Adrien waits for the seven to land again, then sets his palms on his knees as if pressing paper flat. "Terms," he says, gravel softened by steam and salt. He looks from the silver to the thread to the key. "Not a banishment. A release. Those are different machines."
Elara edges two steps nearer, then thinks of chalk and stops. "Machines?"
"Levers," he corrects. "Rooms love levers. People too." He rises, joints respectful of numbers, and stands within the oval granted him. "If we mean to move the first clause from lack to truth, then we must pull where it will give. That means the one bound to the clause must walk its path with his eyes open."
Mira's hand hovers a breath above the silver line, knuckles unshaking now the tremor has been taught its job. "Plainly."
Adrien nods, obliged. "He must relive the last night in full. Not theater. Sequence." He points with two fingers at the ledger, at the open-side square. "No jumps; no self-editing; no rescue from memory by charm. He must speak the woman's name truly, aloud, into the warm border—without breaking it—so the room knows what it is responsible for. He must confess the self-ruin, not hers: the moment he chose appetite over witness." The words cost him nothing; the saying of them costs the room. The baseboard runes prickle, then lie back down. "And he must renounce the borrowed heat."
Luca's outline flickers—tiny—like a candle wick catching and behaving. "Define borrowed heat."
"The room's habit of lending you weather," Adrien says. "Glance, scent, timing. The gentle thefts. You give them back. You say no to the hand under your back when it isn't a hand." He turns to Mira, then to the seam. "He must do that freely. No thread pulling. No salt contracted into the shape of a command."
Mira's jaw sets. "Consent. We've been faithful to that noun all night."
"Good," Adrien says. "Now the price." He waits long enough to respect the floor. "The anchor has to be living." He looks at the key, the thread, the rails, then at her hands. "The clause will grab for the warmest object in the room when it thinks it's being changed. That is you."
Elara's breath catches loud enough to make the crystal count wrong for a beat before it corrects itself. "What does it grab."
"Heart," Adrien says. "And memory. It wants the red and the archive. If he balks mid-ritual—if he dresses refusal as wit or mercy—the recoil hits the anchor first. I've seen women drop where they stand like someone cut the power. I've seen names go blank for an hour." He doesn't look proud of knowing this. He looks like a man reciting the instructions on a bottle you aren't meant to need. "It returns. But it leaves a bruise where sentences live."
Elara's fingers find scarf, twist, untwist. "It's wrong," she says, tiny and ferocious.
"It's physics when you set a house to anchor itself with hunger," Adrien says. "We're amending physics. There is always a lash."
Mira does not flinch. She does not make room on the bed for drama. She keeps her hand above the silver and her body in oath-posture, and her voice is as steady as the ledger's neat hand. "We do this anyway."
Adrien inclines, as if that were the only answer that earned breath.
Luca doesn't move. Not in outline. In weather. The fog in the warmed frame tightens and then eases, and the chandelier is spared another scolding. "Tell me the shape," he says, not bargaining yet, finding edges the way a blind man maps a table.
Adrien moves slow so the grammar holds. "We set the room to corridor. We tie nothing new. We count until the house is bored enough to be honest. Then we walk you through the hours you prefer to jump. You stop where you used to decorate. You name her, all of her name. You say what you broke in yourself to make the trick work. You say what you took." He lifts a hand. "You hand back the heat. You make yourself heavy without it. You decide where you will live next—here as witness, or in the alley with the stain that tells the truth, or nowhere the hotel can invoice."
Elara winces at invoice like someone hearing chalk on tooth.
"The moment you're tempted to turn it into a show, we stop," Adrien adds. "Stopping hurts less than lying. It hurts, still."
Mira shifts her weight to her back foot, surgeon's stance. "Backlash plan."
Adrien counts it on his fingers, which makes the room take it seriously. "If he stumbles and refuses—if the clause pulls tight and looks for your red and your archive—we make three covers. One: the radiator gets shut. Heat starves the habit. Two: salt to tongue. Not for theater. To recall out with your mouth." He nods at the sill's alphabet. "Three: I take the ledger and read every sentence in the margin that humiliates the room into honesty. Shame works on architecture."
Elara blurts, "And me," before remembering she is supposed to speak like staff. "What do I do."
