Neither of them moved.
Bastien’s hand stayed at her waist. His fingers pressed into the warmth they had found, and her pulse answered beneath the skin. Her grip on his jacket had not loosened. She held the fabric at his chest, her knuckles against his collarbone, her fingers curled tight.
Her breathing slowed. Each exhale touched his neck. She stood inside the circle of his arm, and neither her weight nor his hold shifted toward release.
“Are you hurt?” His voice came out lower than he intended. Rougher. The dust had not caused it.
“No.” Her voice sat against his throat. She had not lifted her head. “No, I’m fine.”
The wordfineheld none of its usual casual architecture. She delivered it into the space between his jaw and his collar, and the vibration of her speech traveled his skin. He became aware of the exact temperature of her breath against his throat.
He should release her. The ceiling held its new configuration. The joist had stopped moving. The dust was settling. His arm at her waist served no protective function now.
Neither of them stepped back.
Her fingers uncurled from his jacket. Slowly. Each one releasing its grip in sequence, her knuckles dragging against the fabric as they straightened. Her palm settled flat against hischest, over his heart, and rested there. She had not pulled her hand away. She had opened it.
Bastien’s heartbeat pressed against her palm. Her breathing changed—the rhythm adjusting to match what her hand had found.
Then it hit.
A sharp pull, directional, dragged his awareness south and east. The flare whited out his peripheral vision and replaced it with static. Dizziness arrived behind it, spinning the basement around an axis that did not exist. His forearm discharged in a wave that reached his fingertips and the crown of his skull at once.
His weight shifted. His hand at Delphine’s waist gripped harder—not pulling her closer but bracing against the vertigo that threatened to take his legs. The room tilted. The flashlight on the floor completed its lazy arc, and the moving light multiplied in his vision, splitting into three beams that swept the walls in parallax.
“Bastien.”
Delphine’s palm pressed harder against his chest. Her other hand came up and landed on his arm, grip finding the muscle above the elbow. Two points of anchor in a world that had lost its fixed orientation. He leaned into them.
“Look at me.”
He tried. Her face swam in and out of focus. The curse pulsed again, another directional pull, insisting that a location in the southeast quadrant of the city required his awareness. The beacon did not care that he stood in a compromised basement with a woman whose hands were the only fixed points in his spinning perception.
Delphine’s hand moved from his arm to his face. Her fingers touched his jaw, and the contact cut through the static. Her fingertips found the bone beneath and pressed with enoughforce to redirect his attention from the curse’s demands to the physical fact of her touch.
“Stay here,” she said. “Stay with me.”
The dizziness crested and broke. His vision resolved into a single image: Delphine’s face, six inches from his. Dust had settled in her hair and along one shoulder. The flashlight had completed its roll and stopped against the wall, its beam pointed at the ceiling, throwing their shadows long and merged across the brick.
His breathing came in pulls that shuddered on the exhale. The mark burned on his arm, but the flare was subsiding. The dizziness receded in degrees, each degree returning a portion of the room to stability.
Delphine did not remove her hands.
Her palm stayed against his chest. Her fingers stayed at his jaw. Her body still pressed to his, her face close enough that he could see the faint scar above her left eyebrow and the small movements of her mouth as she assessed his recovery.
“What was that?” she asked.
The truth belonged to a conversation they had not yet had and might not survive.
“The building,” he said. The lie tasted wrong. “Dust. Disorientation from the collapse.”
She studied him. Her fingers at his jaw did not move. She had heard the lie and had chosen not to challenge it—not now, not in a basement with a fractured ceiling and ritual markings carved into the floor and his heartbeat hammering against her palm.
She would challenge it later. He knew her pauses as well as he knew her words.
“Can you walk?”
“Yes.”
