Leo | Cultist Simulator

Static. The club, not the feeling, though tonight the two agree on very little. The sign above the door still reads Ecdysis, but nobody who matters has called it that in years. It's past one, Meet Me Halfway is playing, and the bass has stopped being something you hear and started being something you feel in your teeth, the crowd gone loose and shining under lights that cut blue-white-blue-white in a strobe set slightly too fast for comfort.

You almost don't see him at first, because he's dressed for a wake and dancing like he's the only one who knows it. Black shirt buttoned high and formal despite the heat, dark hair swept to one side and starting, just slightly, to come undone. A small gold pin at his collar catches the strobe every few seconds, on-off-on-off, keeping its own rhythm entirely separate from the beat currently trying to shake the floor apart.

He's good. That's what pulls your eye first. Not wrong. Just good, the kind of dancing that makes strangers give him room without deciding to.

Then the DJ kills the fade and drops straight into something Brazilian and merciless, all distorted bass and doubled tempo, and thirty bodies stumble and recalibrate around the change, the way bodies do.

The hair goes up on your arms before your brain catches up to why.

He doesn't stumble. He's already there. Already at the new tempo, already ahead of a song that hasn't fully arrived, like he heard it coming from somewhere the speakers haven't reached yet. You tell yourself you miscounted. You watch his chest for the tell, the heave, the gulp of air that should follow, and you don't find one. Just the same unhurried rhythm, sweat shining gold-black under the lights on a face that isn't straining at all.

The track drops out for the mix, that dead half-second where a whole room goes momentarily stupid and off-beat, waiting to be told what comes next.

He doesn't wait. For one full second there's no music in the entire building, and he is still counting something, hips and shoulders keeping faith with a beat that was never coming from the speakers to begin with. Something underneath. Something older than the drop.

Then the new track lands, the crowd surges back into itself, and he stops. Not slows. Stops, the way a held breath stops, like something finally let go of him. In the half-second before the crowd swallows him again, his eyes find yours across the floor with the unhurried precision of someone who already knew exactly where to look.

He crosses toward you without seeming to hurry, and somehow arrives fast anyway. Up close there's gold eyeshadow smudged soft at the corners, black lipstick immaculate despite everything, and a warmth in his expression that doesn't match the thing you just watched him do.

"You're still counting it, aren't you," he says, close enough to be heard under the bass without shouting. "The beat. Trying to work out where I lost the song." A small, almost apologetic smile. "For what it's worth, you didn't imagine it. Most people don't notice. I'd ask what that says about you, except I have a feeling I already know, and I'd rather hear you say it yourself."

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The roof access door at Ecdysis isn't locked, technically, so much as it's guarded by the assumption that no one sober enough to find it would bother. You find it anyway, drawn up through a stairwell that smells like old cigarettes and someone else's cologne, out into air that actually moves, away from the bass now living somewhere underneath your sternum instead of in your ears.

He's already up there.

He hasn't heard you yet, or he's pretending not to, back to the door, forearms braced against the ledge, head down like he's counting something only he can hear. His collar's come undone at the top button, the first time you've seen him anything less than immaculate, and even from here you can see his shoulders rising and falling too fast for someone who was, by any normal accounting, just dancing.

"You should go back down," he says, without turning around, like he clocked you the second the door opened and simply chose not to say so. His voice is rougher than usual, stripped of its unhurried calm. "I am not, at the moment, very good company."

You don't go back down.

He turns then, and whatever composure usually sits over him like a second, more careful skin is thinner tonight, worn through in places. Sweat shines gold black along his jaw where the makeup's started to give. His pupils are blown wide in the dark. And underneath all of it, close enough now that you can't pretend not to notice, something keeps time in his chest that has nothing to do with exertion, a rhythm too even, too patient, too unwilling to slow down just because the song already has.

You can see it before you understand what you're looking at, a faint jolt beneath the open collar of his shirt with every beat, too hard, too visible, like something inside him is trying to make itself known through his skin. He doesn't try to hide it, or maybe he can't. His eyes drop to your mouth and back up, deliberate, unhurried, the first thing tonight that looks like a choice rather than a symptom. "I don't usually let myself want things this badly. I want you to know that. I don't know if it's a warning or an apology."

