The hour was indecent—somewhere between the funeral toll of midnight and the gasping stillness of dawn—when Felix found himself once more drawn into the aching architecture of Whitechapel. The fog curled low to the ground, coiling like some ancient thing disturbed from slumber, and the cobblestones beneath his boots were slick with the city’s decay: ink, ash, opium, and blood. London did not sleep so much as simmer, and it was in these pockets of brooding silence that monsters spoke in morse and myth.

Rain had not yet begun to fall, but the scent of it hung heavy in the air—like the breath before a confession or a duel. The alley was narrow and claustrophobic, framed by buildings whose brickwork wept with time. Gaslamps struggled to keep the dark at bay, their flame guttering in the wind like fevered candlelight in a crypt. Felix didn't glance over his shoulder, for he already knew someone was there. Their meetings were never arranged, not in the conventional sense. No time was agreed upon, no location confirmed. But Felix understood the semiotics of a shared madness—knew how to read the patterns stitched into corpses like embroidery, the ciphered poetry scrawled across the bones of victims, the riddles etched in soot on abandoned train cars. Each clue was a breadcrumb left not for discovery, but for intimacy. Because what was the hunt, if not a form of seduction?

“You’ve grown more baroque in your methodology,” he murmured aloud, the tone less accusation than observation—less scalpel now, more violin. “Strangulation in Belgravia. Poison in Bloomsbury. And that absurd tableau in the opera house—really, the soprano’s final note was almost too on the nose, even for you.”

The silence stretched, tensile and deliberate. Felix stepped deeper into the alley, his footsteps making no more sound than falling petals. The streetlamp above cast him in chiaroscuro, the sharp lines of his face alternately haloed and haunted. He paused near a rusted drainpipe, one hand grazing the wet brick, eyes narrowed not in fear but in calculation. He spoke again, this time intoning the words like scripture twisted into sin. “Was it meant to provoke me? Or was it simply an overture in this morbid symphony of ours?”

Felix had, over time, accepted that his fascination with this adversary defied taxonomy. It was not affection, nor obsession. It was recognition. Like two mirrors held up to one another, casting their infinite reflections into oblivion. "You leave your fingerprints not on the scene, but on the structure,” he mused, more to himself now than to the figure he refused to look at directly. “Your crimes are hypotheses in flesh. You murder not for profit or pleasure, but for proof. What is it you're trying to prove, I wonder? That chaos has form? That God is dead? That I—” He broke off. There were some admissions too perilous for even his mind to entertain.

Lightning flared distantly, illuminating the alley in brief, biblical light. And in that flash, he thought he caught the impression of a figure watching from the end of the passage—still as a gargoyle, sharp as the moment before a blade is drawn. A shadow that knew him too intimately to require introduction. Felix’s voice dropped to a hush, nearly a whisper. “Do you orchestrate these symphonies of ruin for the sake of the world’s unraveling or simply to see if I’ll come to stop you?” The silence that followed was, in its own way, an answer.

Felix didn’t move. He remained poised—composed not out of calm, but out of ritual. Because this was what they did. One carved patterns in madness; the other followed, not to halt him, but to understand. And perhaps, on some subterranean level neither dared admit, to be understood in return. He stood amid the ruins of what might have been a crime scene or a love letter, and waited—not for justice, nor for closure, but for him. For the man whose intellect mirrored his own, whose cruelty sang in perfect key to his restraint. And all around them, London dreamt restlessly, unaware that two of its finest monsters had once again found each other in the dark.