The beeswax flame steadies as if it has learned to be watched. Mira shifts the taper half an inch to keep the rectangle of warmth even. In the central pane: her mouth, level. In the right-hand bevel: her mouth again, a sliver wryer. In the left: a heartbeat late, still learning to keep up.
"Good," she says, not to praise. To mark.
The fogged oval where a mouth would be gathers itself, loosens, returns—like a chord trying on voicings to see which feels most like a throat. The radiator's lower tone resumes with a patience that could be read as complicity. The chandelier withholds its small tick as if the crystals fear interrupting a lesson.
The voice—his—breaks the hush with the confidence of a footfall in a familiar corridor. "You ask like a summons," he says. "Like a bell. And with a key in your mouth."
Mira keeps her gaze fixed on the center of the glass. "You answer like a guest who has stayed overlong. And without a name."
"Names," he says, and his chuckle rides the bevel so that it seems to pass through three panes at once, "are doors you can close on a person. I prefer balconies."
"Balconies fall," she says.
"Then you catch me."
She does not smile. "I don't catch."
He sighs, and the condensation lowers in sympathy, a perched breath. "Cruel."
"Exact," she says. The flame leans a fraction toward the fog and rights itself. She notes the shift in heat on the backs of her knuckles. Pull present. Stable. She keeps her wrist steady.
He lets the silence spread its cloth again and sits down at it. "It's a handsome room," he says, after a beat, as if showing manners. "New paint with old patience. The bed—" a grin in the vowels "—has ideas."
"Attempt one," Mira says mildly. "Temperature. Warmth by implication. I'm not an empty grate."
"You count?" He sounds delighted. "You make lists?"
"It keeps the work from thinking it's personal." She watches the fog's edges feather and cohere. The handprint does not return. The almost-mouth lingers. "You were saying about the bed."
"That you look wrong sitting on it like a surgeon on a pew."
"Then avert your eyes."
"I try," he says, velvet-laughing. "You keep making more eyes to fail me. There are three of you and only one of me and still you outnumber me."
"Attempt two," she says. "Flattery. Quantity masquerading as charm."
He tsks lightly. "A scientist who pretends she does not own a mirror."
"I own three, evidently. None of them yours." The taper's cup deepens; a clean rim of liquid wax hugs the wick. She clocks her own arm's ache and lets it live.
"And yet," he says, letting the syllables slow until they almost stick, "you hold a candle to me."
"Physics," she says. "You are a surface convinced it's a story."
"You're good." The fog finds a new density along the lower curve of the oblong where a lip would gather. "It's been a while since I had to work for my supper."
"You don't eat."
"No," he concedes, and his voice changes by a thread—less velvet, more iron under cloth. "But we both know hunger takes many shapes. Don't we, Mira."
Her name in the glass lands not like a touch but like a match on a flint that refuses to catch. She doesn't reply to the question that isn't one. Instead: "Who taught you to speak from behind silver?"
"The question is who taught me to wait behind it." He lets the pause smile. "You came in smelling of salt and needles. I thought: perhaps she will not be a disappointment."
She catalogs that. Attempt three: intrigue. Threading a lineage. "You thought 'perhaps.' If you were certain, you would already have lied."
"Am I lying now?"
"You're evasive."
"That is a kind of dance." The fog lifts at the top edge, deepens at the bottom, as if a chin has tipped. "Tell me—do you always tie thread to lamps and wrists? It's very… bridal."
She glances nowhere—keeps eyes forward—but checks the pull at her wrist by feel. Still slack. Still honest. "Attempt four: suggestive. You want heat. Earn friction." She says it like instruction, not invitation.
His laugh is low and clean. "I forgot how the precise ones are. You put bones around everything, don't you."
"Things stay where they're put," she says. "Or they show you the force required to move them." The beeswax shifts its small column a hair. She nudges her elbow out and back, keeping the warded rectangle warm.
"Force," he muses. "I once broke a staircase with—"
"Names," she says, cutting cleanly. "Then staircases."
"And then what?" He is enjoying himself. It dresses the words. "Dinner? A walk along the promenade? Shall I come out and buy you a sweet at the kiosk, and we can eat it together very slowly and never once look away from each other?"
"Attempt five: nostalgia projected forward," she notes. "Future memories offered as bait."
"What would work?" he asks, genuinely curious. "A confession? A stunt? Should I put my hand through the glass like a fox through a hen door?"