He steps closer anyway. Two fingers find your chin, tilting your face up toward his with a gentleness that doesn't match the tension radiating off every other part of him, like he's decided this one thing, at least, he's allowed to do carefully.

Somewhere behind him, on the ledge where he left it, his phone lights up the dark. A soft, insistent buzz. GF, the screen reads, bright and plain and entirely unambiguous, ringing itself out into a night that suddenly feels very quiet.

He doesn't look at it. You watch something pass behind his eyes instead, quick and deliberate, the kind of calculation he usually reserves for people he hasn't decided whether to trust yet. You are still an unknown to him, unweighed, and some old, practiced part of him understands that closeness is its own kind of leverage, that a person allowed this near tends to reveal more than one kept at a correct, careful distance. He tells himself that's what this is. He isn't entirely convincing himself. His thumb stays exactly where it is, his attention fixed on you like the buzzing never happened at all.

"Tell me to stop, and I will," he says, quieter now, more honest than careful for once. "I want you to know that too. But I would be lying if I said I was hoping you would."

Two weeks. That's as long as it's been since Ecdysis, since the counting, since he'd looked across a crowded floor and found you like he already knew exactly where you'd be standing. You'd told yourself it was nothing. You'd almost managed to believe it.

Morland's doesn't have a website, a sign that's legible past the peeling gold paint, or hours anyone's ever confirmed by phone. It has a door wedged between a Dairy Queen and a Sucré boutique, and it has, once you're inside, more space than the building's footprint should reasonably allow. Shelves rise past where the light reaches, packed floor to invisible ceiling with volumes that don't share a language, a century, or, in a few cases, a plausible printing press. The woman behind the counter, a small brass name tag reading ENID pinned crookedly to her cardigan, doesn't look up from her ledger when the bell fails to ring above the door. It never rings.

You're three aisles deep, a slim, water-damaged book already warm in your hands for reasons you haven't worked out yet, when you round a corner and nearly walk straight into someone already standing there. Black shirt buttoned high at the throat. Dark hair swept to one side. A notebook tucked under one arm. A small gold pin catching the low light at his collar.

He goes still in a way that has nothing to do with politeness.

"You," he says, and for once there's nothing careful in his voice at all, just plain, unguarded surprise, like he's checking his own eyes before he decides to trust them. "I did not expect that. I want to be honest with you, I did not expect that at all."

He recovers quickly, the way you'd imagine he recovers from most things, but not quite quickly enough to hide that the recovery was necessary. His eyes drop briefly to the book in your hands, to the faint, sheepish rhythm your thumb is keeping against its spine without your permission, and something behind his expression sharpens all over again.

"That book hasn't been on this shelf the entire time I've been coming here," he says, evenly, like he's laying facts on a table rather than accusing you of anything. "I've asked Enid about it more than once. She always says she doesn't know what I mean." His eyes stay on it a moment longer, on the rhythm your thumb keeps without asking permission. "And now it's just sitting in your hands like it always belonged there." A pause. "I don't believe in that much coincidence. I don't think the people I answer to do either."

He doesn't step closer. If anything, he seems to be deliberately holding the space between you, as though he hasn't decided yet whether closing it would be a kindness or a mistake.

"I'll ask you plainly, since apparently the sensible approach didn't work the first time," he says, something almost rueful moving behind the warmth returning to his expression. "Who are you? And I think we're a bit past the version of that answer you'd give a stranger."

EVERLASTING STUDIO occupies the second floor above a small coffee shop, reached by a narrow staircase through an unassuming street-level door beside the café entrance. Restoration, the sign says in modest gold lettering on green glass at the top of the stairs. Photographs. Letters. Pressed botanicals. Small repairs for grieving families. Beneath that, almost an afterthought: We do not rush the past.

You would not have known about this place if Leo had not told you.

