That scent.
He must be hallucinating. He spent too much time flying back and forth between countries lately and got so tired he imagines things now. Either that, or Matthew actually drugged him when they were taking blood in the lab.
Any of those suggestions seemed more plausible than Eva being in the same building as him.
His mind went racing, offering as many explanations per second as it could to explain the statistical impossibility of his ex-girlfriend being in such close proximity to him. She surely still lived in Mainz, right? She must had fled during the War World II, but she loved the city, so she must had come back there? In the past, she hadn't fancied long-distance travel – a trip to the States had to be out of question?
Baldwin couldn't prove any of these theories. He made harsh assumptions based on the habits Eva used to have in early XX century. He didn't follow her moves after the break-up. She seemingly cut the ties with his family, nobody was feeding hints of her whereabouts to him. He hadn't seen or heard from her in over a century. The worst thing was that he didn't know whether he wanted the scent to be a hallucination or a sign that she really was here.
He didn't have a chance to choose as he turned the corner on the stairs and was met by her hazel eyes and a stronger, painfully familiar flowery scent. He stopped in his tracks, effectively growing into the stone floor and catching his breath. His brain betrayed him and stopped thinking in a straight line, simultaneously throwing him into several memories at once.
She wore a sky-blue ribbon in her hair during their second meeting. She loved to pick on the way he kept his financial records in alphabetical order by companies' names rather than chronological to be able to pull out the latest one when needed. She once walked barefoot through the forest near Sept-Tours because he dared her to throw her shoes on a nearby tree and they were too tired from laughing to climb it and get them down. She always started pulling on the threads of her dress when she was deep in thought. Her terms of endearment for him were never spoken out loud; she whispered them, because she wanted him to be the only one to hear it.
She spoke just as quietly when she told him it was over. She kept her hands perfectly still, crossed at her chest, her decision made, without a chance of reconsideration. He kept hearing her heels click down the hall outside his flat for a long time, hoping that this time she'd be returning to him, rather than walking away. The silence was absolutely deafening, without her laugh, her whisper and the sound of her beating heart, on the night that she left his life.
It was as silent now that she stood in front of him after all those years. He couldn't even hear his own heartbeat; it must have stopped working altogether. The question he thought long forgotten and didn't even care for the answer burned anew in his eyes: Why? What actual reason drove her, without a long and tedious argument with pleading and bargaining on his part, to his door that night to say, "We're done"?
He lifted his head a bit to meet her eyes with more confidence than he possessed, to get rid of any signs of weakness. There was a high possibility that the attempt was futile. She did know him too well back in the day. But did she remember?
Matthew's voice interrupted his thoughts, and she turned away from Baldwin, who closed his eyes for a second and took a breath. He's the head of the de Clermont family. A natural-born strategist. A man who built his wealth from scratch, dividing and conquering everything he laid his eyes on. He will figure out what to do. Yet, every time his mind took a step towards a possible solution, it got shut down by a pang in his chest. He shook his head, and without saying a word, proceeded out of the building. He heard a faint sound of Matthew calling after him but didn't slow his pace. In the wildest and most desperate dreams he stopped having half a century ago he thought that he'd had all the strength he needed if he came face to face with Eva ever again. He was painfully mistaken.
He used to think it fascinating and now he found it ironic that the scent coming off her in tiny waves was of das tränende herz flower. Because she did, didn't she? Break his heart and left it bleeding.