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)
He braced his palms against the counter behind him until he was sure the tremor inside him could not reach his voice.
“That was not what I intended to say.”
“No.” Delphine’s voice had gone quiet, but not small. “It was what you needed to say.”
The saxophone outside had stopped. The Quarter filled the gap: a car horn, a woman’s laugh fading down Royal Street, the groan of the St. Charles streetcar on its last run of the evening.
Delphine stood four feet from him with her hand near the corkboard and her body angled toward the desk. Bastien leaned against the kitchen counter with his weight on his back foot and his palms flat on the wood. His outburst had removed a barrier from the room, and now they stood in what remained: a space where the investigation and the attraction beneath it shared the same air without pretense.
“You are asking me to trust the people who hold power in this city with information they will use to consolidate that power.” His voice came out lower than before, rougher, rebuilt from what the outburst had left him.
“I am asking you to trust me.”
The distinction rearranged the argument entirely.
“I do trust you.”
“Then stop deciding what I can handle. Stop deciding what I get to know. Stop protecting me from truths that might be the only things that keep either of us from making a mistake that costs another life.”
She took a half-step forward. Her weight shifted as she spoke, carrying her closer without conscious decision. Her canvas bag slid from her shoulder to the crook of her elbow, pulling the fabric of her blouse against her collarbone. The kitchen light fell across the angle of her jaw.
Four feet had become three. The notebook sat abandoned on the counter.
“What I’m carrying is not just information,” he said. “It is history. And the history involves you in ways I have not yet found the right words for.”
Her chin lifted. She watched him with the steady, searching attention that had first caught him off guard in the Archive months ago.
“Then find the words,” she said. “Or find better ones than silence.”
The room contracted. The walls had not moved, but the space between them had become the only dimension that mattered. The corkboard and the photographs and the bloodline maps flattened into scenery.
She caught her lower lip between her teeth and released it. He knew the gesture. He had stored it alongside every other detail of Delphine LeClair in a part of his memory that operated without his consent and with an accuracy that unnerved him.
Her breathing had quickened during the argument and had not slowed. He could hear each exhale in the quiet between them. Three feet had become two, and neither of them could have identified the step that closed it. Her shoulder sat at the level of his chest.
Bastien’s fingers dug into his thighs. He held himself in place against a pull that two centuries of discipline had not prepared him for. The curse hummed its low broadcast, but the heat building above it dwarfed the signal. His heartbeat had matched her breathing, synchronizing with the same inevitability as the tide.
One shift of weight, and his mouth would find hers, and two centuries of restraint would end in an apartment above Dauphine Street while the city played music beneath the windows and the case files watched from the walls.
He wanted to close the distance, and the wanting reached every nerve in his body.
But the distance was the last barrier keeping him functional. Crossing it meant allowing a hunger he had disciplined for longer than Delphine had been alive to override the restraint he had built between his desires and his decisions. She had fractured that restraint across months of proximity and late-night conversations and her hand on his arm. What remained held by stubbornness and habit alone.
Her gaze dropped from his eyes to his mouth and returned in less than a second.
She stood in the charged air between them and did not defuse it. She did not offer either of them an exit.
The argument ceased. It didn’t resolve. The silence that replaced it weighed more than the words had, and the air held the shape of everything their voices had not reached.
Neither of them moved.
Bastien counted his heartbeats, a discipline that had served him in moments of crisis for centuries. He reached twelve, then fifteen, then twenty. Each beat insisted louder than the one before it that the woman within arm’s reach was not a threat to manage or a complication to solve but the single thing he wanted, and pretending otherwise had become impossible.
Delphine’s hand hung at her side. Her fingers flexed once, and he tracked the motion with the full attention of a man standing at the edge of a line he could not afford to cross.