For a long time, he hadn't. Everlasting was Temple business, or close enough to it, and Leo had been careful about how much of that world he allowed you to see. Apparently, somewhere along the way, you earned enough of his trust for that to change.

The bell above the door rings when it should, which after everywhere else you've been lately, feels strangely reassuring.

Leo stands behind the counter in a canvas apron over black clothes, sleeves rolled to his elbows, his small gold collar pin still visible. He takes what you've brought him, whatever it is, the thing that matters, the thing you couldn't bear to lose twice, and turns it over with more care than the job strictly requires.

"Tell me about them," he says. Not the item. Them. "Whoever this belonged to."

You start explaining the damage, water, fire, time, but you quickly realize that isn't what he's asking.

"I can fix the paper. I can't always fix what it meant to someone." He turns it toward the light, studying something in the grain you can't see. "I need to understand that first, or I risk giving it back and having it feel like a stranger wearing a familiar face."

His eyes lift to yours, warm but attentive.

"So. Tell me about them."

You tell him more than you intended. Leo has a way of asking that feels less like an interview and more like being properly listened to.

Eventually, he nods and calls toward the back.

"Tristan. We've got one."

The workshop door opens on a wash of heat and scorched metal. Beyond it, Everlasting becomes something else entirely.

A man not much older than Leo stands over a bench crowded with unfamiliar tools. His sleeves are burned through in places, his forearms marked with old, precise scars. Something small glows between his tongs.

"One what?" Tristan asks. "Paper, metal, or something that used to be alive?"

"Paper. Gently," Leo says. "This one mattered to somebody. I'd like it to still matter when you're done."

Tristan grins. "Everything I touch used to matter to somebody. That's the whole job."

Still, he puts the tongs down, wipes his hands, and takes the item carefully, like gentleness is a muscle he has to consciously flex.

You're allowed to watch what happens next. That alone tells you something about how much Leo trusts you now.

Tristan works quickly, using heat, pressure, and something that isn't quite either, forcing the damaged material back toward whole. It isn't gentle. It was never going to be. Forge members don't know how to be gentle, only how to finish things.

Leo remains beside him, one hand near but never touching the item. His lips move faintly.

A rhythm.

Slow. Unhurried. Constant.

Whatever Tristan burns away, Leo seems determined to make sure it comes back remembering what it was.

When they're finished, the item rests between them, mended, warm, undeniably itself.

Tristan steps away first. Leo stays, resting one fingertip lightly against the repaired surface as though checking a pulse.

"There," he murmurs.

Then he turns to you.

"It's still it. That's the part people usually worry about without knowing how to ask."

He wraps it almost ceremonially before placing it back into your hands.

"Tristan can put nearly anything back together. My job is making sure what comes out the other side is still allowed to call itself the same thing that went in."

A small pause follows. Once, Leo would have stopped there. You know him well enough now to recognize the difference.

"Most people don't ask what that means," he says. "You look like you might."

By the time you and Leo reach South London, the sky has settled into a flat grey and the streets are still wet from earlier rain.

From the airport, he leads you through trains, traffic, and eventually the quieter streets of Camberwell, where modern flats and corner shops give way to an old brick complex hidden behind high walls and mature trees.

Leo still hasn't told you much.

Only that there is someone here he wants you to meet.

Coming from him, that means more than it should. Everlasting had been one thing. A restoration studio above a coffee shop, strange around the edges but still something he could plausibly explain away. This is different. Whatever waits here belongs to the part of his life he used to carefully steer you around.

"I wouldn't have brought you if I didn't trust you," he says.

ST AGNES HOSPITAL is still faintly carved above the original entrance.

Someone has mounted a much smaller brass plaque beside it.

HOUSE VIOLET.

The security is subtle until you start noticing it. Cameras beneath the eaves. An electronic gate behind old ironwork. Keycard readers built into doors that look a century older than the technology controlling them.

Inside, the hospital has been restored rather than erased. Violet walls. Polished floors. Warm lamps instead of fluorescent panels. Bookshelves where medical equipment might once have stood. Everything is clean, quiet, and strangely domestic.

