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)
She picked up her bag from the counter and shouldered it. Her hands moved through the familiar motions, and he watched her fingers close the clasp and adjust the strap with the quiet certainty that he would remember the exact choreography of those gestures for the rest of a life that had already lasted longer than any mortal span.
“Tomorrow,” she said.
“Tomorrow.”
She walked to the door, opened it, and paused in the frame—her body angled toward the stairwell, her face turned back toward him. The apartment light caught the line of her cheekbone and the place where her mouth still carried the evidence of his.
“For the record,” she said. “I’m not going to let you pull away from this.”
She descended the stairs. He listened to her footsteps—measured, unhurried. The front door opened and closed. He moved to the window and watched her cross the street to her car.
She opened the driver’s door and paused. She looked up, found his window, found him standing in it, and held his gaze across the September night for five full seconds before she got in the car.
The Honda pulled away from the curb. Taillights tracked south on Chartres, past the closed galleries and the sleeping courtyards. She turned on Ursulines, and the street took her in increments, one pool of lamplight to the next, until the corner claimed her and the block held only the space where she had been.
The darkened skin burned steady. The broadcast continued. The corkboard behind him displayed five dead vampires and a pattern that pointed toward a purpose he had not yet identified.
He pressed his fingers to his mouth. Her taste remained.
This changes things.
Standing in this apartment with her breath still on his skin, he understood the change had not begun with the kiss. It had begun the first time she smiled at him across a table at Café du Monde, and every moment since had been the slow collapse of a structure that was never going to hold. Really, it happened the moment she’d been born.
He turned from the window. The photographs waited. The maps. The evidence of a killer’s design that tightened around him with each passing day.
He would sit at the desk and study the patterns and hunt the architect who had made him a target. The work had not changed. The danger had not lessened. The truth he owed Delphine remained unspoken, and the speaking of it would test everything the kiss had built.
But the kiss had built. And for the first time since the mark appeared in his flesh, what grew between him and Delphine held stronger than what the curse kept trying to take.
He sat at his desk. Opened the case file. Read the first line three times without absorbing a word.
The investigation would have to wait until morning.
SIXTEEN
She drove.
He did not argue.
She pulled onto Chartres and turned south, toward the river, taking the route that would carry them through the Marigny toward Baptiste’s side of Esplanade. The radio stayed off. The Honda moved through the Quarter’s empty blocks with only the engine and the tires on the pavement occupying the air between them.
The kitchen had released everything that had pressed against the walls of every room they shared for weeks. What filled the car now was not absence but cleared space, and the cleared space held the shape of what had just passed between them without trying to contain it.
Bastien sat in the passenger seat and tracked the gap between his knee and hers. Six inches of bench seat separated them, illuminated by the dashboard’s pale glow whenever she passed beneath a streetlight. Her right hand rested on the shifter. Her left controlled the wheel with the easy precision she brought to everything that required her hands.
Their shoulders touched when she turned onto Esplanade.
The car leaned through the curve, and her weight shifted left, and the sleeve of her jacket pressed against his arm for a full second before the road straightened and the contact broke. Heat traveled from the point of touch through the fabric and into his skin and remained there.
She looked at him once.
At the red light on Esplanade and Frenchmen, where the glow of the Marigny’s late bars bled through the windshield and painted the dashboard in shifting color, Delphine turned her head and found his eyes. She did not speak. She held him there across the car’s dark interior and took him in. The light painted half her face in amber and left the other half in shadow.
The light changed. She faced forward. The car moved through the intersection.
His fingers curled against his thighs. He wanted to reach across the console and take her hand where it rested on the shifter, to thread his fingers through hers, to close the gap the way he had closed it in the kitchen.