Page 27 of Where the Snakes Sleep

I glance past Camille to the other man, who gives me a quick nod. “Oh. Okay…?”

“I reconsidered our conversation with Monsieur Duret,” Camille continues, “and I could not, in good conscience, entrust the job to someone who disrespected you so blatantly. Therefore, I brought a more capable workman. No thanks necessary.”

What the hell?

“I said I needed to figure out if the roof could be repaired,” I answer, my jaw tight.

He tilts his head. “Yes.”

“That wasn’t me asking you to set it up.”

“I understand.”

My eye twitches. “So you set it up anyway.”

Camille’s face remains immovable. “Yes.”

Monsieur Barthes shifts from foot to foot, starting to look uncomfortable. Damn it.

I step aside. “Well, since he’s here…”

Camille inclines his head, as though I’ve finally arrived at the inevitable conclusion he knew I would.

Asshole.

The roofer says something rapid and technical in French. I smile with earnest confusion.

“He needs to see the damage inside before he goes up,” Camille interprets.

“Right. Of course.” I move aside and let Monsieur Barthes step in first. Camille follows. He crosses the threshold into my home—my private space—and I shut the door behind him, suddenly at a loss for what to do with my hands.

Camille’s gaze roams over exposed floorboards, the patch of stripped trim, the corridor toward the kitchen. There’s an appraisal in his eyes, too thorough to be casual.

“You’ve been busy,” Camille says, after a long, clinical pause.

His gaze is eating the room alive, mapping every exposed support beam and tangled length of stripped wire, every pale patch of drywall where I’d tried and catastrophically failed to sand away a century of paint.

“I’ve been trying,” I answer.

Camille’s focus flickers back to my face, and that weighted silence presses again, like he’s waiting for me to crack.

“I can see that,” he says, not unkindly, but not kindly either.

“Is that an insult?” I ask, bracing for it, because every interaction with him seems to be a prelude to some slow-burning humiliation.

“No.”

“It sounded like one,” I push, aware that I sound petulant.

He doesn’t correct me. Instead, his lips part in a rare, full smile—a flash of white and wolfishness, glinting with something I can’t name.

“Your work is improving,” he says, deadpan, but the trace of pride goes through me like a drug.

I want to hate it, but I feel weirdly seen, which is honestly kind of worse.

“That was definitely an insult,” I say, but my voice stumbles.

I turn away before my face can betray me, almost bumping into Monsieur Barthes, who is making himself at home by poking at a sagging door frame and muttering unintelligible French into the ether.