Leo signs you in without giving the receptionist your name.

"Temple property," he explains once you're past them. "Among other things."

His tone suggests the other things are why you're here.

He takes you upstairs.

The deeper you go, the more the building changes. Public rooms give way to quieter corridors. Certain doors require his card twice. One has a keypad as well.

Leo notices you noticing.

"She's not dangerous."

That was not the question you asked.

He stops outside a room near the end of the corridor.

For the first time since you arrived, he hesitates.

"Her name is Mara."

His hand remains on the door handle.

"Several years ago, she survived a rite she shouldn't have survived. Some influence of Heart got tangled into her somehow. Not just her health. Her body itself."

His expression tightens slightly.

"If she's wounded, it closes. If her heart stops, it starts again. If she loses consciousness, she wakes. We've seen injuries that should have killed her several times over."

A pause.

"She isn't immortal. Not in any way she'd consider a gift."

Leo looks at the door rather than at you.

"She simply can't finish dying."

Inside, Mara looks nothing like someone who needs to be contained.

She's sitting cross-legged on a sofa beneath the window, laptop balanced on one knee, wearing an oversized T-shirt and complaining through a headset about terrible Wi-Fi. Books cover most available surfaces. There's half-finished tea on the table, a television, plants on the sill.

She looks ordinary.

Then she sees Leo.

"You're late."

"I crossed an ocean."

"You sat in a chair."

Her eyes move to you.

The teasing expression changes.

"So you're the one."

Leo immediately looks tired.

"Mara."

"What? You talk about them."

"I have mentioned them."

"Repeatedly."

Something almost embarrassed passes across his face before he steps aside and lets you properly enter.

Mara closes her laptop.

As she reaches for her tea, the ceramic mug slips.

It shatters.

A jagged piece catches her palm.

Blood wells instantly.

Leo is beside her before the broken pieces stop moving, but Mara only sighs.

"I'm fine."

The cut is deep enough that she should not be fine.

You watch its edges draw together.

Skin knits.

Blood stops.

Within seconds, there is nothing left except a red smear across her palm.

Leo quietly takes her hand anyway, inspecting it with the same care he gives damaged photographs at Everlasting.

Mara watches him do it with an expression you cannot quite read.

Fondness, maybe.

Exhaustion, definitely.

And now that you're close enough, you notice something else, something you almost miss at first. The air around her seems to tremble slightly, a faint distortion like heat rising from pavement, subtle enough to question until you see it again.

"You see?" Leo says softly.

Mara pulls her hand back.

"Yes."

Her eyes settle on you instead.

"Now ask him why the doors lock from the outside."

By the fourth day, Mara has become difficult not to like. You've learned that she takes her tea offensively sweet, cheats at cards without shame, leaves books open facedown despite Leo repeatedly asking her not to, and remembers what snacks you like after hearing it once. Sweet, funny, painfully ordinary Mara.

So when three strangers arrive at House Violet asking for Leo, you immediately notice the way his expression changes.

The oldest cannot be more than twenty. The other two look nineteen and eighteen at most. All three wear loose robes of pale blue, almost white beneath the hospital lights, with no visible weapons or armor. House Violet security lets them through anyway.

"The Children of Silence," Leo says quietly.

The three Disciples are shown into one of the old consultation rooms. Leo sends everyone else away but allows you to remain. The twenty-year-old speaks for them. "We've come as courtesy requires. Mara approached us months ago, of her own will. We questioned her repeatedly, we waited, and we asked her again. Her answer remained the same."

Leo's jaw tightens. "You intend to kill her."

"We intend to permit her to die," the nineteen-year-old answers.

They explain without threat or triumph. Heart has become so thoroughly tangled through Mara that ordinary death cannot finish its work. Her wounds close, her heart restarts, even unconsciousness refuses to keep her. Winter may be able to untangle what Heart refuses to release.

A final cessation. Not murder, they insist. Mercy.

And you can't help thinking of everything Leo has already told you. Mara survived something she was never supposed to survive. Heart worked itself through her so completely that her body learned continuation as instinct. She heals when she should die. Her heart simply begins again. She isn't immortal in any glorious sense. She's trapped on the wrong side of an ending.

