Chapter 4: Seren Ashvale's Rehearsed Entrance

The knock came on a Friday, which he would later consider appropriate. Friday was the day the week had already decided what it was, and new information arriving on a Friday had a particular quality of bad timing that felt almost personal.

He was washing up when he heard it. Not the tentative knock of a stranger checking addresses, not the flat administrative rap of someone official. Three knocks, a pause, two more. The rhythm of someone who had thought about how they would knock.

He dried his hands. Ptolemy looked up from the radiator with the considering expression of an animal that has made peace with uncertainty and found it adequately warm.