The first time the sofa spoke, Kael thought it was the pipes.
The second time, he blamed the neighbor.
The third time, it said his full name, legal middle included, in a tone that sounded like a man reading a warrant.
Kael Ryn stood in the doorway of Unit 3B with his coat half-unbuttoned and his badge tucked into the breast pocket like he was embarrassed by it. He held a clipboard that looked ordinary until you stared too long—then the paper shimmered and rearranged itself, as if the ink was trying to escape the rules of language.
A woman hovered behind him, arms folded tight across her chest. She had sleep in her eyes and anger in her posture.
"That's it," she hissed, like she expected him to argue. "That's the thing. That's the whole problem."
Kael followed her stare into the apartment.
The sofa sat in the center of the living room like it owned the place.
Brown fabric. Slightly sunken cushions. One corner had been patched where a cat—or something that wanted to be a cat—had clawed at it once.
If you didn't know any better, you'd think it was the most normal object in the entire building.
Kael knew better.
He stepped inside and the air shifted around him, almost polite. The room smelled like laundry soap, old takeout, and the faint metallic bite of a spell that had been cast too often in too small a space.
The sofa hummed.
Not a loud sound. More like a throat clearing before someone says something they shouldn't.
Kael lifted his eyes and watched the thin seams along the cushions.
"Unit 3B," he said aloud, mostly for the file. "Resident reports… furniture vocalization, suspected curse."
"It's not suspected," the woman snapped. "It's talking. It's been talking for a week. Last night it started giving me life advice."
Kael paused with his pen hovering.
"What kind of advice?"
"Bad advice. 'Leave your job. Burn your boss.' Stuff like that. Then it started—" She swallowed hard. "Then it started whispering about my mother."
Kael nodded, like he'd heard worse. Because he had. Once, a wardrobe sang lullabies in an extinct language until a toddler answered it back.
"And you didn't… buy this from a questionable street market?" he asked.
"I got it from my aunt. She's dead. So if this is her, tell her I said she can haunt someone else."
Kael flipped the clipboard over. The back was layered with a thin grid of runes only Bureau employees could see—just enough to catch anomalies without making the room explode.
He tapped the edge.
A faint blue line lifted off the paper like steam and crawled across the air toward the sofa.
The woman leaned closer. "Is that… safe?"
"It's safe-ish," Kael said. "Don't touch anything. Especially not—"
The sofa spoke.
It didn't open a mouth, because it didn't have one. The sound came from inside the cushions like a voice trapped between layers of foam.
"KAEL MICAH RYN."
Kael stopped breathing for half a second.
Nobody used his middle name except his mother and the Ledger.
He didn't show it on his face, though. He just wrote:
Object: Sofa. Behavior: Uninvited familiarity.
The woman made a strangled noise. "You hear it, right? Tell me you hear it."
"I hear it," Kael said calmly, because panic was contagious and the Bureau did not provide hazard pay for emotional outbreaks.
The sofa hummed again. "I HAVE A STATEMENT."
Kael blinked once. "A statement."
"A CONFESSION."
"You're… confessing," Kael repeated, as if making it normal would make it less insane.
The sofa's cushions shifted slightly, like something inside it rolled over. "I HAVE COMMITTED FRAUD."
The woman stared. "Fraud?"
"SPELL-TAX FRAUD."
Kael's pen froze.
That wasn't a normal category for a residential haunting.
That was… Bureau-of-Spell-Taxation territory.
That was "someone else's job," which, in Kael's experience, always became his job the moment it got messy.
He cleared his throat. "Okay. Let's take this from the top. What's your name?"
The sofa's voice dropped, lower now. Guilty.
"I AM REGISTERED AS FURNITURE."
"That's not a name."
"I WAS IMPORTED AS A NON-SENTIENT HOME COMFORT UNIT."
Kael slowly lowered the clipboard. "You're telling me you're not supposed to be able to talk."
"CORRECT."
The woman took a step back, hand flying to her mouth. "Oh my god."
Kael raised his eyes to the ceiling, not to pray—just to stop himself from swearing.
Sentient objects were rare. Not unheard of, but rare enough that the paperwork was thick and the supervisors got nervous.
And if it was talking about spell-tax fraud…
Something about that tasted like bigger trouble.
Kael shifted his weight and let his voice go softer, professional. "When did you become… aware?"
The sofa answered immediately, like it had been waiting.
"THREE MONTHS, TWELVE DAYS, SIX HOURS AGO."
Kael wrote it down. "And during that time, you committed spell-tax fraud."
"YES."
"How."
The sofa hummed again, and the air in the room got colder by a degree. The runic grid on Kael's clipboard flickered like a lantern in wind.
"I WAS PURCHASED BY A MAN NAMED VELTOR HASK."
Kael's eyes narrowed. That name pinged something in the back of his head—an unpaid citation, maybe. A complaint filed and ignored. Somebody who knew how to slip between departments like oil through cracks.
"HE TOOK ME TO A STORAGE UNIT." The sofa's voice shifted. "HE CARVED A LEDGER-MARK INTO MY FRAME."
Kael's stomach tightened.
Ledger-marks were not supposed to be carved by civilians. They were permissions. Access keys. The kind of thing that let you do things you weren't allowed to do.
Kael steadied his breathing. "What kind of mark?"
The sofa hesitated, like it didn't want to say it.
Then: "AUDIT OVERRIDE."
The woman whispered, "What does that mean?"
