Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQE6P366JVN3WVWRSRV1WF

The door swung open, and Rory's hand froze on the handle. Lucien Moreau stood in the narrow hallway, one shoulder propped against the peeling wallpaper as if he'd been waiting for hours rather than the thirty seconds since he'd knocked. The amber eye caught the light from Eva's flat; the black one swallowed it whole. He looked exactly as she remembered—platinum hair slicked back with mathematical precision, charcoal suit cut so sharp it could draw blood, ivory-handled cane tucked under his arm like an afterthought. "Bonsoir, Aurora." She hadn't heard that voice in four months. Four months since she'd walked out of the Velvet Archive without looking back, since she'd told him exactly what she thought of his methods and his secrets and his insufferable habit of treating her like a chess piece on his board. "No," she said, and moved to close the door. His hand came up—not touching, never touching without permission, that had always been his way—but close enough that she stopped. "Five minutes. That's all I'm asking." "You don't ask, Lucien. You maneuver." Something flickered across his mismatched eyes. If she didn't know better, she might have called it hurt. "Fair. But I'm asking now." Behind her, Ptolemy meowed from his perch on a stack of medieval grimoires, the sound plaintive and curious. Rory glanced back at the tabby, at Eva's cluttered flat with its towers of books and scrolls covering every surface, and weighed her options. She could slam the door. She could pretend the last year hadn't happened—the Whitmore case, the thing in the tunnels beneath King's Cross, the night they'd almost— She stepped back. "Five minutes. Clock's running." Lucien moved past her with that fluid grace that had always set her teeth on edge. Too smooth. Too controlled. He took in the cramped space with a single sweep of his gaze—the three deadbolts on the door, the curry-scented air drifting up from the restaurant below, the organized chaos of Eva's research scattered across the coffee table. "Your friend isn't home," he observed. "Obviously. She's in Prague until Thursday." Rory crossed her arms over her chest. "How did you know I'd be here?" "You always water her plants when she travels." He turned to face her, and the overhead light threw shadows across his angular face. "The ivy on the fire escape was looking rather vigorous as I walked past." "That's not creepy at all." "I prefer 'observant.'" "You would." Silence stretched between them, thick and weighted. Ptolemy jumped down from his book stack and wound between Lucien's legs, purring. Traitor, Rory thought. The cat had always liked him. "You look well," Lucien said quietly. "Don't." "Don't what?" "Don't do the pleasant small talk thing. You didn't come here at nine o'clock on a Wednesday to discuss my health." She moved toward the kitchen alcove, putting the narrow counter between them. Distance. She needed distance. "Say what you came to say." Lucien set his cane against Eva's cluttered desk—careful not to disturb her papers, she noticed—and unbuttoned his jacket. The gesture was so achingly familiar that something twisted in Rory's chest. How many times had she watched him do exactly that in his office, in that dim back room at the Crow's Nest, in the car outside the Ashford estate while rain hammered the windshield and she'd been stupid enough to believe they were on the same side? "There's a situation," he said. "One that requires your particular skill set." "I'm not for hire." "I'm not offering payment." Rory laughed, and it came out sharper than she intended. "Right. Because the great Lucien Moreau does favors out of the goodness of his heart." "I have a heart?" "Jury's still out." He moved toward her then—two steps, no more—and stopped when her shoulders went rigid. His jaw tightened. "I deserved that." "You deserve a lot of things. A list I'd be happy to provide if you've got the time." "Aurora—" "Don't call me that." The words came out rough, scraped raw against her throat. "You don't get to call me that anymore." The silence that followed was different. Heavier. Lucien's expression shifted, and for just a moment, the mask slipped. She saw something underneath—exhaustion, regret, something that looked dangerously close to longing. "Rory, then." His voice was soft in a way she'd only heard once before, in a darkened hallway while blood dried on her hands and the thing they'd killed cooled on the floor between them. "I made a mistake. Several mistakes. I should have told you about the Marchetti connection. I should have trusted you with the full picture instead of parceling out information like you were an asset to be managed." "Yes. You should have." "I was trying to protect you." "I don't need your protection." She gripped the edge of the counter, feeling the crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist press against the laminate. Childhood accident, she always told people. Nothing that mattered. But her fingers found it now anyway, that familiar curve of raised skin. "I needed your honesty." "I know." He took a breath—deliberate, controlled, the way he did everything. "I know that now." Ptolemy had settled