“Promise me you’ll be careful,” he said.
“I’m always careful.”
“Promise me anyway.”
She smiled, brief and warm. “I promise to be as careful as my professional standards allow. Which is very careful indeed.”
They worked through the morning, side by side at his desk. Delphine brought her archivist’s precision to the Beaumontcorrespondence, cross-referencing names and dates while Bastien explained the political landscape of 1847 and the violence of 1891. She asked careful questions—never probing for information he wasn’t willing to share, always focused on what the documents themselves could reveal.
By noon, they had assembled a clearer picture than Bastien had managed alone.
The conspiracy against the Marchande-Levesque family had been deliberate, coordinated, and extensively documented—at least among those who participated. The Beaumont papers contained references to meetings, agreements, the division of spoils following the purge. Names appeared and reappeared: representatives of the houses that had voted against the compact, their human agents, the witnesses who had validated the official history.
“Someone has access to records like these,” Delphine said. She sat back from the desk, rubbing her eyes. “The specificity of the victims, the significance of the locations—this isn’t random vengeance. This is informed vengeance. Documented vengeance.”
“The houses burned their archives after the purge. Or claimed to.”
“Obviously not all of them.” She gestured at the Beaumont volumes. “These survived. Others may have as well. Private collections, estate sales, materials that escaped the intended destruction.”
“And someone found them.”
“Someone with research skills. Someone who understood what they were looking at.” She met his eyes. “Someone who did exactly what you’ve been doing—tracing bloodlines, mapping connections, identifying the descendants of those who participated in violence that was supposed to stay buried.”
His forearm warmed. He pressed his palm against it, feeling the frequency respond to understanding.
“The killer isn’t acting alone,” he said.
“The killer might not even be the one driving this.” Delphine’s voice carried consideration as she assembled a theory from the incomplete evidence. “The research required to identify these victims, the knowledge of historical grievances, the precision of the targeting—that’s not the work of someone motivated by simple revenge. That’s the work of someone with a plan.”
“A plan to destabilize vampire politics.”
“A plan to tear open wounds that were supposed to have healed.” She rose from her chair and moved to the window, looking out at Dauphine Street with the distant expression of someone thinking through implications. “You said the Marchande-Levesque family proposed reform. They wanted to change how vampire society operated. The other houses destroyed them to prevent that change.”
“Yes.”
“What if someone decided the destruction wasn’t sufficient? That the houses who committed it needed to suffer consequences?” She turned to face him. “Not just personal consequences. Structural consequences. The collapse of the order they killed to preserve.”
Bastien watched the light catch her hair, the copper warmth of it against the window’s brightness. She had arrived at the same conclusion he had reached hours earlier—had traced the same logic, identified the same strategy, understood what the murders were designed to accomplish.
The intelligence of it—the speed and precision of her reasoning—did something to his composure that six hours of violent political history had not managed.
“You should go home,” he said.
“I should?”
“This investigation will become more dangerous before it ends. I’ve already made you visible by accepting your help. If the wrong people learn what you’ve contributed?—”
“Then they’ll learn it.” She crossed her arms, her expression shifting from consideration to resolve. “I made my choice when I brought those records here. I’m not going to unmake it because the risks are becoming clearer. We’ve been through this before, Bastien.”
“Delphine—”
“Bastien.” She uncrossed her arms and closed the distance between them, stopping near enough that he could feel the warmth of her, the particular quality of her attention when she had decided something. “I understand you want to protect me. What I’m asking you to understand is that I don’t need protecting from my own decisions.”
There was a moment—one of those moments where the air in a room changes quality, where the distance between two people stops being about geography and starts being about whether either of them is going to acknowledge what’s happening.
He was very aware of her proximity. He had been aware of it all morning, across the desk, working through documents that had nothing to do with what was also occurring in the room. She smelled of coffee and something floral, and she was looking at him with the expression she wore when she had said everything she intended to say and was waiting to see what he would do with it.
“Promise me you’ll be careful,” he said again, quieter.