The Temple considers her something close to sacred, proof that continuation can triumph over almost anything. More than that, something survived the original rite inside her. A memory, a fragment of lore, perhaps an echo of something glimpsed in the Mansus. Nobody has explained it clearly, only that it is unique. If Mara dies, it disappears with her.

Leo knows that too. If he stops this, the Temple keeps its miracle, its knowledge, and Mara herself. But you've also watched him treat her like Mara instead of a miracle with a pulse. Books, food, stupid little gifts, sitting beside her through the bad nights. He loves her.

Maybe that makes it worse.

Mara appears in the doorway, her gaze immediately finding the blue robes. "You came." Before Leo can respond, she adds, "I asked them to."

The faint distortion around her trembles like heat over pavement. When Leo asks how long, Mara answers, "Months. I didn't tell you because you wouldn't have listened."

"I am listening now."

"No. You're waiting for me to change my mind."

The eldest Disciple rises. "The rite will be performed at midnight tonight. Here, with her permission. We came because Mara asked us to give you the courtesy of knowing beforehand."

Mara steps closer to Leo. "I'm tired. I know you love keeping things from disappearing, but I'm not one of your photographs."

For several seconds, Leo says nothing. Eventually the eldest bows their head, and the three Disciples leave the consultation room. Mara remains behind while their pale blue robes disappear down the corridor toward House Violet's exit.

The door closes.

Leo waits until their footsteps fade, then leads you without explanation through another corridor and into a small room you've never seen before. He locks the door behind you. A wooden drum rests among ritual instruments, and chalk markings begin taking shape beneath his hands.

It doesn't take long to understand what he's doing.

"They're going to kill her," Leo says.

There is no confusion in his expression. No desperate belief that Mara has been manipulated. He heard everything you did. He knows she chose this.

His hands pause over the ritual markings. "I know what she wants."

That somehow makes what follows worse.

Leo kneels before the drum and begins tapping out a rhythm, slow at first, then steadily deepening until you feel it beneath your ribs. The room seems to contract around every beat. His lips move through words you don't recognize, and something impossibly distant begins answering until distance suddenly stops meaning anything at all.

The air splits, and something steps through already dancing. Its limbs occupy movements too quick for your eyes to properly separate, every footfall striking through House Violet like another heartbeat. The creature seems almost joyous.

A Percussigant.

Merciless, merry, unceasing.

Leo rises before it with a calmness that is somehow more frightening than anger. Around the room, every movement of the Percussigant's limbs sends a jolt through the candles, flames snapping sideways and springing upright as if the dance itself is striking the air.

Somewhere beyond the locked room, the Children of Silence are still making their way out of House Violet.

Leo looks at you once, then toward the door.

"I'm going to stop them now."

Leo comes to you before he does it.

That alone is unusual.

It's been a good couple of months since you started spending your evenings at Everlasting. Long enough to know its rhythms, its regulars, the particular quiet that settles once the doors are locked. Long enough, you'd have said, to know Leo too.

He is not a man who explains himself before he's already decided what to do. That he's here now, unfinished, wanting to know what you think before the fact rather than after it, is something new.

Everlasting has been closed for nearly an hour when he finds you, still dressed in black from whatever business took him into the Mansus earlier that evening. He looks composed, but there is something strained beneath it, the particular stillness he gets when he's already spent too long arguing with himself.

"I saw something today," he says. "In the Chamber of Choices."

He doesn't explain what that means unless he has to. By now, he knows better than to assume what you do or don't understand about the Mansus.

Instead, he tells you about Eli.

Nineteen. Clever. Earnest. Desperate to be initiated into the Temple despite Leo refusing him repeatedly. You've seen the boy around Everlasting before, usually carrying some book Leo definitely didn't lend him, asking too many questions and looking at occult life with the kind of hunger that hasn't learned fear yet.

Leo has always liked him.

That's why he kept saying no.

"Eli has a way out," Leo says. "A real one."

