He asked me to stop and I did not stop.

The man in the circle had stopped breathing on his own four minutes ago. I pressed two fingers to the sigil at his wrist. The mark heated under my touch and his pulse jumped, hard, dragging his lungs back into rhythm. His palms had gone white against the graphite. The circle I had drawn held him in place. The sigils I had placed at four points on his body held everything else.

His name was Vessen Kurov. Hedge fund. Second session. He had signed the exposure clause six weeks ago and he had read every line and he had come back.

I moved my hand from his wrist to his throat.

The sigil there was smaller. I had drawn it with a brush dipped in ash and iron water, a thumb-width below his Adam's apple, and when I touched it his head tipped back and his mouth opened on a sound he did not intend to make. The override had started. His body was running ahead of his mind now, responding to the sequence I had laid into the marks, and his awareness was still here, still watching it happen, which was the point. The tension was in the gap between what he intended and what his body was doing without him.

I moved to the center of his chest. The anchor sigil. I placed my palm flat over it and pressed.

His back arched off the floor. His muscles contracted in a wave that started at his ribs and ran down through his stomach and into his hips, and the sound that came out of him was low and involuntary and it filled the room the way water fills a glass. He was hard. He had been hard since the override kicked in. His cock strained against the thin ritual cloth I had left him and the fabric was wet at the tip and I watched that the way I watched all of it, with precision and without participation.

The air in the room thickened. A pressure that was not temperature and not humidity but something the ritual pulled from the space between his desire and my control. The entities began to form.

They came from the edges of the circle. Two shapes. Feminine. Their bodies were thinner than flesh, translucent at the joints, moving with a slight delay as if they followed a rhythm the rest of the room could not hear. Their faces were indistinct. Their hands were not. They reached for him the way something reaches when it already knows what it will find.

The first placed a hand on his inner thigh. He groaned. The second curved behind him, her mouth near his ear, and whatever she said or did not say made his hips roll forward into nothing. His arousal was total and escalating. The entities amplified what the sigils had started. His breath broke into short bursts. His hands left the floor and grabbed at the shape nearest him and his fingers passed through her shoulder and came back wet with something that was not sweat.

I stood outside the circle. I held the frame.

The amplification peaked. His body moved without instruction. His back arched again, harder. His voice cracked on a word that might have been please or might have been stop and the difference did not matter because the ritual had passed the point where language worked. The entities pressed closer. One had her hand between his legs, working him through the cloth, and the other had her mouth on the sigil at his throat and the sound he made was neither controlled nor quiet.

He said, "Stop."

His voice had changed. The word came out high and broken and the panic in it was real.

I did not intervene. The exposure clause specified that the ritual completed on its own terms. He had signed. He had been told.

I turned. I walked to the door. I opened it and stepped through and pulled it shut behind me and the sound from inside shifted from controlled response to resistance. A man who had already lost his body and was trying to climb back into it from a place the ritual had taken him.

I stood in the anteroom. My tea was on the desk, cold.

The front door opened.

He was tall. Dark hair, cut short the way academics cut their hair when they stop noticing barbers. He carried a leather bag with one strap broken and mended with electrical tape. He stood in the doorway and looked at the crow on my desk and then at me and then at the closed door behind me, and whatever sound was still coming from that room, he heard it, and he did not flinch.

He was agitated. I could read it in how he held the bag, in how his eyes tracked the room in a pattern that was not random. He was reading the space faster than anyone who had stood in that doorway. After Vessen left, Kier stood at the edge of the circle and looked at the graphite marks where the closing had been drawn. He said, calm and exact, "Your closing invocation. The second and fourth words derive from a diocese dissolved in 1763. They still function, but not for the reason you think they do."

I looked at him.

"I would not have used them," he said.

I considered firing him before he had worked an hour.

"Kier Vasska," he said.

"I know who you are."

"The listing said nine."

"You are early."

"Your previous assistant," he said. "What happened."

He had been in the room for thirty seconds. He had heard the sounds from behind the door and he had not asked about those. He had asked about the person who used to stand where he was standing.

"She was a plant witch," I said. "She approached magic through balance. Healing. Growth cycles. She stayed inside a ritual too long. She absorbed the experience instead of holding distance. By the time I pulled her out, she could not separate her own responses from the ones the ritual had put in her."

"Where is she now."

"Resting. She does not practice."

He stood there with a broken bag strap and a man coming apart behind a closed door, and he said, "The ritual room."

"Yes."

"Should we open it."

He had said we.

"Yes," I said.

We crossed the anteroom. I put my hand on the door. He stood at my left. I opened it.

Vessen Kurov was on the floor. The circle was intact. The entities had dissolved. The sigils on his body were fading, the ink pulling back into his skin like water into dry earth. He was on his side, breathing hard, his clothes displaced, his skin flushed from his throat to his stomach. His hands were shaking. His eyes were open and unfocused and wet. The room smelled like iron and salt and something sweeter underneath.

He was trying to sit up. He was not succeeding.

Kier looked at the man on the floor. He looked at the fading sigils. He looked at the circle on the ground. He looked at me.

"Was this controlled," he said.

"Yes," I said.

He did not ask anything else. He stood in the doorway with the crow on his shoulder and he looked at what I had done and I watched him bury whatever that was, and he did not leave.

I wrote his name in the ledger that evening. I wrote it into the next ten sessions.