She had left it after their last working session, two days before the council meeting. He had noticed it that night, set it aside, told himself he would return it the next time they met. He had not returned it. The notebook held its corner of the counter and refused to become invisible, the same way Delphine refused to become background in any room she entered.
His phone buzzed. Her name on the screen.
“I left my notebook at your place.”
“I know.”
“I need it. I have transcriptions in there from the Archive that connect to the victim sequencing.”
“Come get it, then.”
A pause. He heard traffic behind her voice, the blare of a horn, someone laughing on a sidewalk. She was already in the Quarter.
“I’m on Royal. Five minutes.”
She arrived in four minutes.
Bastien opened the door and Delphine LeClair climbed the stairs with the efficiency he had come to expect from her. She wore the same dark linen from the council meeting, though she had loosened her hair from the pulled-back arrangement so it fell past her shoulders. Her canvas bag hung from one arm. Her eyes had narrowed into that forward-looking focus, her attention already three steps ahead of the conversation.
She found the notebook on the counter, flipped it open, and scanned the page she needed.
“The Marchande-Levesque genealogical branches,” she said, half to herself. “I cross-referenced these against the death records in the Archive’s collection, and the overlap is tighter than we discussed at the council. Five of the seven victims descend from families present at the 1847 tribunal. The other two connect through intermarriage within the same generation.”
“I know.”
“You know because I told you. Before the meeting.” She set the notebook down and turned to face him. “And when you stood in front of Marcelline and presented the pattern, you stripped it down to the bloodline map and the political implications. You left out the intermarriage connections.”
“Because the intermarriage connections were not relevant to what the council needed to hear.”
“They were relevant to the scope of the threat.” She did not look away. “If the killer is targeting every branch that traces back to the tribunal, the field of potential victims doubles. You gave Marcelline a smaller number. You gave her a version that fit the resources she was willing to commit.”
Bastien crossed to the desk and set his jacket over the back of the chair. The mark continued to give a low and steady heat that had not diminished since the meeting. Through the open window, a saxophone picked up the trombone’s melody half a block away and bent it into bruised, aching territory.
“Marcelline will commit what Marcelline chooses to commit,” he said. “Presenting the full scope of the threat would not have changed her allocation. It would have given her a reason to declare the investigation beyond my capacity and appoint her own people.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I have known Marcelline Renault for longer than the state of Louisiana has existed. I know exactly what that woman does when she feels the problem exceeding the solution she has chosen to fund.”
The apartment held the day’s accumulated warmth. Humidity clung to every surface, and the fan above pushed it in circles without reducing it.
Delphine pulled out one of the kitchen chairs and sat. She opened the notebook to a page dense with her handwriting, annotations running up both margins.
“You also omitted the symbol variation from the Cantrelle scene. The incision pattern on Jean-Marc’s body deviated from the prior six, and you told the council the method had merely become more efficient. You didn’t mention that the deviation followed a different sigil tradition entirely.”
“Because the distinction requires knowledge of ritual practice that neither Marcelline nor Valentin possesses, andattempting to explain it in that room would have produced questions I was not prepared to answer.”
“Questions about your own expertise.” She met his eyes across the small kitchen. “Questions about how you recognize sigil traditions that predate modern practice by centuries.”
The statement hung between them.
“My expertise is the reason they hired me,” he said.
“Your expertise exceeds what anyone should have. I’ve spent my career working with primary sources, Bastien. I know what access to historical knowledge looks like, and I know what it looks like when someone’s understanding of the past is not learned. It’s lived.”
She delivered the accusation at the same level she had been speaking. Her voice did not rise. Her hands did not move. The restraint landed harder than shouting would have.
And the restraint cracked him open.