"You count," Adrien says. "If numbers fail, you sing while you mop—quiet. You know how. Kitchens trust you. Kitchens frighten rooms." He glances at Mira. "She'll need a human voice to cling to if the lash tries to make her forget her own name."
"I won't forget," Mira says, not like a dare; like a rule.
Luca, linen: "Don't practice on her."
"We're not practicing," Mira says. "We're signing terms."
He takes that in. It is not kindness in her; it is a gift of structure. He accepts it. Then—his condition: "One rule." The fog stiffens a shade, not push, not charm—resolve. "No more pushing the guests. Not even a breath on timing. Not even a hum in the pipes. Not while we attempt this. Not after. The house doesn't get to sell weather with my hands. If I live—if I stay—I won't be the bar. If I go, the bar still doesn't get me as a trick."
"Already the rule," Mira says, clean as steel.
Adrien makes the sign people make with eyebrows when agreement is no longer the headline. "Good," he says. "Then we're nearly civilized." He looks at the mirror. "Luca. Without charm. Say what you will do."
Luca's outline finds a way to look straight without inventing eyes. The pane holds the weight. "I will relive the last night in full. I won't decorate it. I'll speak her name—the whole of it—where the heat is, not at the crack. I'll confess the part that was my breaking and not call it romance. I'll hand back the borrowed heat and stop being weather." He stops, breathes on six, stops on seven, and adds the only sentence that makes him look like a decent man without trying: "I will not push anyone. Not you. Not the laughing through the wall. Not the dancer. Not the chandelier." He thinks of Madame's brochures and refuses to let that thought inside his sentence. "No one."
"Good boy," Adrien says; then, because the room hates being talked down to, rephrases: "Good. Man."
Mira gives him the smallest crooked smile, for paying attention to dignity. Then, to Luca: "If you change your mind mid-ritual, you say it plain. You don't act it. You say stop. You do not create a little scene to make me attack you so you can blame the lash on me."
He goes still with the embarrassed patience of a man whose old tricks have just been named. "I won't," he says. "I know exactly what that little scene looks like. I used it often." He grimaces—not cute. "It never worked."
Elara hugs herself. "What if the name breaks the crack."
"Then we made the wrong mouth our prophet," Adrien says. "We'll move. Not tonight. In the morning. Alley first. If we're lucky, the brick will eat the worst of the fracture."
Mira inclines without enthusiasm. "We're not lucky," she says. "We're thorough."
"And thorough women," Adrien says, "make good liturgies." He spreads his hands at the ledger. "You're allowed to quote me."
The chandelier, vain and appeased, ticks seven with gusto and then acts as if it has always preferred humility.
"What do I call the moment," Luca asks, because naming is safer than wanting. "The… renounce."
"Say: I give it back," Mira answers. "If you want Latin, you can have renuntio calori mendaci, but the wood hears I give it back."
Adrien nods; the wood brightens once. "It likes that."
Elara, eyes on the seam, lowers her voice. "What do we do with the woman's name when it's spoken. Do we… keep it." She sounds like a girl worrying about carrying a saint to school wrapped in a handkerchief.
"We put it somewhere the hotel can't sell it," Mira says. "In our mouths, inside arithmetic. Not on the brochures. Not in the bar's tricks." She looks to Luca. "You speak it once. Then we don't use it as a lever. It remains a person, not a switch."
He exhales, relieved like a man who feared she would ask him to wear it. "Once," he agrees, and does not practice. Practicing names is how rooms get drunk.
Adrien resumes his slow drift toward the baseboard, setting his boot down as if wood had nerves. "In the alley," he says—still tonight; still the room; the word is a thumb under a sentence, not a jump—"I will ask the stain to teach me the shape of your last minute. It will lie. I'll shame it with ledgers. Then we'll try to lift the clause with speech." He looks to Mira. "Not a promise. A plan."
"Plans are easier to kill than promises," she says. "Good."
The radiator adds nothing. It warms.
"Backlash," Luca says, circling to the danger on purpose so it doesn't wait around the corner later. "Name the shape again. If I refuse. If—" he swallows the pronoun, the room's favorite sugar "—if I flinch too hard."
