The office was smaller than Billy expected. Warmer too, which somehow made it worse.
Clocks lined every wall — a dozen of them, maybe more, none of them agreeing with each other. One had stopped entirely, hands frozen at some hour that meant nothing now. Billy didn't bother checking his own sense of time against any of them. It wasn't worth the disappointment.
He sat in the chair across from the desk, uninvited, boots up on the edge of it. The desk itself was too clean. Papers stacked at right angles, ink pot capped, not a smear of dust anywhere — the kind of clean that came from a maid, not a man who used the room.
A single photograph sat angled toward the desk chair, not toward the door. Billy leaned to catch it anyway. A woman, plain and smiling, a small boy on her shoulders missing a front tooth. The frame was cheap tin, dented at one corner like it had been dropped and picked back up more than once.
He didn't touch it. Just looked.
The door opened behind him.
"You're alive" the voice said, mild, unbothered, the way a man greets weather rather than a threat sitting in his chair. His hand shake it doesn't last long before it returns to normal
Billy just stared at him with blank expression
"Cute joke. Why surprised , haven't you heard I am man of miracles nothing should be surprising when it comes to me or am I wrong, i do wonder how they found me though"
"Everything comes out eventually, Billy." Footsteps, unhurried, circling toward the far side of the desk. "That's rather the whole trouble with you, isn't it."
Billy finally swung his boots down and turned to look at him properly.
"Nice office. Diligent little clocks. Very trustworthy." He smiled — showed teeth. "You always were a dramatic man."
The man didn't flinch, didn't smile back, just settled into his chair with the same unhurried calm he'd walked in with, and reached to straighten the photo frame Billy had disturbed by half an inch.
"Why the pottery, and pottery from you ain't it Lucy job, weren't you the brute in this operation" he said. "Sit then. This will take a while."
"I am not dead. You not being scared of me is truly strange."
Billy's head tilted. The smile stayed on his mouth but slid off everywhere else — his eyes stopped moving, fixed on Ronadle's face like he was trying to read something written too small.
"They don't know you're alive, do they." Ronadle's voice didn't rise or slow down for it. "And the clothes look really nice. You know. Too nice."
He reached across the desk and caught the edge of Billy's sleeve between two fingers, turning the cuff toward the lamp, thumb dragging once along the stitching.
"Took your time with them, didn't you."
Billy let out a long breath through his nose, shoulders dropping half an inch, the smile going stale on his face.
"Of course the old man wasn't alone in this."
"I wasn't your first stop."
Ronadle's chin lifted a fraction. His hand, which had been resting flat on the desk, curled slowly into a loose fist before he seemed to notice and spread the fingers flat again, deliberate, like correcting a posture he hadn't meant to slip out of. He picked up the capped ink pot for no reason at all and set it back down exactly where it had been.
"Just need to settle some stuff, as you said — it's my job. And I'm here just to reassure. Lucy was pretty adamant."
Billy was already talking over the last word, eyes drifting past Ronadle to the row of clocks behind him, counting them without meaning to.
"Guess she got tired of working with just pets."
Ronadle's mouth opened, then didn't. He looked down at the photograph Billy had tilted earlier, reached over, and straightened it another half inch it didn't need. His jaw worked once before he spoke again, voice a shade too even.
"You're funny, you know that? Or at least it's been said — you just put in more effort now. Who knows."
Billy was already on his feet, stretching one arm over his head with a small groan, heading for the door without waiting for the rest of whatever that was going to become.
He didn't look back for an answer. The door shut behind him before Ronadle had one ready.
'As the door clicked shut behind him, the voice that had been trying to get a word in since the ritual room finally found its opening.
Finally. You'd think after all that dramatic entrance business someone would let me get a line in. Also — for the record — the undead in that bar reacted better to seeing him than his own kind just did. That's genuinely a low bar to clear, and he cleared it face-down.
Billy's jaw tightened. He didn't answer it. He never answered it.
He kept walking, boots hitting the corridor stone harder than they needed to, hands shoved into his coat like he could bury the sound of it that way.
Ignoring me won't—
He rubbed at his temple hard enough to leave a mark, exhaled through his teeth, and kept moving.
By the time he hit the stairwell his shoulders had climbed up near his ears, tight, and he caught himself picking at the cuff of his own sleeve — the same sleeve Ronadle had turned over in the lamplight — before he made himself stop and shove his hand back in his pocket.
He didn't slow down until he was outside, back against the cold stone by the door, one boot planted against the wall behind him.
Only then did something in his face ease.
Not relief exactly. Closer to a held breath finally let go somewhere private enough to allow it. The corner of his mouth pulled, small, almost involuntary.
He believed it.
The coat. The cut of it, the stitching Ronadle had turned toward the light like he was checking for a tell — and found the one Billy had wanted him to find. Too nice for a hunted man, and that was exactly the point. Nobody spends care on their hands three weeks after their girl brings you back at the ass end of a graveyard.
Billy tipped his head back against the wall and let himself grin properly for the first time since he'd walked in.
"He was happy I was gone."
A short breath of a laugh followed it, more air than sound.
"Guess the comment about my clothes did the trick after all."