The beeswax candle keeps its small, exact column. The rectangle of warmth she stitched on air around the central pane glows in the quiet way warmed glass does: not visible, but felt on the skin as a change in courtesy. The radiator hums under the floorboards and through them, a long vowel held under the tongue. In the left-hand bevel, a suggestion of a cheek gathers if she refuses to look at it; in the right, nothing but her lines; in the center, her face and the fogged oval where a mouth would be if rules were fewer.
"Terms," she says, and the word is a shelf she lays out between them. "No touching my mind. Not a brush, not a test. You speak plainly when I ask for it. And you give a name."
"Three rules," he says, as if counting cards. "I used to be better with threes."
"We're both out of practice," she says. Her forearm burns neatly. She gives the ache no permission to change her grip. "I don't bargain this set. We begin or we end."
The condensation on the mirror's inner skin pulses and steadies. In the fog, the outline of the almost-mouth thins, thickens, as if considering sulking. Luca laughs—not loudly, not theatrically. The sound is warm enough to make cloth want to lean closer to hear it.
"You assume I want beginning more than I fear ending," he says.
"You wouldn't have laughed if you didn't."
"Or," he says, amused, "I laughed because I like the way you set knives like cutlery."
"Speak plainly," she prompts.
"Fine," he says. "I want beginning. I have a weakness for thresholds."
"No touching my mind," she repeats, because a rule spoken twice remembers itself. "I'll know if you try."
"You'll know even if I don't," he says, thoughtful now, the velvet of him thinned down to the grain. "You'll feel heat and call it trespass."
"If the heat belongs to me, it will tell me so."
He lets that sit, smiling in it. "What happens if I break a rule."
"You don't," she says.
"Not helpful."
"Then try it and find out." She doesn't sweeten it. The candle's rim of liquid wax holds steady. The red thread at her wrist sits slack: a simple witness.
He resists the way a man resists a coat he would like to keep unbuttoned. "Names," he says finally, like a man lifting his chin for a collar. "The first rule of mirrors: names make the breath fog on the wrong side. If I say one, you'll see it printed there like a boy's prank and mistake it for a possession."
"Speak plainly," she says again.
He exhales across the silver; the fog fattening does look, for a heartbeat, like letters could be coaxed out of it if she wanted to play at childish games. He refuses that. Good. The handprint doesn't return. The almost-mouth holds at the lower edge of the oval, as if about to catch its bottom lip between teeth it doesn't admit to.
"All right." Luca's tone lowers, the hint of theater stripped down to the word itself. "You gave me one."
"I offered a scaffold," she says. "I'm waiting to see if you mean to hang anything on it."
"Luca," he says, and the syllables step onto the glass the way a man steps onto a boat: heel—give—balance. "I will learn it as mine again. If I keep it," he adds, lighter, "I will owe you something eventually."
"You owe me already," she says. "You used my air."
He laughs softly, pleased to be reminded. "So. 'No touching her mind,' 'speak plainly,' 'give a name.' Will there be a fourth rule."
"If you need one," she says, and lets the flame kiss the rectangle's left edge, then right, refreshing it. "If you touch my body with more than air and light, I burn the wards out with this candle and leave the room cold enough to crack your tricks."
He tastes the picture she's made. "That would be… stern."
"Exact," she says. "Again."
"Exact," he concedes, and the warm amusement returns. "Very well. I will be a gentleman."
"Don't." She doesn't let the word linger. "Be honest. 'Gentleman' is a costume."
"Ah, architect," he murmurs. "You dislike pasteboard."
"Plain." She tilts her wrist a fraction and returns it, sensing the heat along the pane even out. "Your turn. You asked after mine."
He hears the space in that. "Your name."
"You know what I use."
"I want the one you lock away." He makes it coaxing and tries to hide it. "What they would shout down a hallway if you left in anger."
"I don't leave in anger," she says.
"Then what they would say—"
"No touching my mind," she says, softer, not because she relents but because she wants the words to travel differently: under the skin of the glass, not over it. "You can ask what you like. You don't get to tell me what I do when I leave."
"Fair," he says at once, careful to win the point by giving it up. "Mira."
She doesn't grant him the second syllable of her name as a gift; she allows it as a fact. The mirror fogs the way windows fog when the kettle begins to think. The air warms—not much, not enough to be theater, just the small gain that happens when attention concentrates in a room and the room decides to believe in it. The beeswax makes its honey-smoke that you do not smell until you are willing to.
"You feel that too," he says, pleased. "The swell."
"I feel a change in pressure," she says. "I feel heat attempting definition. The wards hold."
"The wards hold," he echoes, more a toast than a complaint. "You make good fences."
"They're not fences. They're marks. Marks keep language honest." She adjusts her grip on the taper—no lower. "The room will test them."
