Total pages in book: 100
Estimated words: 95475 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 477(@200wpm)___ 382(@250wpm)___ 318(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 95475 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 477(@200wpm)___ 382(@250wpm)___ 318(@300wpm)
An existential threat.
And a love that might not be real at all.
Bastien Durand, once an angel and now the most relentless supernatural investigator in New Orleans, thought the last crisis was behind him. But when a cursed grimoire surfaces at Rousseau Auction House—and a shadowy informant threatens the woman he loves—he’s dragged into a new game with stakes that are anything but routine.
The grimoire was bait. The real prize is an artifact known only in whispers—the Shadowglass Mirror, a relic said to reflect a soul’s truest nature . . . and the ability to bend it to someone else’s will.
The one orchestrating this? Gideon Virelli—a manipulative scholar who knows far too much about Bastien and Delphine’s connection, and her hidden power. Gideon doesn’t just want the relic—he wants Bastien to question everything he spent centuries protecting, including the tether that binds him to Delphine, the choices that built their love, and the very nature of the magic they were never meant to share.
To protect Delphine, Bastien must walk the knife’s edge between duty and doubt.
Because some mirrors don’t just show you who you are—
They show you the lie you’ve been living all along
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
Prologue
Bastien watched Delphine’s taillights disappear down Chartres Street, her car swallowed by the October darkness and the oak canopy that turned the Garden District into a tunnel of shadow and shifting lamplight. She’d said “tomorrow” before closing the door—easy and certain, as though the word carried no weight at all. Tomorrow meant dinner at Jacques-Imo’s, meant conversation that didn’t require careful editing, meant the cautious optimism of two people who’d just survived something impossible together and were ready to see what came next.
The Veil breach was sealed. The amateur practitioner would wake in a hospital with nothing worse than confusion and a healthy respect for forces beyond their understanding. The Quarter’s wards held steady. For the first time in months, Bastien felt something dangerously close to hope.
His phone buzzed as he reached his car.
Unknown number. Text message. No words, just an image: a photograph of a grimoire under glass, its spine bearing symbols he recognized even in the grainy phone screen resolution. Laveau family marks. Genuine ones, not the tourist-trap reproductions that cluttered every voodoo shop on Bourbon Street.
A second text followed immediately.
Unknown Number: Café Du Monde. 11 PM. Come alone, or I send this to someone who’ll try to use it.
Bastien checked his watch. 10:17 PM. Forty-three minutes to cross the city, find parking, and walk into whatever trap this was.
He got into the car.
Café Du Monde at eleven on a Thursday night was neither empty nor crowded—just the scattered aftermath of a tourist day winding down, a few die-hard beignet addicts, and the staff who’d seen everything and registered nothing. Bastien chose a table near the back where he could watch for someone coming from all angles, ordered coffee he wouldn’t drink, and waited.
She arrived at 11:03.
The woman was perhaps sixty, silver hair pulled back in a style that suggested old Creole families and the kind of confidence that came from never needing to prove anything. Charcoal wool coat despite the October warmth. Leather gloves. Shoes that made no sound on the tile floor. She crossed the courtyard with the fluid precision of someone accustomed to being watched but not approached.
She sat across from him without asking. Set a cream-colored envelope on the metal table between them. The paper was thick, expensive, sealed with dark wax that caught the overhead lights and threw them back wrong.
“They said you’d know why,” she said. Her voice carried traces of French Quarter aristocracy, words reduced to essential syllables.
“And who would they be?”
“Someone who understands what Charlotte Lacroix left unfinished.” She pushed the envelope toward him. “Someone who knows what Delphine doesn’t know about herself. Yet.”
The locket against his sternum went cold.
Bastien took the envelope. The paper was cold—colder than October air should make it, cold enough that his fingers registered alarm. “What does he want?”
“What Charlotte left incomplete.” The woman stood, already turning away. “You have one week to find it. After that, we force the issue—and Delphine remembers everything at once. All three lifetimes. At the same time.” She glanced back over her shoulder and lowered her voice. “Her mind won’t survive it. But you already know that.”
She walked toward the river where the darkness took her.
Bastien broke the seal.
The wax cracked clean. Inside, three items arranged with surgical precision.
First, an invitation to the Rousseau Auction House. Exclusive viewing, seven nights from tonight. Rare occult manuscripts and relics of historical significance. The kind of event that drew collectors who knew better than to ask about provenance.
Second, the photograph from the text message. The grimoire under glass, with the Laveau family marks clear on the spine. But that wasn’t what made his breath catch. In the background of the shot, deliberately included, was another object: a hand mirror, its frame worked in silver that seemed to move in the photograph’s grain.
Third, a note. Four sentences written in ink that shimmered with iridescence.
Charlotte built a network of mirrors to track her soul across death. She died before completing the anchor. You know where she hid the final piece. Bring me the Shadowglass Mirror, or I’ll wake every memory Delphine carries and break her mind doing it.
The ink caught light that didn’t exist in the evening around him, held it, released it in patterns that made his vision blur if he looked too long. Mirror-forged ink. Pigment infused with reflection magic, a technique so rare that fewer than a dozen practitioners worldwide could manage it.
Someone understood Charlotte’s work. Understood what the mirror network was designed to do. And they were using that knowledge to leverage him through the one thing guaranteed to make him comply—the threat of harm to Delphine’s fragile, still-integrating consciousness.
He read the note again. The words didn’t change.
Bring me the Shadowglass Mirror, or I’ll wake every memory Delphine carries and break her mind doing it.
Bastien folded the items back into the envelope. Left cash on the table. The coffee sat untouched, growing cold in the October air while tourists laughed at nearby tables and the city continued its nightly routines, oblivious to the threat that had just been delivered in the space between dinner and midnight.