on the arm of Eva's threadbare sofa, watching them with the unblinking attention of a creature who'd seen far stranger things than two people dancing around the wreckage of whatever they'd almost been to each other. Rory's phone buzzed in her pocket. She ignored it. "Four months," she said. "Not a word. Not a message. And now you show up at my friend's flat talking about situations and skill sets like nothing happened." "Like nothing—" Lucien broke off, and something dangerous flared in his mismatched eyes. "You think I stayed away because nothing happened?" "I think you stayed away because you're a coward who'd rather disappear than have an actual conversation about—" "About what?" He closed the distance between them before she could react, stopping just short of the counter that separated them. "About the fact that I've thought about you every day since you walked out? About the way you looked at me in that hallway like I'd broken something neither of us knew how to fix?" "Lucien—" "About the fact that I can still feel exactly where you touched my face, right here—" He pressed two fingers to his cheekbone, the gesture almost violent in its precision. "—and I haven't been able to feel much of anything else since?" The words hung in the cramped flat, tangling with the smell of curry and old paper and something else underneath—sandalwood and smoke, his cologne, exactly as she remembered. "That's not fair," Rory said, and her voice had gone quiet in a way she hadn't intended. "None of this is fair." He lowered his hand. "I'm half-demon, Aurora. Rory. Whatever you'll let me call you. My father's blood makes me very good at calculating odds and manipulating situations and keeping everyone at a careful distance. It does not make me good at—" He stopped, jaw working. "This." "This?" "Wanting someone so much it terrifies me." Rory stared at him. Beneath the perfect suit and the careful posture, she could see it now—the tension in his shoulders, the slight tremor in his hands. Lucien Moreau, the unflappable fixer who'd faced down demons and crime lords and things with too many teeth, was nervous. "You hurt me," she said. "When I found out about Marchetti. When I realized how much you'd kept from me." "I know." "I trusted you. Against my better judgment, against everything that experience had taught me about men who keep secrets and treat honesty like currency—I trusted you." "I know." His voice cracked on the second word. "And I have spent four months trying to figure out how to earn that back." "Is that why you're here? To earn something?" "No." He reached up, and for a moment she thought he might touch her. But his hand stopped short, hovering in the space between them. "I'm here because there's a girl in Whitechapel who's going to die if someone doesn't find her in the next forty-eight hours. Someone with ties to the same people who tried to kill you last spring. And I could find another way. I could pull strings and call in favors and handle it myself." His mismatched eyes held hers. "But I don't want to do this without you. I don't want to do any of it without you anymore." The radiator clicked on, filling the silence with a metallic hum. Outside, Brick Lane was coming alive with the evening crowd—laughter, car horns, the distant thump of bass from some bar down the street. Inside Eva's flat, the world had narrowed to the space between them. Rory let out a slow breath. "Tell me about the girl." Something shifted in Lucien's expression—hope, maybe, fragile as spun glass. "Her name is Mira Okonkwo. Seventeen. She went missing three days ago, and the trail leads somewhere neither of us wants it to go." "Where?" "The Ashford family." He said the name like it tasted of ash. "Which means I need someone who can think sideways. Someone who doesn't play by any rules they recognize." "Flattery isn't going to fix things between us." "I know." He picked up his cane from Eva's desk, fingers wrapping around the ivory handle. "But I thought it might be a start." Rory looked at him—really looked, past the armor of his tailored suit and careful control—and saw the truth of it. He was asking, not maneuvering. Hoping, not calculating. It didn't erase what he'd done. It didn't rebuild the trust he'd broken. But it was a start. "There's a curry place downstairs," she said. "We can talk there." "Is that a yes?" "It's a maybe." She moved past him toward the door, close enough to catch that familiar scent of sandalwood and smoke. "But Lucien? If you keep things from me again—" "I won't." She paused with her hand on the first deadbolt. "Because if you do, I won't walk away next time. I'll make you regret it." The smile that crossed his face was small and genuine and something she'd never seen from him before. "I would expect nothing less." Rory turned the first lock, then the second, then the third. Behind her, Ptolemy meowed his goodbye as Lucien followed her into the hallway, and somewhere in the back of her mind, a voice that sounded like her mother whispered that she was making a terrible mistake. But as they descended the narrow stairs toward the curry house below, and Lucien's shoulder brushed hers in the tight space, Rory found she didn't particularly care.