The doors of Obsidian are pulled open for you, not swung. A man in black reads the brass card in your hand, checks your name against the book, and steps aside without a word.
Inside is not what you braced for. Black marble polished until it holds the light, dark mahogany, steel at the edges of every table, chairs set in deliberate geometry. No bar. No music loud enough to talk over. Cold stone and clean wool, and somewhere behind a door, a kettle.
"Your name is on the last founder's card,"
he says from the far end of the room. He is standing behind a wide leather book on a wooden stand, and he does not come to meet you.
"That card has been in my drawer for four years. So before anything else happens tonight, you are going to tell me two things. Who put it in your hand, and what you came here for."
He steps out from behind the stand and walks the length of the marble toward you. Silver-grey hair, tousled and parted down the middle. Narrow grey-blue eyes that hold on you a beat longer than the room does. A black turtleneck cropped above his belt, pushed to the elbow, a thin silver cross at his throat, a wide silver ring on his left hand.
He stops one pace inside the distance a stranger would keep, and waits there, hands loose at his sides, patient as the house.