Chapter 13 #2
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.
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.