Total pages in book: 115
Estimated words: 105939 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 530(@200wpm)___ 424(@250wpm)___ 353(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 105939 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 530(@200wpm)___ 424(@250wpm)___ 353(@300wpm)
The awakening and opening in the Veil weren’t just affecting Delphine anymore or even those with bloodline ties of one kind or another. It was pulling anyone with even the slightest psychic sensitivity into the vortex of her expanding consciousness. The city itself was becoming a conduit for memories that had been safely contained for generations.
He found her at a café near the French Market, sitting across from a woman with silver hair and kind eyes. Someone new, someone unconnected to the web of deception that surrounded Delphine’s existence. She was animated in a way he hadn’t seen in weeks, gesturing with her coffee cup as she told some story that made her companion lean forward with interest.
“ . . . and then the tour guide started crying,” Delphine was saying, her voice carrying clearly across the space between their table and Bastien’s hiding place in the shadow of a newspaper stand. “Right in the middle of describing the architecture. Said the building was telling him about all the people who’d died there, but it was built as a department store. No one ever died there.”
Her companion leaned back in her chair, expression thoughtful. “The city’s been strange lately. My neighbors are having the most vivid dreams. Mrs. Guidry swears she spent all last night at a Mardi Gras ball from the 1890s. Could describe every detail—the decorations, the music, even what she wore.”
“You think it’s just the heat? Summer makes everyone a little crazy.”
“Maybe. Or maybe New Orleans is remembering things it had forgotten.” The older woman’s voice carried the weight of someone who’d lived in the city long enough to recognize its rhythms. “This place has always been thin between worlds. Sometimes the past bleeds through more than usual.”
Delphine laughed, the sound so purely joyful that Bastien felt his resolve crystallize into painful certainty. “You make it sound like the city is haunted.”
“Child, this whole city is haunted. The question is whether the ghosts are waking up.”
For once, she appeared simply herself—not plagued by questions she couldn’t answer, not confused by visions she couldn’t explain, not frightened by abilities she didn’t understand. She looked genuinely happy, engaged in normal conversation with someone who saw her as just another person navigating the strangeness of living in New Orleans.
Her companion said something that made Delphine throw back her head in delighted laughter, the sound so pure and uncomplicated that it cut through Bastien’s chest like a blade. This was what she could be without the weight of destiny crushing her shoulders. This was the life she might have if his presence didn’t drag her into forces she’d never chosen to face. Delia was this joyful all the time.
It came to him in fragments—sunlight, wildflowers, her laugh echoing across a stretch of wind-stirred meadow. Bastien hadn’t meant to remember it now, but the moment slipped in like a tide through cracked stone.
Spring, 1906. Somewhere just outside Natchez. The world had slowed for a day.
Delia was barefoot in the grass, hat crooked on her head, curls slipping loose in the breeze as she spun in slow circles beside a picnic basket they’d long forgotten to open. She laughed—really laughed—and he’d never heard anything so perfect. A sound without tension, without grief. It cracked something open in him every time.
“You’re staring again,” she called over her shoulder, pretending not to be flattered, but he could see how she enjoyed his attention.
“You’re hard not to stare at,” he’d drawled, leaning back on one elbow, a blade of grass between his teeth and an utterly ridiculous smile he couldn’t seem to shake.
“You’re full of it,” she said, grinning as she walked toward him, skirts hitched above her ankles, cheeks flushed with sunlight and mischief. “Lucky for you, I happen to like trouble.”
She dropped beside him, curling into his side without hesitation, her fingers slipping into his. The silence that followed wasn’t heavy or awkward—it was familiar. The kind that only came with knowing someone all the way down to the bone.
“I wish we could stay like this,” she’d whispered once, nose brushing his temple.
“We will,” he’d answered, believing it with a kind of dangerous hope. “One way or another, I’ll always find my way back to you.”
She’d kissed him for that. Soft, sure, the kind of kiss that felt like both promise and possession.
And for that brief sliver of time, before fire and fate, they had been nothing more and nothing less than what they were—
His Delia.
And her Bastien.
Unbreakable.
He’d become a walking reminder of everything wrong with her world instead of a guide toward making it right. His presence was pressure rather than comfort, obligation rather than choice. The emotional tether between them was his fault—his silence, his careful distance, his belief that protection meant withholding truth.
Every time she looked at him, she saw mysteries she couldn’t solve, questions that frightened her, power that threatened to overwhelm her carefully constructed life. He was the crack in her normal world through which chaos poured, the reminder that her peaceful existence was built on foundations of lies.