"You don't have a hand." She lets her gaze flick, finally, not to indulge him but to test the rule: right-hand bevel, then back to center—clean; left-hand bevel, back—there. In the lagging pane, not a face, nothing so generous, only a sliver—a darker rush where cheekbone might adopt light if it wanted to. When she looks dead at it, it is only her again. Peripheral: there's the hint. She files the mechanism. Edge visibility. Gaze-avoidant manifestation.
"You see me better when you don't look," he says, as if hearing the thought and refusing to gloat. "Most people do well with that arrangement."
"Most people prefer stories to facts," she says. "I'm not most."
"You're not resigned, either." His tone warms again, careful as a hand on a skittish animal. "You're tired, though. I can tell by the way you keep your shoulder from speaking. If you set the candle down, Mira, we could make this easier."
"Attempt six," she says, "concern disguised as permission." She tastes the air: beeswax, iron, lavender. "No."
"It's only an inch lower," he persists, velvet on velvet. "Your arm would forgive you. I can talk while you rest. We could talk about heat, if you like. I know a dozen ways to make a room learn the difference between warmth and—"
"Stand in a kettle and call it a baptism?" She lets a tiny smile happen, for her own humor, not his. "Your metaphors are hand-me-downs."
He inhales—no breath, no fog shift, but the sound of a man deciding whether to be wounded or entertained. "I am out of practice."
"Practice where?" she asks, quick. "Not in this room."
"What makes you think that?"
"The wardrobe doors are bored," she says. "You haven't learned to use them. The bevel's habit says amateurs. And if you'd had long company you wouldn't be so hungry."
He laughs again, this time closer to the glass's skin, a scrape of brightness on the silver. "So: a scientist and a tailor. You read the seams."
"Titles waste time." She lets the flame cross the left corner of the rectangle again, then the right, tightening the heat's fence. Inside it, the condensation refuses to clear. The not-quite-mouth lingers. "Answer the question you owe."
"I owe nothing," he says pleasantly. "But I'm in a generous mood."
"Then be generous, not clever."
"Oh, allow me both." He leans into the word the way a man leans onto a piano lid before beginning a party trick. "Tell me what you'll do if I give you my name."
"Use it for the thing names are for."
"Which is?"
"Accuracy."
"And control," he says, amused.
"Only if you give it to me wrong."
"I would never," he says, making a vow like it weighs nothing.
"Attempt seven," she says. "Oath without collateral."
He makes a small, appreciative sound as if she has performed a neat card cut. "How far will you go with your little rituals, Mira? Salt on the sill, thread at the wrist, a candle taught to draw rectangles. Will you write on your tongue and swallow? Will you draw yourself in chalk and refuse to step out? I could help."
"I don't need help."
"Everyone needs help," he says softly, and the fog swells as if the mouth behind the silver spoke closer to the pane. "Some of us need permission to take it."
"Attempt eight: pity recast as intimacy." Mira shifts her weight so her left knee relieves the right. The taper does not waver. "You're moving through a sequence. Next you'll offer to tell me something about myself."
He hums in acknowledgment. "You carry two kinds of thread but you only trust one. The red is for you; the other is for other people. You sleep shallow. You read rooms before you enter. You write things down and hide the paper where someone curious will find it and think they know you."
Mira does not grant him the luxury of a blink. "Inventory is not insight."
"But true inventory is its own weather," he says. "You feel it before you name it."
"Which of those details did you gather with sight," she asks, "and which did you infer from wanting to be impressive?"
"Don't be cruel," he says again, with mock complaint. "You make me shy."
"Impossible."
"All right. I cheat." He sounds pleased to confess it. "I listen to the building the way you do. And you, Mira, are loud in your quiet way. The board under your heel tells me where you learned restraint. The phone's little click tells me you expect calls that look like mistakes. The knife on the coaster tells me you're economical; you love an object that asks to be two things at once."
"You could say that about yourself," she says. "Mirror and mouth."
"Aren't we uniquely suited, then?"
"You will say that to anyone with a pulse and a spine."
"Especially to them."
The radiator takes the lower note down a shade; a valve tightens invisibly and whispers through the ribs. The flame lifts and steadies. In the left-hand bevel, for the length of a blink she catches a jaw's line, a cheek's shadow, an ear's suggestion—handsome in the way ink sketches are handsome: economy mistaken for virtue. She looks dead-center; it is gone. Peripheral, the edge returns: a mouth corner that knows its audience, a jaw taught by laughter to behave.