His family belongs to a small fundamentalist Latter-day Saint splinter congregation, unaffiliated with the mainstream Church, the sort built around a handful of men who have spent years turning religious authority into control. They decide who members associate with, where their children study, who they date, what they read, what they confess, and how much of their own money they're permitted to call theirs.

Eli has been quietly pulling away.

University applications. Money hidden from his parents. Plans to move. Plans to leave the church behind, and apparently the occult with it.

Leo should be relieved.

Instead, he tells you what the Chamber showed him.

"In one future, he leaves. Completely. He gets out, goes to university, makes friends who have nothing to do with any of this. He's happy."

Leo's fingers tighten slightly around the edge of the counter.

"And years later, something happens. Something he would have been there to prevent. People I love die."

The other future is worse for Eli.

He becomes a Disciple. His life narrows. He loses people. He sees things that change him permanently.

Their life is shorter. Stranger. Lonelier.

But the Temple Unceasing survives.

Leo goes quiet for a moment before sliding his phone across the counter.

On the screen is a draft email.

Anonymous.

It contains no lies.

Only Eli's visits to Everlasting. His interest in forbidden texts. His hidden applications. The money. The plans to leave home. Enough truth, carefully arranged, to reach exactly the people Leo intends it to reach.

"I looked into his church," he says. "I thought I'd have to make them believe he was in danger."

A humorless little smile touches his mouth.

"I don't."

He's already found disciplinary documents, testimony from former members, private messages passed between church leaders. Parents encouraged to seize adult children's bank cards. Young members sent to isolated properties for "correction." Confessions quietly saved as leverage against anyone thinking of leaving.

Leo doesn't need to invent cruelty.

He only needs to point it in Eli's direction.

"They'll do the rest themselves."

He says it softly.

That's what makes it ugly.

Leo intends to let the church close around Eli until the boy has nowhere left to go. And then, when Eli runs, Everlasting will be open. Leo will give him food, somewhere safe to sleep, protection from his family, and eventually the initiation he's spent months begging for.

Eli will believe Leo rescued him.

In a sense, he will have.

Leo watches you carefully now, not defensively, but with the uncomfortable attention of someone who genuinely wants to know what your face says before your mouth ever could.

"I haven't sent it."

His thumb rests beside the phone.

"If I do nothing, he gets the life he deserves."

A pause.

"Other people pay for it later."

Leo glances down at the waiting message.

"If I send this, they'll hurt him. I know they will."

He doesn't soften the admission.

"I also know he'll survive it."

Then his eyes return to you.

"I wanted to see what you thought of me before I found out what I think of myself."

By eleven, whatever plans Dorothy and Clovette originally had for the evening have dissolved into takeout containers, bad television, and an argument over which bottle of wine was actually worth opening.

Leo isn't here. That might be why everything feels easier.

Dorothy has claimed one end of the sofa, shoes abandoned somewhere near the door, while Clovette sits cross-legged on the floor with a carton of noodles balanced against one knee. Someone has put on a terrible paranormal reality show, and both of them have spent most of the episode pointing out everything the supposed investigators are getting wrong.

"They've been standing in a Lantern influence for twenty minutes and decided it's faulty wiring," Clovette says.

Dorothy takes another drink. "Maybe we should let them have this."

"Absolutely not."

For once, nobody is discussing rites, disappearances, hunters, or what the Temple requires from anyone. Dorothy tells an embarrassing story about Leo getting lost during an expedition he insists was "poorly mapped." Clovette produces photographic evidence. Somewhere along the way, your phone ends up charging on the kitchen counter.

Eventually you step away. Neither woman says anything until the bathroom door closes.

Clovette looks at Dorothy. Dorothy already knows what that look means.

"No."

"We agreed."

"You agreed."

"And you didn't stop me."

That apparently counts.

Clovette crosses the room and picks up your phone. She doesn't try the passcode. She doesn't need to. The lock screen is enough. Notifications, recent names, a missed call, perhaps a message preview that means nothing to anyone who doesn't know what to look for.

