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)
“Five minutes,” she mumbled. “Then I’ll go home.”
“Stay.” The word emerged before he could reconsider. “It’s almost sunrise anyway. Rest here.”
She was already asleep.
Bastien watched her breathe, face relaxed in unconsciousness, trust implicit in the way she’d let herself become vulnerable in his space. She’d chosen this. Affection, yes. But also awareness of responsibility that went beyond magical partnership.
She trusted him. With her safety, with her choices, with her participation in work that could cost her memories or worse. They really had no idea.
He couldn’t afford to fail her.
He moved to the table and continued mapping the network’s geometry, planning the ritual that would bind her as permanent anchor. Working through exhaustion because stopping meant confronting the truth—he was falling in love with her again, and this time there was no excuse of soul memory or divine tether.
Just two people choosing partnership despite every reason to maintain distance.
Gideon was wrong. It wasn’t manipulation. It was love across lifetimes.
Outside, the Quarter woke. Street cleaners started their routes. Delivery trucks rumbled through narrow streets. Morning arrived with relentless normalcy, indifferent to the fact that two people had spent the night preventing reality from fracturing.
Bastien glanced at Delphine sleeping on his couch, blanket pulled to her chin, hair falling across her face.
Worth protecting. Worth the risk of permanent bond. Worth whatever it cost to keep her safe while respecting her agency to make her own choices.
He turned back to his work and kept planning.
Chapter
Twenty
Bastien watched the torrential rain from his apartment window. Delphine had fallen asleep on his couch two hours ago, research notes scattered across the coffee table. She’d fought exhaustion until her eyes wouldn’t stay open, finally admitting defeat somewhere around eleven. He adjusted the blanket over her shoulders and left her a note saying he’d gone to check on Maman’s shop before the storm hit.
Another lie. They were getting easier. The war within him carried on. Tell her enough so she could make decisions for herself. Withhold information that could harm or kill her. Back and forth like a pendulum.
He packed methodically. Waterproof bag for the mirror shard and his tools. Flashlight. Chalk. The silver knife he used for drawing blood wards. Change of clothes in the car—soaked clothing after hours in the tunnels would raise questions he couldn’t answer.
Delphine had wanted to come with him when he’d mentioned checking the tunnels. He’d told her they weren’t safe yet, that he needed to verify structural integrity first. She’d accepted it with the careful patience she had for him often—the kind that said she knew he was lying but would give him space to admit it when ready.
Except he wouldn’t be ready. Not for this.
Heavy rain created Mirror Flood conditions. Surface water was turning every puddle into a potential network node. Tunnel flooding would amplify that effect. Dangerous, but it gave him a window. Gideon’s reflections thrived in carefully controlled spaces. Chaos might blind them.
The first drops hit his window at half past midnight. Then sheets of gray that turned Dauphine Street into a waterfall. Cars pulled onto sidewalks. Shop owners were stacking sandbags against their doors. The Quarter was in full preparation for what it had survived a thousand times before.
Bastien grabbed his coat and headed into the storm.
The access point was industrial. No tourist would wander there—only warehouses and storage facilities along the river, and street lights few and far between. Bastien had scouted it a few days ago while Delphine worked her shift at the Archive.
Rain hammered the pavement. Water was already six inches deep at the intersections, storm drains backing up faster than they could handle the runoff. His headlights caught the access panel—heavy iron set into concrete, marked with faded warnings about authorized personnel only.
He parked and killed the engine. He sat for thirty seconds watching rain drum against the windshield.
Stupid. Dangerous. Necessary. The trinity of his decision-making process.
The panel fought him. Rusted hinges, decades of weather damage making it stick. He pried it with a crowbar he’d brought for exactly this purpose, the metal shrieking as it finally gave. The sound vanished beneath the storm’s assault.
First look down he found the ladder descending into darkness. The sound of water was already rushing below, echoing off brick and stone. The void smelled like river silt and century-old construction.
Flashlight between his teeth, waterproof bag strapped across his back, and hands on wet metal rungs that wanted to slip out from under his grip, he began the decent.
Thirty feet down. The sounds from above muffling—storm becoming distant percussion, city becoming memory. Just him and darkness and the ladder that descended into spaces the surface world had forgotten.
His boots hit water at the bottom. Ankle-deep current moving fast toward the river, pulling at his legs with insistent pressure. He played the flashlight beam across his surroundings.
Nineteenth-century drainage infrastructure. Brick archways tall enough to stand in, groined vaults overhead that spoke of French colonial engineering. But grafted onto the old work: newer concrete sections, twentieth-century repairs, municipal upgrades that had incorporated the original tunnels into modern systems without fully understanding what they’d built upon.