“Neither is threatening people I care about.” Bastien gestured toward the end of the alley. “Go. Now. While I’m still feeling conversational.”
The vampire went.
Bastien waited until the footsteps faded entirely, until his expanded perception confirmed the watcher had moved at least four blocks away, before allowing himself to lean against the alley wall and breathe.
The mark continued its steady burn against the inside of his forearm. Broadcasting. Drawing attention. Exposing every pattern of his existence to anyone who cared to watch.
The vampire had been right about one thing: removing individual observers would not stop the observation. His position was known, his movements tracked, his vulnerabilities identified. Every faction in the city could monitor him in real time.
He pushed off the wall and moved toward the Archive entrance.
Delphine sat at her desk, bent over documents with the focused attention that characterized her work. She looked up as he entered, and her expression shifted from concentration to something warmer in the way that he had stopped pretending not to notice.
“You’re early.” She set down her pen and stretched, rolling shoulders that had clearly been hunched over research for too long. “I wasn’t expecting you until seven.”
They had planned dinner. A proper dinner, at a restaurant she had mentioned wanting to try. He had been looking forward to it with an anticipation that now felt complicated.
“I was in the neighborhood.” The lie came easily, which was its own problem. “Finished my meeting sooner than expected.”
Delphine studied his face with the attention she gave to documents requiring careful analysis. “You look tense. Did something happen?”
“Nothing worth discussing.”
He moved to the window, checking the street below from habit rather than necessity. Empty now. No watchers visible. But the absence meant nothing when they could find him whenever they chose.
“Bastien.” Her voice carried concern. “Talk to me.”
He turned from the window to face her. She sat with papers spread around her, the amber light of her desk lamp catching copper highlights in her hair, her expression open and patient in the way that made him forget, sometimes, how much he was hiding.
“The investigation is progressing in ways I didn’t anticipate.” True enough. “There are complications.”
“Complications involving me?”
The question landed with precision that made him wonder, not for the first time, how much she perceived without understanding. She read people the way she read documents—thoroughly, catching details others missed.
“What makes you ask that?”
“Because you’ve been watching the street since you came in. Because your shoulders are set the way they get when you’re preparing for something. Because—” She rose from her chair and crossed to where he stood, close enough that he could smell the jasmine in her hair. “Because something changed in the last week. You check corners before we walk anywhere. You position yourself between me and doorways. You’ve started asking where I’ll be and when, questions you never asked before.”
He should have known she would notice.
“The case has expanded.” He measured the words. “The people responsible have broader reach than I initially assumed. They’re monitoring anyone connected to my investigation.”
“Including me.”
“Including you.”
Delphine absorbed this without visible fear. Her expression shifted to the focused calm she showed when confronting difficult documents, when facing information that required processing rather than reaction.
“Is that why you were really early? Because someone was watching me?”
He could lie. He could maintain the fiction that his early arrival was coincidence, that his tension had nothing to do with the vampire he had just threatened, that her safety was a peripheral rather than central concern.
She deserved better than comfortable lies.
“Yes.”
“And you handled it?”