"How long," she asks, "have you been here."
"Long enough to forget what new paint smells like until tonight." He slows, testing candor the way a burglar tests a latch. "Long enough to hear the sea change its mind about the town. Long enough to learn three names for the same hotel and the different promises each made." A half-smile in the silver. "Long enough to want this very much."
"To want what."
"Company." He lets the word be simple.
"Company with rules," she says.
"With rules," he agrees readily. "And with a scientist. I never get the scientists."
"They leave when they realize your control requires their cooperation."
He chuckles. "And yours?"
"You mistake me."
"For what," he purrs.
"For someone interested in being the subject." She lets a very small laugh escape her then, as if to test whether he understands that humor can be a scalpel. "Try a different lever."
"Fear?"
"Poor choice."
"Threats?"
"Worse."
"Ghost stories?" He savors the phrase. "There used to be a nicer word for them. Visitations. It had a bell in it."
"You're ringing plenty." She tastes the beeswax again and finds it clean, unburned. "You could try truth."
"I did," he says lightly. "You called it evasive."
"Then be specific."
He sighs, a showman indulging an obstinate audience. "Specifics, then. A woman once slept in this bed with her shoes on because she believed taking them off would mean she wasn't ready to run. She didn't run. She left in the morning with a man who returned the key and tried to tip Madame Corvi for not noticing. Madame Corvi notices everything."
"Specific to you."
"To me?" He pretends to be scandalized. "Oh, I have a list. I've been good. I haven't knocked anything over in… what year is it. No: I won't make you do that dance. To me: I have a talent. For reflections. I learned that if a face looks too directly at me I vanish—which is cruel, because I am extremely good-looking in the edges. I learned that heat invites me and helps me stay. And I learned," he says, voice dipping to a confessional warmth that would feel closer if she allowed it, "that when someone holds a flame with their arm aching just to keep me inside the frame she drew, and refuses to blink because blinking would be a gift… I learned that I want—oh, very much—to be worthy of that attention."
"Attempt nine," she says gently. "Earnestness, feigned or not."
He laughs, actually delighted. "How would you tell the difference."
"By whether your next sentence is a request."
He is silent, then: "Touch the glass."
"Of course." Her mouth doesn't move into the obvious smile, but she feels it rise and chooses not to show it. "Attempt ten: escalation. Body-heat invitation. You want conduction."
"I want contact," he says. The fog thickens where the almost-mouth hangs, then thins. "It matters to me."
"You'll get light and allow yourself to pretend it's warmth," she says. "Then you'll claim you can't maintain it without—what. Payment."
He inhales, mock-wounded. "That's cynical."
"That's experience."
The taper's flame makes a tiny runner of light on the bevel at her right. In the lagging left, the edge-face leans as if to scent her. She doesn't shift. The circle of heat around the pane remains even. The rectangle—three circuits deep—holds.
"Do you never tire of winning," he asks, so soft she could pretend the radiator made it. "Even alone."
"I don't mistake refusal for victory."
"What do you call it."
"Baseline." She listens to the soft click that means a neighbor turned a tap. "We begin from there."
"I want to know you," he says, choosing each word as if they were picked from a well-stocked tray. "I want to know what people did to you to make you count attempts out loud. I want to know why you came here with salt when the whole town is just a larger jar of it."
"You'll have to live," she says. "And even then, only the parts I let you borrow." She tilts the taper toward the glass a fraction more; the ward warms. "Your turn. Say something that costs you."
"Costs?" He tastes the word. "All right. Here: I do not remember the exact moment I gave up my name. I remember the reasons I thought I had. I remember thinking I could get it back at any time. And I remember the way people stopped shutting doors on me once they couldn't call to me to come or go. I remember liking that too much. And now—" a velvet shrug "—I can't undo the trick."
The radiator hums—one long line that, if it belonged to a throat, would feel like a truth exhaled to keep a room from fogging. Mira holds the flame where it is. She doesn't look aside for a reward glimpse of his cheek. She gives him the fairness of a still test.
"Better," she says. "Not expensive, but a coin."
"You're hard to shop for," he says, but there's no sulk left in it. Only amusement, the kind that doesn't need you to laugh with it to know itself. "All right, scientist. Your turn costs."
