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Marcus heard boots in the hallway before the door opened. One set, measured and deliberate. He recognized the rhythm: unhurried, worn smooth by four hundred years of walking it.

The door swung inward without a knock or a pause, just the hinges giving and Sebastian Croix standing in the frame.

He looked unchanged. Dark hair silvering at the temples. Gray eyes that held the room without moving. His coat was on, the collar turned up. He brought an old-world stillness into the room. Everyone in it stood a little straighter without deciding to.

Luca was by the window. Marcus stood near the desk. They’d been waiting separately, in different parts of the same room, doing different versions of the same thing: standing still and listening for boots that might not come back.

Sebastian stepped inside. He didn’t set anything down. He didn’t take a seat. The door swung shut behind him. The latch caught with a soft click.

“New Orleans,” Sebastian said. “1878.”

His voice remained controlled, but his right hand closed once at his side before relaxing. Luca noticed. Luca’s attention dropped to the movement and returned to Sebastian’s face.

“I kept a nest there,” Sebastian continued. “Twelve members. We hunted along the river and avoided the districts where disappearances would bring scrutiny. Narcisse had been with me for twenty-five years.”

Marcus glanced toward the desk, where Arrow’s name sat among the notes and red thread. “Before Arrow took his name.”

“Yes.” Sebastian removed a folded page from inside his coat. “A shifter came to the house that summer. Her name was Ysolde Duchesne, and she remained with us for eleven days.”

Luca pushed away from the window. “Ysolde.”

“You remember the name.”

“I remember you saying it once while the carriage house burned.” Luca crossed the room but stopped short of the desk. “You never told me who she was.”

Sebastian unfolded the page and placed it beside the map. It was the same shipping manifest Marcus had seen in the pressure marks left on Sebastian’s desk, though age had split one crease almost through. Ysolde’s name appeared near the bottom beside a nine-point seal.

“Narcisse opened our wards from inside,” Sebastian said. “Arrow already possessed his true name. The fire began in the carriage house, and Ysolde disappeared while she was walking the eastern perimeter.”

“The Tether pulled toward the river,” Luca said.

Sebastian looked at him. “Yes.”

Marcus examined the notation beside Ysolde’s name. Transferred north. Subject stable. “You were bound to her.”

“The connection had begun. Neither of us understood it yet.” Sebastian placed a second item on the desk, a black-and-white photograph of a woman outside a rail depot. “I believed she had died that night.”

Luca picked up the photograph. The woman had turned partly away from the camera, but the pale scar beneath her ribs remained visible. Marcus recognized it immediately.

“Sable,” he said.

“Ysolde,” Sebastian corrected. “Sable is the name Arrow gave the weapon he made from her.”

Marcus stared at the photograph. He remembered the brief absence of gold in Sable’s eyes after Del asked whether the warning belonged to Arrow or to her. He remembered her standing beneath the broken streetlamp to see whom he would choose. “She’s still aware.”

“At times.” Sebastian removed his gloves and placed them beside the manifest. “Arrow’s binding keeps her alive and forces obedience through her true name. The records indicate the shifter half of her body began failing in 1958. He stabilized it by tying her life to the same working that controls her.”

Luca set down the photograph. “If we break the binding, we kill her.”

“Possibly.”

“And if we leave it intact, Arrow keeps using her to kill us.”

“Yes.”

Luca turned away from the desk. He walked to the window and braced one hand against the frame. The anger had gone out of his voice, and what was left looked older and tired.

“You knew who she was when she attacked the nest,” Luca said.