"Because you are testing me."
"Because the room is hungry," she says, and the bedside lamp's cloth shade picks up the word, casting it in warm oval onto the wall. "Tell me what you hear at night."
He considers resisting; she hears him enjoy the thought of being contrary and let it go a step later. "Wires," he says. "The building's veins. They hum in different keys depending on which person sleeps behind which wall. People and metal teach each other pitches. It's very educational."
"Educational how."
"Lies vibrate differently than fear," he says promptly. "Joy has a warmth to it that leaks into the copper for hours after its owner has finished. Salted grief—when someone cries as if the body is a machine emptying a redundant tank—gives a fullness to the mains that the electrician would not be able to meter, but I can." A small, almost embarrassed chuckle. "And kettles. The things I know about kettles: you could write a treatise."
"Go on," she says. The radiator gives a polite clatter deep in its ribs; the lower note recovers like a step taken and caught.
"Footsteps," he continues. "Staff have careful feet that apologize to floorboards. Guests have proclamations for feet. Children have accidents for feet—when there are children; there aren't often. The night porter counts keys with two fingertips and makes tiny grief noises when a tag is chipped. Elara sings. Very badly, bless her. She sings little weather songs while she tucks corners." His voice warms further at that. "And Madame Corvi. She hums one line only when she's alone. She doesn't know she hums it. It's a lullaby someone taught her to hate. She hums it anyway."
"What line," Mira asks.
"Do you promise not to tell her I told," he teases.
"I'm not a confessional," she says.
He gives her the notes not by singing but by speaking them as if he were telling the radiator how to hold its vowel. "Down… down… up a little," he says, smiling at himself, "and stay."
"That's a lot of lullabies," she says.
"The good ones all circle the same drain," he says.
"What else," she says.
"Midnight calls," he says. "Three this week. One man who asked the desk for forgiveness and got an extra pillow. One woman who said another woman's name and hung up when the line breathed back. One boy—too young for this place—who called from the staircase just to hear the bell go at the other end." He rolls the memory in his voice like a coin. "The bell loves itself."
"And after," she says, "when most of the building gives up and sleeps."
"The sea makes its case to the windows," he says. "And the windows pretend not to be persuaded while fog signs the treaty." A grin. "Also: rats. But they are gossip and appetite, and neither is lethal if the kitchen is honest."
"Is the kitchen honest."
"Tonight," he says, positively. "They threw the soup away and started again."
Mira notes the new warmth in the air—not friend, not foe; a flex. The fog on the mirror swells toward the edges, thickening against her heat-drawn frame and pressing there like a cat leaning into a leg it cannot pass. The warmth sits on the back of her hand where it holds the candle; the skin there prickles as if entertained. The rectangle holds. Her thread stays slack. The salt on the sill has taken on a gloss, but the line is unbroken.
"You," he says, light and careful, turning the question back the way a card is turned and slid. "What do you hear at night."
"Blood," she says.
He laughs, not cruelly. "Always the correct answer from a surgeon."
"It's not a joke," she says. "It's a system check. I listen for my pulse where it shouldn't be. I listen for the artery that wants drama. I listen for the vein that dreams of being an artery. I listen for a glitch."
"And if you find one."
"I name it." She doesn't lighten the word. "And I keep my hands warm."
"I could help," he says, automatic, then catches himself. "Rule one. No help in the mind."
"No help in the mind," she agrees. "It's loud enough in there."
He lets that live as a fact between them. The mirror fogs again from the inside, the condensation swimming slowly up and left like weather behind glass. He asks, almost politely, "And what do you dream."
"Small truths," she reminds him.
"I'll take a crumb," he says, cheerful. "Even the red ones."
She watches the fog bloom and recede in time with the radiator's low line. She gives him one he cannot wear as a mask. "When I dream poorly," she says, "I dream corridors where the doors pretend to be hearts. If I push, they open and it's only rooms. If I listen, they beat. I wake up with my hand flat on my own ribs and my ear against myself like a child at a wall."
He doesn't tease. "And when you dream well."
"A cupboard," she says. "A plain one. Empty, but smelled of flour. I close myself in and do inventory of the quiet. When I come out, I know where everything is. Even the things I never bought."
"That is the most enviable dream I've heard in a century," he says, and she hears no irony in it at all.
The air climbs another gentle degree, the way rooms do when they decide the conversation matters to them. The wardrobe breathes its sweet wood-sugar; the sachet's lavender holds its line. The beeswax flame lifts and leans and rights itself, steady enough to write with. In the left-hand bevel, a slip of Luca's edge becomes almost-face, a handsome error; she keeps her gaze dead-center and allows it to be only weather.