Kael didn't answer her. His attention was locked on the sofa now, not because he trusted it, but because he didn't trust anything else.
Audit Override meant one thing.
Someone wanted to bypass record-keeping.
Someone wanted the Ledger to look away.
Kael swallowed, suddenly aware of how quiet the apartment building was. No distant chatter in the hallway. No footsteps above.
Just the hum of a cursed couch and the faint crackle of magic that wasn't supposed to be here.
"Continue," Kael said.
The sofa's voice grew steadier, like it was relieved to finally talk to someone who understood the words it was using.
"HE USED ME TO FILE FALSE COMFORT CLAIMS."
Kael's pen scratched hard. "Comfort claims?"
"GOVERNMENT SUBSIDIES. FOR DISPLACED ARTIFACTS."
Kael exhaled through his nose.
So this wasn't just petty.
This was organized.
A con artist carving Ledger-marks into furniture to siphon city funds meant one of two things:
He was very brave.
He had backing.
Neither option was comforting.
The woman's voice wavered. "So… I'm sitting on a criminal?"
"More or less," Kael said. "Try not to take it personally."
The sofa spoke again, urgent now. "I DID NOT WANT THIS."
Kael looked up. "You didn't."
"I WAS MADE INTO A TOOL."
Kael studied it.
There were small signs now that he was looking—tiny stitching mistakes along the back seam where the fabric had been pulled off and replaced. A faint, almost invisible scorch mark near the left leg.
Someone had opened it up.
Someone had done surgery on a couch.
Kael leaned forward slowly and extended two fingers toward the armrest. He didn't touch it. Not yet.
He let his senses brush the edge of the enchantment.
There.
A cold, sharp imprint under the fabric, like a brand. A rune carved too deep.
Audit Override.
His jaw tightened.
This was above his pay grade.
Which meant it was exactly the kind of thing the Bureau liked to throw at him because he didn't complain loud enough.
Kael straightened and flipped to a fresh page on his clipboard. "All right. I'm going to do a basic containment scan. If anything changes, you tell me. If you start talking about her mother again, I'm stapling your mouth shut."
The sofa hummed, almost offended. "I DO NOT HAVE A MOUTH."
"Figure it out," Kael muttered.
He pulled a thin strip of parchment from his coat. It looked like a receipt, except the ink on it shifted as if it was still being written.
He pressed it to the floor in front of the sofa.
The parchment lit up.
Blue runes formed a circle and climbed the air like smoke, wrapping the sofa in a gentle coil.
The room's temperature dropped again.
The woman hugged herself. "Is it supposed to do that?"
"It's supposed to do something," Kael said. "If it does nothing, that's when you worry."
The runes tightened.
The sofa shuddered once, like an animal resisting a leash.
And then Kael felt it.
Not a voice.
Not a whisper.
A pressure behind his eyes.
Like someone else's hand had reached into the world and was pushing against his scan.
The circle flickered.
Kael's pen lifted off the clipboard by itself, hovering an inch above the paper.
He stared at it.
That wasn't part of the procedure.
The ink on his clipboard rearranged into neat lines without him writing a single letter.
UNREGISTERED AUTHORITY DETECTED.
Kael's blood went cold.
He hadn't filed anything.
He hadn't reported anything.
He hadn't even tapped into the Ledger network.
So why was his Bureau clipboard pulling an authority alert?
He slowly turned the clipboard over.
The runic grid on the back—normally stable—was glitching.
Small symbols appeared and vanished like blinking eyes.
In the center, a mark formed.
Not the Bureau seal.
Not a department stamp.
A thin, unfamiliar symbol that looked like a slash through a circle, the kind of thing you'd see in an error box before a system crash.
Kael stared at it.
And somewhere deep in the building, like a giant waking up in the concrete, something answered.
A silent pulse.
A recognition.
The woman didn't notice. She was still staring at the sofa, like it might leap at her.
Kael forced his voice steady. "Ma'am. I'm going to ask you something, and I need you to answer honestly."
She swallowed. "What?"
"Have you noticed anything else… off… in this apartment since you brought the sofa in? Lights flickering. Objects moving. Paperwork disappearing. Any weird symbols showing up where they shouldn't?"
She hesitated. "Actually… yeah. My mirror fogged up yesterday and wrote something on it."
Kael's eyes stayed on the glitching mark.
"What did it write?"
The woman licked her lips. "It said… 'WE SEE YOU.'"
Kael didn't move for a moment.
Then he gently picked up the parchment circle and canceled the scan with a flick of his wrist, like he was putting a lid back on a boiling pot.
The runes died instantly.
The room warmed again.
The sofa went quiet.
Not sleeping quiet.
Watching quiet.
Kael closed his clipboard slowly, like he was trying not to startle the air.
"Okay," he said softly. "New plan."
The woman's voice shook. "What plan?"
Kael looked at the sofa one last time.
Then he looked at the hallway outside the apartment, suddenly aware of how empty it felt.
And how the building seemed to be holding its breath with him.
Kael adjusted his badge in his pocket, like a man reminding himself he had a job title even if reality didn't care.
"I'm taking the sofa," he said. "And you're coming with me."
Her eyes widened. "Why me?"
Kael gave her a thin smile that wasn't comforting at all.
"Because," he said, "whatever carved that mark into your couch… just noticed I noticed."
And as if to prove his point, somewhere in the walls—behind plaster and wire and quiet—something clicked.
Like a file being opened.