Mira answers before Adrien can enjoy his own expertise. She says it as if reading a consent form to a person who will sign anyway. "Pain behind the breastbone—tight, like a hand that forgot to be a hand. A swallow that misses. A blank where a word should be." She glances at Elara. "Two minutes. Ten. An hour in the worst case. Then the system remembers what it is for." She returns her gaze to Luca. "You will not use my risk as leverage to make me forgive you faster. I don't forgive on credit."
He laughs—short, grateful, alarmed by relief. "Architect," he says, helpless with liking the word tonight. "Fine."
Adrien scratches the back of his wrist, thinking. "Last clause," he says. "No recounting for strangers. When it's done—when you move from hunger to truth—you don't become a tour. You don't tell Elara's replacements ghost stories to make their shifts go faster. The only people who hear the name again are the ones who earned it." He nods to the ledger. "Or the ones who paid for linen."
Elara's hand flies to her mouth. "I'd never," she says, stricken.
"I know," Adrien says, soft. "I meant other people."
"I meant other people," Mira echoes, and lets Elara unclench under being chosen as not-other.
The sea knocks—once—polite as a man who used to err at doors. They breathe together. Seven lands. The mirror's skin does not ripple for attention.
"Now I want to know if the room will behave when we say the ugly thing out loud," Luca says. "Not the name. The thing before the name. The seed. The sentence I should have said to myself that night and chose the prettier sermon."
Mira gestures with her chin. "Say it."
He does not make a preamble. He does not hum. He does not lean. "I liked being the reason people forgot themselves," he says. "I called it kindness and it was theft." The fog does not thicken. The skin of light holds. The floor hums lower, as if admiring a cut made clean. He goes on, because saying one ugly thing finds others like teeth on a zipper. "I was frightened of being ordinary and used the room as my costume. When she came to be believed, I played god for her because I could. She drank. I did not ask why. I corrected her wrist like a gentleman and put my mouth on a word that wasn't mine." The orange blossom rises—one measured breath—sweet, bitter, gone. He refuses to chase it. "The last thing I thought before it hurt was that I looked good."
Elara makes a small, furious noise into her scarf and then pretends she is fixing the knot.
"Good," Adrien says, without congratulating. "That's the confession. Save the marrow for morning."
Mira's fingers do not move over the thread. They obey the rule she set. Her jaw loosens half a millimeter. "Terms accepted," she says.
"Say mine," Luca insists, stubborn like a man trying sobriety in a room that sells champagne. "No more pushing."
"Already the rule," she repeats, and the runes, pleased to hear a sentence return whole, brighten and settle. The iron key warms under her hand as if its evening has been given meaning.
Adrien pulls the chair a thumb-width back to center its shadow, because shadows do stupid things during truth. He puts the tin—lozenges, not nails—on the table again as if paying for the lesson. "We begin when morning admits it is morning," he says. "We test the stain. We come back while arithmetic still belongs to us. No music. No guests. No Madame."
"At eight," Elara says, ready to break her own policy to make tea.
"At eight," Mira says.
Luca stares at the point where the thread's loose half-inch hovers over the key's bow, the small, bright gap that kept all this honest. "If I go," he says, and doesn't draw breath into melodrama, "you will not mend the crack."
"I will not," Mira says. "It tells the truth."
"If I stay," he tries on, "I don't want to be the chandelier."
"You won't," she says. "You'll be the chalk."
He laughs, helpless and almost giddy with the idea that not being art might be better.
Adrien stands. "Count us down to bed," he says to the chandelier, which preens and pretends it didn't hear him. He looks to Mira. "One more breathing. Your rule."
Mira nods, and finds the easy tempo their bodies earned. "One."
"Two," Elara whispers, the servant chosen to be a witness.
"Three," Adrien adds, letting gravel turn to wool.
"Four," hum the boards under their feet.
"Five," says the iron in her palm, returning warmth.
"Six," says the sea, hand to rock.
"Seven," says the woman with the thread, and all their breaths arrive where the number lands—heavy, decent, unamplified. The candle steadies. The runes answer once, small, polite. And on either side of the glass, they listen again—to the identical rhythm of their breathing, to the corridor they built on purpose, to the machine that will move in the morning if it has learned its lesson tonight.