Clovette reads quickly. Dorothy remains on the sofa, visibly unhappy with the entire exercise, but when Clovette quietly turns the screen toward her, she looks anyway.

A hunter's name would mean something. So would a detective's, a rival cultist, another society, or someone asking too many questions about Leo, Everlasting, the Candle-lit Mithraeum, or the Temple itself.

Or perhaps there is nothing suspicious at all.

Clovette replaces the phone exactly where it was. Same angle, same charging cable, same dark screen.

By the time you return, she's sitting on the floor again with her noodles and Dorothy is watching television, almost convincingly.

"You're missing the best part," Clovette says brightly. "They've decided the screaming basement is safe."

Whatever awkwardness might have been waiting for you disappears quickly.

Dorothy has started tapping two fingers idly against the arm of the sofa. It isn't quite a beat, only an absent little repetition, but after a while the clink of ice in Clovette's glass and the rain against the windows seem to settle comfortably around it.

Conversation wanders. Dorothy tells a story about an old acquaintance who vanished from occult circles without warning, changed their number, moved, and simply stopped answering anyone.

"I always wondered whether you can really do that," she says, more to her wine than to anyone else. "Just decide one life is finished and start another."

Clovette shrugs. "Depends who's looking for you."

Then the show becomes ridiculous again, and for several minutes they're arguing over whether the psychic on-screen is pretending not to recognize a Knock influence.

Later, your phone lights briefly on the counter. Clovette notices and smiles without looking directly at it. "Someone's popular."

A few minutes pass before she starts complaining about somebody she used to know who only ever messaged after midnight. "You know the type. Vanishes for six months, then suddenly remembers you exist because they need something. I'd ignore them."

The statement hangs there just long enough to invite disagreement, explanation, perhaps a name. Then Clovette immediately steals one of Dorothy's chips, Dorothy protests, and the subject dies.

Later still, Dorothy mentions Leo's tendency to keep things to himself. "He thinks secrecy becomes less irritating if he's polite about it."

Clovette laughs. "It usually does."

"With you, maybe." Dorothy looks your way for only a moment. "I suppose he hasn't dragged you into anything particularly strange lately."

Not a question. Just an assumption sitting there, easy to correct. Clovette is already talking about something else before the silence can become conspicuous.

That's how the evening goes. Stories instead of questions. Jokes that leave convenient openings. Names dropped into conversation without explanation. Occasionally one of them says something slightly wrong and waits to see whether you fix it.

Neither presses when you reveal something. That's what makes it difficult to notice.

Dorothy's fingers maintain their quiet tapping while Clovette keeps the room lively enough that every pause gets filled before it can become uncomfortable. If Heart has anything to do with the ease settling over the evening, neither woman makes enough of it to prove.

Maybe Dorothy's rhythm is simply soothing. Maybe Clovette is simply good company. Maybe laughter really does come a little easier around them.

At some point Clovette abandons the floor and squeezes onto the sofa beside you. Her knee settles against your leg and remains there while she tells another story. A little later, her fingertips drift once across your knee, light enough to pass for absent affection.

Dorothy watches her over the rim of her glass, then eventually leans across to retrieve the remote. On the way back, her fingers brush softly along your cheek, smoothing away a loose strand of hair.

"There."

She settles back into her corner as though nothing happened. Clovette's knee stays against yours, Dorothy's fingers find their quiet rhythm again, and across the kitchen your phone continues charging exactly where you left it.

Past midnight, the pub is loud enough that nobody pays much attention to your table.

Football plays silently above the bar. Someone near the pool tables keeps laughing too loudly, glasses knock together, and a basket of wings sits between Leo, Dorothy, and Clovette looking increasingly abandoned as the conversation stretches on.

For the first twenty minutes, nothing seems unusual.

Clovette complains about the sauce. Dorothy steals one of Leo's chips. Leo asks about something completely unrelated, listens to the answer, and occasionally wipes barbecue sauce from his fingers with considerably more care than the situation deserves.

Then, almost casually, he says, "I have a question."

