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)
“You said you needed to see this,” he said from the doorway.
She looked up. “Finally. I texted you hours ago.”
“I was at the levee dealing with werewolf problems.”
“Is that a euphemism?”
“Unfortunately not.” He crossed to the table. Rain tapped against the windows, steady percussion that turned glass reflective in the lamplight. “What did you find?”
She rotated one of the ledgers toward him. “1762 property manifests. Charlotte Lacroix ordered forty-three mirror panels from a glassworks in Bordeaux. They arrived in New Orleans six months before the fire that supposedly destroyed her workshop.” Her finger traced down a column of handwritten entries. “Except here’s the interesting part—she paid for delivery to five different addresses, not just her studio.”
Bastien leaned over her shoulder to read. The manifests showed what she’d described: mirror panels distributed across the Quarter in a pattern he’d been mapping for two weeks. Charlotte had embedded the network into the city’s architecture from the beginning.
“The addresses match sites where I’ve been tracking resonance spikes,” he said.
“I thought they might.” She flipped to a second ledger. “And this one lists her suppliers. She wasn’t buying ordinary glass. Look at the specifications—silvered with mercury amalgam, backed with tin foil, sealed with pine resin mixed with something the manifest calls ‘blessed salt from Brittany.’” She met his eyes. “That’s not decorative mirror work. That’s ritual construction.”
He should have told her the truth weeks ago. Roxy was right about that. But watching Delphine piece together Charlotte’s network through historical documents felt safer than explaining the parts she couldn’t see yet—the voices in glass, the temporal distortions, the way mirrors had learned to remember conversations and replay them in contexts that weaponized intimacy.
“You’re very good at this,” he said.
“At research? It’s literally my job.” She took a drink of cold coffee and made a face. “Why do I keep doing that?”
“Because you forget to drink it while you’re working.”
“Thanks for the insight.” But she smiled. “There’s more. The third ledger tracks Charlotte’s correspondence with someone named Etienne Moreau. A craftsman who specialized in what she calls ‘acoustic glass’—mirrors designed to capture and preserve sound.”
Bastien straightened. “Acoustic glass.”
“Right? I’ve never heard of that technique in eighteenth-century mirror making. But according to these letters, Moreau taught Charlotte how to forge glass that could hold vibrations. Store them. Replay them on command.” She tapped the page. “Sound familiar?”
Glass Tongues. Charlotte hadn’t just invented the technique—she’d documented it. Left a paper trail that anyone with access to Archive records could follow if they knew what questions to ask.
“Where are these letters now?” he asked.
“Storage. I can request them from the climate-controlled vault, but it’ll take until tomorrow.” She stretched, spine cracking. “I’ve been sitting here too long.”
“How long?”
“Since three. When did you eat last?”
“Breakfast, maybe.” She stood and walked to the window, pressing one hand against the glass. Her reflection appeared in lamplight—exact mirror of her position, perfectly synchronized. “It’s strange working here at night. The building feels different when everyone else is gone.”
Bastien watched her reflection in the window. Nothing unusual yet. No lag, no distortion. Just Delphine looking out at rain-soaked Ursulines Avenue while her mirror image did the same.
Then her reflection’s mouth moved.
Not speaking—just lips forming words while her actual face stayed still. The discrepancy lasted half a second before correcting itself.
“What did Charlotte want with acoustic glass?” Delphine asked, still facing the window. “The letters mention confession, preservation of truth. She wrote to Moreau that glass was more honest than paper because it couldn’t be revised or destroyed. She basically implied it was a more permanent record.”
“She believed mirrors showed reality without bias,” Bastien said, moving to stand beside her. His own reflection appeared in the window next to hers. Both images synchronized properly now. “She trusted them to hold truths people couldn’t bear to speak aloud.”
“Truths about what?”
“Love, mostly. Loss. The things that don’t survive translation into language.”
Delphine turned to look at him. Her reflection in the window turned a half-beat late.
“You knew her,” she said. Not a question.
“I knew of her work. Her reputation.”
“That’s not what I asked.” She held his gaze. “You talk about Charlotte Lacroix the way people talk about someone they loved. Past tense but present feeling. Like she’s still somehow relevant to your life hundreds of years after her death. She was one of my ancestors; I think I deserve to know.”
He’d underestimated how well she read him. Or maybe he’d stopped being careful around her, stopped maintaining the distance that would have kept her safe from exactly this conversation.
“She was important to me,” he said. “A long time ago.”
“How long?”
“Long enough that the details don’t matter anymore.”
“Try again.” But her voice stayed gentle. “Bastien, you’ve been asking me to trust you for months. About the investigation, about why certain artifacts matter, about patterns I’m not supposed to see. You can’t have it both ways—either we’re working together or we’re not.”