the mirror down. His fingers wouldn’t release. The glass stayed locked in his grip.
Words rose across the surface. Faint script forming from condensation that had no source. Charlotte’s handwriting—same careful formation he’d seen on decades of documents.
Affection is obedience by another name.
The letters vanished. Immediate erasure, not gradual fading.
Charlotte hadn’t written that. The phrasing contradicted everything she’d believed. The philosophy opposed her nature.
Gideon had written it. Corruption introduced to reframe her devotion as something darker. Something dangerous; a lie.
Bastien forced his fingers open. The mirror settled onto velvet without sound.
He killed the lamp and positioned himself directly over the fragment. His face appeared in the glass—no transformation, no displacement. Just the current configuration looking back at him.
Every line the centuries had carved. Every shadow. Every alteration that love and descent had written into flesh that remembered what it used to be.
Outside the door, footsteps approached. Delphine’s pattern—quick steps, slight hesitation before doorways when her arms were full.
Ten seconds before she knocked.
He had ten seconds to compose his face, to hide what the mirror had shown him.
He took eight.
Three precise knocks. Her signal.
“Come in.”
The door opened. Delphine entered with a folder thick enough to require both hands. “Found the craftsmen’s records. The ones who did Charlotte’s gilding.” She crossed to the table, stopped when she saw his face. “What happened?”
Direct question. No hedging. That was Delphine.
“The mirror showed me something.” He measured his response. “A scene from when Charlotte created these. Her workshop. The gold leaf application process.”
“You saw that? In the glass?”
“Echo Imprint. Strong emotion near prepared mirrors seals itself in. The glass replays what Charlotte felt while she worked.”
Delphine set down her folder and moved closer, studying the fragment without touching it. “What did she feel?”
“Certainty. Devotion that refused limitation.”