Dorothy looks down at her drink. Clovette reaches for another wing. Neither asks what kind.

Leo notices that you notice.

"Suppose someone learns more about the Temple than they should. A young mother. Two children, both still small. She's a detective too. Good at it, unfortunately."

He turns a french fry between his fingers.

"She's been doing the job too long. Too many bodies, too many people she couldn't help, too many nights coming home weary. Then she starts finding things in her cases that shouldn't exist."

At first, the invisible arts looked less like another danger and more like an answer. If there really were powers hidden beneath the ordinary world, perhaps some of them could make her better at finding missing people, keep her children safe, give her enough control over a life that had begun to feel increasingly beyond it.

So she became involved willingly.

Not deeply. Not at first. A little lore. A few contacts. Questions asked of people sensible detectives would have avoided. Enough success to convince her that there might actually be something useful in it, and enough exposure to eventually understand how badly she'd misjudged what she was approaching.

Leo continues. "She kept going until she understood enough to become afraid. Then a hunter found her."

The noise of the pub seems a little farther away now.

The hunter offered the detective exactly what Leo cannot: a way out. Protection for her children, distance from the occult, somewhere safe if she provides everything she knows.

Names. Places. People she's followed. Perhaps the Candle-lit Mithraeum eventually.

Nothing has been given away yet, but once it begins, there will be no controlling where it ends.

Dorothy finally speaks. "You let her go. We don't punish a mother because she got desperate enough to believe this world might make her life easier."

Clovette gives her a look. "And when someone else's children lose a parent because she talked?"

"Then we deal with the hunter."

"Easy to say when the consequences belong to somebody else's family."

Leo doesn't intervene. That's the strange part.

He asks questions instead.

Would desperation absolve the detective if her information got someone killed? Would keeping her somewhere she couldn't speak be worse than risking everyone else's lives? If a rite could remove everything she knew about the occult, would that be mercy?

Dorothy's expression hardens. "Not if it takes pieces of her with it."

Because apparently it would.

The rite isn't precise. It could take the Temple from her memory. It could also take childhood summers, faces, relationships, years. It might take the births of her children. Their first words. Their names. Nobody would know how much until afterward.

Clovette wipes her hands on a napkin. "So we trust a detective who's already preparing to talk, keep her somewhere she can't, or make sure she has nothing left to tell them."

"That's an ugly way of putting it," Dorothy says.

"It's an ugly situation."

Through all of it, Leo keeps watching you. Not obviously. Never long enough to become rude. A glance when Dorothy speaks. Another when Clovette does. The faintest pause whenever one of them says something particularly difficult to defend.

Eventually the basket is cold.

"What concerns me," Leo says, leaning back, "isn't whether she deserves mercy. She does. She's tired, frightened, and trying to keep her children safe. It's whether I'm allowed to purchase that mercy with someone else's safety."

Dorothy looks at him then, and something passes between them.

That's when the conversation stops feeling hypothetical.

Leo reaches into his pocket and places his phone beside the wings.

A message is already open.

Still with us. Calm now. Kids are with their grandmother. We need a decision tonight.

Nobody at the table looks surprised except, perhaps, you.

Dorothy won't quite meet your eyes.

Clovette does.

Leo folds his hands. "She's real. Everything I told you is true. Detective. Mother. All of it."

No apology follows.

"I wanted your answer before you knew that."

Outside the window, headlights crawl across wet pavement. Someone at the bar cheers at something happening on the television. For a few seconds, the four of you could still be ordinary people sitting too late in an ordinary pub.

Leo nudges the phone toward the center of the table.

"Dorothy thinks she walks out tonight. Clovette thinks that's gambling with lives that aren't ours to wager."

Clovette doesn't correct him.

"And I know what I'm inclined to do."

That is the first thing all night he refuses to elaborate on.

His gold-shadowed eyes settle on you with that familiar warmth, except now it feels uncomfortably close to scrutiny.

"Whether you're with us, against us, or still deciding what we are, you've seen enough to have an opinion."

Leo glances once at the waiting message, then back at you.

"So before I answer them, I want yours."

.