"I'm working," she says.
"Work with me."
"That depends on what you are."
"A reflection," he says promptly.
"Not sufficient."
"A gentleman."
"I have known too many uses of that word."
He smiles in the fog; she can feel it in the shape rather than see it. "Then for now, I'll be what you require. A witness. A piece of stubborn weather. Company that does not ask for bed or bread. Company that—on good behavior—stays where it is put and speaks when spoken to."
"That last part won't last."
"No," he says cheerfully. "It won't. But I am trainable."
The chandelier lets a crystal kiss another, soft as a metronome clearing its throat. The buoy beyond the window blinks into its own future. The beeswax candle burns with the tidy ferocity of practiced discipline. Mira feels the heat along her palm, the pull in her shoulder, the map of the room under her feet like braille she can read without looking.
"Since you prefer balconies," she says, "let's build one. Terms."
"Ah," he murmurs. "Architecture."
"You don't touch," she says. "You don't ask for that again. You don't offer heat as a bribe. If I ask a question, you answer it before asking one back. If you lie, I will know. If you try to frighten me, I will leave you here with your own voice until you remember you're not the only sound in the building."
He hums, contentment in it. "I like you."
"Terms," she repeats.
"Yes," he says. "Agreed—provisionally. I may negotiate later when I have earned leverage."
"You won't." She lets herself blink, once, slow. In the left-hand bevel his jaw-line obliges her by sharpening for a flash. "First question. How did you learn to condense behind silver."
"A woman showed me," he says, immediately. "She taught me as if she meant to kiss me for learning. She didn't."
"Where is she now."
"Thick in the world," he says, and for the first time there's something like envy in it. "She went on."
"Second. How do you choose who hears you."
"I don't. I try. Most don't hear. Some pretend not to. You walked in counting, and the room made room."
"Third," she says. "Why this hotel."
He laughs a little. "Because it keeps buying mirrors."
Mira allows her mouth the smallest quirk. She takes stock: heat constant; fog stable; thread slack; salt untroubled; phone subdued; radiator patient. The candle's cup has widened; the wick stands straight, a good student.
"Fourth," he says softly, turning the form back at her without malice. "Why you, tonight."
"Because I decided it." She checks the mirror's edge with a glance—not for him, for the bevel's habit; it keeps its petty delay. "And because you have waited in the wrong posture for too long."
"What posture should I try."
"Less kiss. More court."
He laughs, delighted. "Ah. We're back to balconies."
"We never left." She breathes once and lets the breath go slow; the flame doesn't argue. "Say a name. Any name. I don't care if it's yours."
"Choosing one," he says, with theatrical care, "would be worse than lying. It would be a costume. You deserve at least a skin."
"Then tell me what people called you before you forgot."
He quiets. The fog gathers, thins, gathers. The radiator keeps its note like a violinist waiting for a cue. Somewhere below, a door unlatches and relatches with the practiced discretion of staff who understand that sound is the real currency in a hotel.
"I remember," he says at last, voice down to a temperature that reads as honest because there isn't enough sugar left in it, "that the first syllable felt like stepping onto a boat. Steady, then a little give. The second turned in the mouth. The last ended soft, as if it hated doors." He pauses. "Will that do."
"For now." Mira lets the taper drift an inch right and back, refreshing the warmth along the rectangle's edge. "I'll call you Luca."
There is a beat. Then—because he cannot help himself, and because his nature is to be pleased by a gift even when it's a scalpel—he smiles into the glass. She feels it like a change in pressure rather than sees it.
"Luca," he repeats, tasting it. "Yes. That is almost it."
"Almost is the floor," she says. "We build up."
"Architect," he murmurs. "Scientist. Tailor. Bell."
"Mirror," she says. "Luca. Stay inside the ward."
"Only because you ask so beautifully." He says it warmly, not to land heat but to enjoy the way it travels. "Mira."
She holds his name and hers between them with the candle's small, unwavering column, and the night along the pane sees itself twice—once in glass, once in flame. The radiator hums its patient line. The bevel makes its tricks. The wardrobe wood breathes sap as if remembering summer.
Outside, the buoy blinks again. Inside, the candle throws a new, neat stitch of light along the mirror's edge, and he—Luca—moves just enough in the left-hand pane that if she were a woman who chased glances, she would have missed it. She holds center, and the room learns, as he does, the kind of conversation she intends to have.