"My small truth," he offers, matching the currency. "Sometimes, when the building is empty in that particular way that isn't about bodies but about intention—holidays, storms—I can feel the first floor flex, very slightly, as if it misses a weight. I do not know whose weight. I think it's the kind of absence that's bigger than a person and smaller than a parade."
"The lobby clock's tick," she says. "It keeps time, but it isn't listened to."
"Yes," he says, pleased she gives his metaphor metal legs. "Exactly. You hear it too."
"I hear the way dust resettles when the front door opens. And the way the desk drawers can be shut gently or culpably." She lifts the taper a little to keep the heat even along the rectangle's top. "Another."
"I never learned to like the taste of my own name," he says, surprisingly quick. "When I had it in my mouth, it always tasted like a shirt collar in summer."
"Too tight," she says.
"Too new," he says. "Too formal. As if I were attending myself and expected to forget my vows halfway through."
"You might have," she says. "You seem the type who enjoys improvising solemnity."
He bows in the fog without making a shape you could swear to. "Guilty."
"And you hear Madame Corvi at night," she says. "You could hum her line, but you didn't."
"I won't," he says. "Her privacy keeps her delicate. The day she learns that she hums will be the day she stops."
"Good," Mira says. "Leave her that."
The fog swells once, more insistently. The enchantment in the room—that's the only useful word for the pressure of attention and heat and the building's own old trickle of intent—presses up against her rectangle, testing. The flame answers by narrowing to a clean point and refusing to lick higher. The warmed frame of air she wrote with light replies, not with heat, but with shape: it holds. The condensation beads at its invisible border as if someone had drawn a square on the inside of the silver with cold chalk and the wet could not cross.
"This is where men in doorways usually compliment you again," he says slyly, observing his own kind. "Then ask something they should have started with."
"You won't."
"I'm learning," he says, and it is almost apology, almost pride. "What would you have me tell you next."
"Speak plainly," she says. "No velvet. What do you want tonight."
"Company," he says. There is nothing coy in it now. "A thinking person in the chair. A voice that doesn't need to raise itself to be heard. An arrangement that stays inside the frame until I've learned not to paw at it like a dog."
"And tomorrow."
"If you stay," he says, "I will want the same. With more questions answered. With you telling me three things and me telling you three. With me not asking you to touch the glass and me not pretending that not asking doesn't cost me."
She registers the honesty. "Better."
"And you," he says, smiling just enough to let her hear it, not enough to push. "What do you want tonight."
"To keep my arm steady until I choose to lower it," she says. "To learn the exact pitch at which this building hums when it's telling the truth. To leave this room without becoming part of its story."
"That last one is impossible," he says, almost tender.
"Then we practice approximation," she says. "Name for a name. You've had one. I've had one. We owe small truths on the half-hour until dawn."
"Deal," he says, finding the game delicious. "Half-hours, then. I'll begin the next: when the fog presses from inside the glass, I feel it as pressure in my teeth."
She doesn't let herself smile, though the image is not without charm. "When the fog presses from inside the glass," she returns, "I feel it behind my sternum like a hand pushing a door between ribs."
He makes a small, pleased sound. "We're getting somewhere."
"We're staying put," she corrects. "That's different."
The candle's cup is a little deeper. The wick stands very straight, a spine with purpose. The window's buoy carries on with its quiet semaphore, irrelevant and indispensable both. The thread at her wrist is a light reminder that motion is a choice. The salt on the sill sits like a patient alphabet.
"My turn for a rule," Luca says, tentative, testing whether she permits his share of architecture. "If I ask something you don't like, don't answer with a knife. Answer with quiet. I'm learning your silences. They're very articulate."
"Granted," she says. "If I do not answer, you do not fill the space with theater."
"Granted," he echoes, happily.
"And no stories whose point is your own importance," she adds.
His laugh eases into the glass as if the silver were comfortable with it now. "You've met me."
"I've met rooms like you," she says.
"Do I get to meet the rooms like you," he asks, light. "Or do you only bring your worst self to frightened buildings."
"Plainly," she says.
"Plainly," he agrees, instantly obedient. "Do you have anyone who would tell you not to sit like that, arm burning, bargaining with things you shouldn't bargain with."
"Several," she says. "They're not here."
"Lucky me," he says, and lets that be enough.
The radiator takes the lower note down another slim half-step, the kind that signals the boiler's long thought about dawn. The wardrobe wood sighs a little as if remembering that it is, in fact, tree. The mirror fogs again from within, pushing against the warmed air and pearling along that invisible line. It would be easy to read it as intimacy. It is pressure meeting shape. That's all. The candle flame wavers, rights itself, and throws a stitch of light across the bevel that lands like a narrow smile on the glass.
"What do you dream," he asks, circling back, "when you dream me."
"I don't," she says, simple.
"Not yet," he says, and the room, delighted to be given a future tense, warms a fraction as if it has thought of one.