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)
Outside, a door slammed. The sound broke across the silence, and both of them blinked.
Bastien exhaled. His lungs burned with the breath he had held without realizing it.
Delphine took a half-step backward. Her shoulders stayed taut and her chin did not drop even as her feet moved, and the tension in her body made clear that she wanted the space no more than he did.
“I should go,” she said.
Her voice still carried clarity, but a roughness ran beneath it that the heat between them had put there. She picked up her notebook from the counter and slid it into her bag. Her hands moved with their usual economy, but her fingers took longer than necessary to close the clasp.
“The intermarriage connections,” she said. “I’ll compile them into a format that protects the underlying methodology. A version you can present without revealing how you arrived at it.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I know I don’t have to.” She shouldered her bag and faced him from the doorway at the top of the stairs. The kitchen light caught the line of her throat where her pulse moved visibly beneath the skin. “I’m doing it because the investigation matters. And because you were right about Marcelline, even though you were wrong about everything else.”
The corner of his mouth lifted before he could stop it.
“What was I wrong about?” he asked.
“That carrying things alone protects anyone.” She locked onto him from the doorway, and the space between them hummed with the residue of what had almost happened and had not. “It just means you drop them eventually. And whoever is standing nearby gets hurt by the fall.”
She descended the stairs. He listened to her footsteps on the treads and then to the front door opening and closing beneath him. He moved to the window and watched her walk south on Chartres. Her stride did not slow.
The street took her in increments. She passed through the pool of one streetlamp and into the dark before the next. A couple stumbled out of a bar ahead of her, laughing, and she sidestepped them without breaking pace. Then the corner of Ursulines claimed her, and the street held only her absence.
The curse burned steady against his forearm, broadcasting his position into the night, and he could not tell whether the heat flooding his body belonged to the mark or to the memory of standing two feet from Delphine LeClair and choosing not to close the distance.
Night-blooming jasmine released its scent from the courtyard below, thick enough to taste. The saxophone had started again, farther away now, drifting north toward Esplanade.
He flattened his palm against the windowsill and held it there until he could no longer tell where the wood’s warmth ended and his own began.
The argument was not over. The tension between them had not broken but had only paused, and the pause would not last.
What was building between them exceeded his capacity to contain it.
And for the first time in longer than he could measure, Bastien did not want to contain it.
FOURTEEN
She had called him the next morning from the Archive, her voice carrying none of the previous night’s tension — only the focused precision of someone who had found something and needed to show it to him.
The building on Tchoupitoulas Street had been a cotton press in 1843.
Bastien knew the year because the ironwork above the loading dock still carried the foundry stamp—Phelps & Burnham, a firm that had supplied half the industrial hardware in antebellum New Orleans before yellow fever killed both founders and their surviving families declined to continue the enterprise. The building had passed through eleven owners since then. Cotton press, then warehouse, then cooperage, then warehouse again, then a brief and unsuccessful attempt at converting the ground floor into artist studios in 2003, then nothing. The city’s inventory listed it as condemned. Someone had cut the padlock on the loading dock sometime in the past year, and its replacement—a cheap hardware-store model—took Bastien under ten seconds to pick.
Delphine stood behind him, her flashlight pointed at the pavement.
They had driven here from the Archive in her car, a ten-year-old Honda whose passenger seat held a canvas tote full of photocopied property records. The records connected this address to the Marchande-Levesque estate through a chain of ownership transfers that Delphine had traced backward from a title irregularity in the Orleans Parish Conveyance Office files. The Marchande-Levesque family had purchased the building in 1867. House Chardon had seized it in 1892, one year after the purge, through a probate filing that listed no living heirs.
Every murder site had occupied ground once belonging to the destroyed family. This building fit the pattern. It sat on the river side of Tchoupitoulas, tucked between a renovated warehouse that now housed a furniture showroom and an empty lot where the foundation of a demolished structure showed through the weeds. The neighborhood had changed around it—new construction, condominiums, restaurants that served sixteen-dollar cocktails—but the cotton press remained, unrenovated, undemolished, holding its corner of the block the way old buildings in New Orleans held everything: by outlasting what replaced them.