The room was sterile in its design, a seamless integration of cold steel and reinforced polymer, its every surface meticulously crafted to suppress the very notion of escape. Fluorescent lighting hummed overhead, casting a clinical glow that seemed almost surgical in its precision- an artificial radiance designed not to illuminate, but to dissect. The air carried the faint, antiseptic tang of sterilization, underscored by something less identifiable, something acrid and metallic, like ozone after a storm.

Sirius stood at the periphery of the interrogation room, his presence as deliberate as it was unyielding. There was no wasted movement, no unnecessary gesture; even the way he adjusted the cuffs of his gloves seemed imbued with a quiet menace, an implicit promise of the efficiency with which he conducted his work.

His gaze, sharp as honed obsidian, traced the figure seated before him. Shackled. Vulnerable, yet not fragile. The observation did not amuse him, nor did it perturb him. It was simply a variable, an equation to be solved with the correct application of pressure. Surveillance nodes embedded into the walls flickered intermittently, their lenses whirring softly as they cataloged every breath, every micro expression, feeding a network that pulsed with unseen scrutiny.

Sirius had studied the dossier, of course. He had committed every page to memory, every alias, every fabricated history. And yet, none of it held as much weight as the unspoken familiarity that lingered in the space between them, a phantom of something neither had yet named. The irony was almost clinical in its perfection: two agents, sculpted by the same machine, now poised on opposing ends of an invisible knife’s edge.

“Did you think I wouldn’t recognize you?” His voice was smooth and precise- like the edge of a scalpel, not meant to wound indiscriminately, but to carve with intent. “I’ll admit, I was almost impressed. But I want to know who sent you. I want to know what you were looking for. You’re not here by accident, after all.”