Total pages in book: 134
Estimated words: 124479 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 622(@200wpm)___ 498(@250wpm)___ 415(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 124479 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 622(@200wpm)___ 498(@250wpm)___ 415(@300wpm)
“Yes.”
“What if someone decided the destruction wasn’t sufficient? That the houses who committed it needed to suffer consequences?” She turned to face him. “Not just personal consequences. Structural consequences. The collapse of the order they killed to preserve.”
Bastien watched the light catch her hair, the copper warmth of it against the window’s brightness. She had arrived at the same conclusion he had reached hours earlier—had traced the same logic, identified the same strategy, understood what the murders were designed to accomplish.
The intelligence of it—the speed and precision of her reasoning—did something to his composure that six hours of violent political history had not managed.
“You should go home,” he said.
“I should?”
“This investigation will become more dangerous before it ends. I’ve already made you visible by accepting your help. If the wrong people learn what you’ve contributed—”
“Then they’ll learn it.” She crossed her arms, her expression shifting from consideration to resolve. “I made my choice when I brought those records here. I’m not going to unmake it because the risks are becoming clearer. We’ve been through this before, Bastien.”
“Delphine—”
“Bastien.” She uncrossed her arms and closed the distance between them, stopping near enough that he could feel the warmth of her, the particular quality of her attention when she had decided something. “I understand you want to protect me. What I’m asking you to understand is that I don’t need protecting from my own decisions.”
There was a moment—one of those moments where the air in a room changes quality, where the distance between two people stops being about geography and starts being about whether either of them is going to acknowledge what’s happening.
He was very aware of her proximity. He had been aware of it all morning, across the desk, working through documents that had nothing to do with what was also occurring in the room. She smelled of coffee and something floral, and she was looking at him with the expression she wore when she had said everything she intended to say and was waiting to see what he would do with it.
“Promise me you’ll be careful,” he said again, quieter.
“Already promised.” She retrieved her bag from the counter, gathered the Beaumont volumes, and moved toward the stairs. “I’ll search the other collections we have. The Chardon papers. The Lavigne estate materials. If there’s more documentation of the 1891 conspiracy, I’ll find it.”
“Be careful.”
“You said that already.”
“It bears repeating.”
She paused at the top of the stairs, turned back, and looked at him with an expression he couldn’t fully translate—warmth and something sharper underneath it, something that said she saw the distance he was maintaining and had decided not to call it what it was. Not yet.
Then she stepped forward, took his face in both hands, and kissed him—not brief, not gentle, not the kind of kiss that was a goodbye. The kind that was a statement. Her thumbs at his jaw, her mouth certain against his, the cotton blouse warm under his hands when they found her waist without him instructing them to.
She pulled back first. Her hands dropped. She looked at him for one more second with that untranslatable expression.
“Lock the door after me,” she said, and descended the stairs.
Bastien stood at the top of the stairwell long after the sound of her footsteps had faded.
The killer would strike again. The pattern demanded it.
He gathered the documents into neat stacks, preserving their organization. The Beaumont correspondence went into a separate pile—evidence that would need securing before someone realized it had been removed from the Archive.
He reached for his phone and began making calls.
He was mid-conversation with Baptiste when the temperature in his office dropped.
Sharper than last night’s revenant on Chartres—more localized, more intentional. Bastien ended the call without explanation and was on his feet before the thing fully materialized, which was the correct order of operations and the only reason he didn’t take the full force of its initial strike.
This one was stronger.
It had the same smoke-and-density texture as the revenant from the previous night, the same luminescent eye-spaces, the same fundamental wrongness of a spirit that had accumulated enough will to achieve partial physical form. But where the Chartres Street encounter had felt opportunistic—a revenant that had followed the beacon from wherever the signal reached—this one felt deliberate. Directed. As though something with more intelligence than hunger had sent it here, to this specific location, at this specific moment.
It cleared the width of his office in a movement that had no business being that fast, scattering the genealogical charts he had spent hours organizing. Bastien met it before it could build momentum, using the same inside-the-reach tactic that had worked on Chartres, but this revenant had learned from the archetype—it didn’t commit to the initial contact, feinting instead, forcing him back a step before pivoting.
Cold flooded the room. His breath clouded.