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 was becoming dependent on her proximity. The thought landed, and his jaw clenched around it.
Delphine held his gaze from her position above him. Then she leaned down and pressed her mouth to the mark.
The beacon went silent.
The broadcast ceased for the first time since the curse had found him. The space it left behind opened so wide that Bastien’s breath caught in his chest and stayed there. His ears rang with the absence.
Delphine lifted her head. “What just happened?”
“You stopped it.” His voice came out stripped to the fact and nothing else. “The signal. It stopped.”
She looked at the mark, then at his face, then at the mark again. Her brow drew inward, and her mouth pressed to a line—the expression she wore when evidence broke the existing framework and she had to rebuild around it.
“Temporarily?”
The beacon resumed before she finished the word. Low, steady, and with its familiar insistence, but at a fraction of its former volume, brushing against his awareness without commanding it.
“Temporarily,” he confirmed.
She filed this. He could see her filing it, adding the observation to the accumulating architecture of what she knew and did not yet understand about what he carried. She did not push. She kissed the mark once more, lightly, and the signal flickered, and then she rose from the bed and crossed the room to the bathroom.
Water ran through the safehouse’s reluctant plumbing. Bastien lay in the bed she had vacated and pressed his palm against the mark where her mouth had been. The skin held her warmth.
His chest ached when she left the room. His hand reached toward the empty mattress beside him before he caught it and pulled it back. Two centuries of solitude, and his body had recalibrated around her in a single night.
She returned from the bathroom wearing his shirt. The fabric hung past her thighs, and she had rolled the sleeves twice, and the collar sat wide enough to show the line of her collarbone. She moved through the safehouse kitchen with the ease of someone who understood unfamiliar spaces, opening cabinets until she found the coffee, filling the pot from the tap, pressing the button on the coffeemaker.
He watched her from the bedroom doorway. She measured grounds with a spoon she found in the second drawer she tried. She rinsed two mugs that had sat in the dish rack long enough to collect dust.
“There’s no milk,” she said. “And the only thing in the refrigerator is a bottle of hot sauce that expired in January.”
“Baptiste’s provisions.”
“Baptiste needs to reconsider his definition of provisions.” She poured coffee into both mugs and carried one to him. Their fingers overlapped on the ceramic, and neither of them hurried the transfer.
She sat at the kitchen table. He sat across from her. September heat was already building toward the day’s full weight, and the live oak filtered the light into moving patterns on the table’s surface. The coffeepot clicked as it finished its cycle.
Bastien drank and watched her drink and let the quiet hold. The case files waited in the other room. The corkboard of photographs and sigil tracings and bloodline maps waited where they had left it the evening before.
But the woman sitting across from him in his shirt, with coffee dust on her fingers, had earned this pause. He had earned it. Whatever the day would bring, whatever the case would demand, these minutes belonged to them.
Delphine’s phone sat on the table between them. His phone sat in the bedroom, on the floor beside the bed where it had landed when she pulled his shirt over his head the night before.
His phone rang.
The sound cut through the kitchen. Bastien set his mug down and crossed the safehouse in four strides. The screen showed Baptiste’s name.
He answered.
“Where.” The word carried its own history between them. He had answered Baptiste’s calls with that single syllable across years of fieldwork, and the syllable contained everything that followed: location, urgency, what he would find when he arrived.
“Seventh Ward. Abandoned double-shotgun on North Prieur, past St. Bernard.” Baptiste’s voice held the tightness Bastien had learned to read as contained alarm. The vowels compressed. The consonants landed harder than casual speech produced. “This one is different.”
“Different how.”
“The carving is deeper. The symbol over the heart repeats. Three times, concentric. And the body...” A pause that lasted two seconds longer than Baptiste’s pauses ever lasted. “It faces the door. The killer left the door open. Whoever did this wanted it found fast.”
Bastien pressed his hand against the curse mark. The signal, still operating at its reduced level, spiked once and settled.
“Thirty minutes.”
“I’ll hold the scene.”
The call ended. Bastien lowered the phone and stood in the bedroom with the sheets still carrying the shape of two bodies and the air still holding the scent of Delphine’s skin.
She stood in the kitchen doorway. She had heard his side of the conversation, and her face had already shifted from the unguarded warmth of the morning to the composed focus she brought to the investigation. The change showed in the set of her jaw and the angle of her shoulders and the way her eyes found his and held them without blinking.