“I slept.”
“You slept for forty minutes between three and four. Your breathing changed, and then it went back to what it does when you’re awake.” She turned her face upward, her chin restingon his chest, her eyes finding his. The lamplight from the hall caught the planes of her face. “I know the difference.”
He could not argue with observation that precise. She had mapped his breathing the way she mapped archival inconsistencies, with the patience of someone who understood that patterns surrendered themselves to attention and hid from haste.
“You should have slept,” he said.
“I did sleep. You were the one doing calculations in the dark.” She propped herself on her elbow, and the sheet slid from her shoulder, and the morning light found the skin he had traced with his hands hours ago. “What were you calculating?”
The question held no edge. She asked the way she asked about everything, with the expectation that he would answer, and the willingness to wait if he could not.
“Whether the mark has changed.”
“Has it?”
The skin where the mark remained showed its defined edges in the morning light. The mark had not changed shape. Its color had not deepened. But the quality of its presence in his body had shifted overnight, and the shift held. The beacon sat lower than it had at any point since the first murder scene, and the quiet it produced felt less like dormancy and more like a held breath between movements, the silence before the next phrase begins.
“I don’t know yet,” he said. “It behaves differently near you.”
She studied the mark. Her fingers hovered above the skin without touching, tracing the boundary between darkened and undarkened flesh. Then she settled her palm flat against it again, and the beacon dropped another register, and his lungs opened and his shoulders released and his next exhale emptied him so completely that his hands tightened on the sheet.
He was becoming dependent on her proximity. The thought landed, and his jaw clenched around it.
Delphine held his gaze from her position above him. Then she leaned down and pressed her mouth to the mark.
The beacon went silent.
The broadcast ceased for the first time since the curse had found him. The space it left behind opened so wide that Bastien’s breath caught in his chest and stayed there. His ears rang with the absence.
Delphine lifted her head. “What just happened?”
“You stopped it.” His voice came out stripped to the fact and nothing else. “The signal. It stopped.”
She looked at the mark, then at his face, then at the mark again. Her brow drew inward, and her mouth pressed to a line—the expression she wore when evidence broke the existing framework and she had to rebuild around it.
“Temporarily?”
The beacon resumed before she finished the word. Low, steady, and with its familiar insistence, but at a fraction of its former volume, brushing against his awareness without commanding it.
“Temporarily,” he confirmed.
She filed this. He could see her filing it, adding the observation to the accumulating architecture of what she knew and did not yet understand about what he carried. She did not push. She kissed the mark once more, lightly, and the signal flickered, and then she rose from the bed and crossed the room to the bathroom.
Water ran through the safehouse’s reluctant plumbing. Bastien lay in the bed she had vacated and pressed his palm against the mark where her mouth had been. The skin held her warmth.
His chest ached when she left the room. His hand reached toward the empty mattress beside him before he caught it andpulled it back. Two centuries of solitude, and his body had recalibrated around her in a single night.
She returned from the bathroom wearing his shirt. The fabric hung past her thighs, and she had rolled the sleeves twice, and the collar sat wide enough to show the line of her collarbone. She moved through the safehouse kitchen with the ease of someone who understood unfamiliar spaces, opening cabinets until she found the coffee, filling the pot from the tap, pressing the button on the coffeemaker.
He watched her from the bedroom doorway. She measured grounds with a spoon she found in the second drawer she tried. She rinsed two mugs that had sat in the dish rack long enough to collect dust.
“There’s no milk,” she said. “And the only thing in the refrigerator is a bottle of hot sauce that expired in January.”
“Baptiste’s provisions.”
“Baptiste needs to reconsider his definition of provisions.” She poured coffee into both mugs and carried one to him. Their fingers overlapped on the ceramic, and neither of them hurried the transfer.
She sat at the kitchen table. He sat across from her. September heat was already building toward the day’s full weight, and the live oak filtered the light into moving patterns on the table’s surface. The coffeepot clicked as it finished its cycle.
