Chapter 15: The First Time Someone Gets Hurt

The knock came at quarter past eleven.

Evander was at the kitchen table with a cup of tea he hadn't touched and the folder he still hadn't opened, which was becoming a kind of ongoing statement about his character that he preferred not to examine. Ptolemy was on the chair across from him, performing the deep meditative stillness of a cat who had decided that sleep was for people who hadn't arranged themselves so effectively. The harbor was quiet. The rain had stopped an hour ago and left behind the particular weighted silence of wet streets drying.

He knew it was Seren before he opened the door. He couldn't have explained why, precisely — operational habit, something about the cadence of it, the fact that it was a knock and not a buzz from the street entrance, which meant she had come through the building's side door the way she'd been coming and going for a week now, quietly, without announcing herself to the intercom. He'd stopped examining that particular habit too.