Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQE6P7MJWQDAVGSFMK0EDQ

The three deadbolts clicked in sequence, and Aurora pulled the door open expecting the Thai delivery she'd ordered twenty minutes ago. The words died in her throat. Lucien Moreau stood in the narrow hallway, one hand resting on the ivory head of his cane, the other holding a bottle of wine like a peace offering. His platinum hair caught the dim light from the single bulb overhead, and his mismatched eyes—one amber, one black—fixed on her with an expression she couldn't quite read. "Before you close the door," he said, his accent curling around the words like smoke, "I should tell you that I've been standing out here for eleven minutes trying to decide whether to knock." Aurora's grip tightened on the door frame. Behind her, Ptolemy let out a low mrrow and wound between her ankles, oblivious to the tension crackling in the air. "Eleven minutes," she repeated flatly. "I counted." "And you decided that eleven minutes was the magic number?" A ghost of a smile tugged at his mouth. "I decided that if I stood here any longer, Mrs. Okonkwo from 3B would call the police again." Despite herself, Aurora almost laughed. Almost. But then she remembered the last time she'd seen him—three months ago, in the rain outside Silas's bar, when he'd told her some things were better left alone and walked away without looking back. She remembered the hollow feeling in her chest for days afterward, the way she'd caught herself checking her phone for messages that never came. "Eva's not here," she said, though they both knew he hadn't come for Eva. "I know." Lucien shifted his weight, and for the first time since she'd met him, he looked almost uncertain. The impeccably tailored charcoal suit, the precise knot of his tie, the careful arrangement of every detail—it was armor, she realized. It had always been armor. "May I come in?" Aurora should have said no. Should have closed the door and gone back to the research notes spread across Eva's coffee table, back to the translation she'd been puzzling over for the past three hours. Should have pretended that the sight of him didn't make her pulse quicken and her stomach clench with something that felt too much like hope. Instead, she stepped aside. Lucien moved past her into the cramped flat, and she caught his scent—sandalwood and something darker underneath, something that reminded her of incense burning in empty churches. She locked all three deadbolts behind him, more out of habit than any real sense of security. The flat looked even more chaotic than usual. Books and scrolls covered every available surface—the kitchen counter, the armchair, the floor around the sagging couch. Eva's research into the Thornwood murders had consumed the space like a living thing, and Aurora had been living in the middle of it for the past week, sleeping on the couch and eating takeaway straight from the containers. Ptolemy, the traitor, immediately began rubbing against Lucien's ankles, purring like a small engine. "He remembers you," Aurora said, unable to keep the edge from her voice. "Animals usually do." Lucien crouched down to scratch behind the tabby's ears, and something about the gesture—the careful gentleness of it—made Aurora's chest ache. "I heard about what happened at the warehouse. With the binding circle." "From who?" "Does it matter?" She crossed her arms. "It does if you're here because someone sent you." Lucien straightened, and his expression shifted into something harder, more familiar. "No one sends me anywhere, Aurora. I thought you knew that by now." The use of her full name landed like a small blow. He'd always called her Rory before—when they'd worked together tracking down the stolen grimoire, when they'd spent three nights in a row following leads through London's supernatural underworld, when he'd kissed her in the back of a cab at four in the morning and she'd felt like she was falling into something she couldn't name. "Then why are you here?" She hated how her voice wavered on the question, hated the vulnerability of it. Lucien set the wine bottle on the stack of books nearest him—some treatise on demonic hierarchies, she noticed, which seemed grimly appropriate given his heritage. He removed his suit jacket with precise movements and draped it over the back of Eva's desk chair, and Aurora watched the familiar ritual with a complicated feeling in her throat. "I made a mistake," he said quietly. "Three months ago. I made a mistake, and I've been trying to convince myself it was the right choice ever since." Aurora's nails dug into her palms. The small crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist seemed to pulse with old memory, old pain. "You walked away. You told me to let it go, to stop looking into the Avaros connection, and then you just—" "I know what I did." "Do you? Because from where I was standing, it looked a lot like you decided I wasn't worth the risk." The words hung between them, sharp and jagged. Lucien's jaw tightened, and his mismatched eyes—god, those eyes that had haunted her dreams for months—flashed with something that might have been anger or might have been grief. "You think I walked away because you weren't worth the risk?" His voice was low, controlled, but she could hear the current of emotion running beneath it. "Aurora, I walked away because you were. Because every time I'm near you, I want things I have no right to want. Because my father's people have been watching me for years, waiting for a weakness they can exploit, and you—" He stopped, ran a hand through his platinum hair, destroying its careful arrangement. "You became that weakness the moment I met you." Aurora's heart was pounding so hard she could feel it in her throat. "That's not your decision to make." "I know." "You don't get to decide what risks I'm willing to take." "I know." He took a step toward her, then stopped, as if uncertain of his welcome. "I've spent three months telling myself I was protecting you. That distance was the kindest thing I could offer. But then I heard about the warehouse, about the binding circle, about how close you came to—" His voice broke, just slightly. "And I realized that staying away wasn't protecting you from anything. It was just leaving you to face it alone." The curry house below them had started its dinner rush; Aurora could hear the muffled clatter of pans, the rise and fall of voices speaking Bengali. The sounds of ordinary life, carrying on while her world tilted on its axis. "I almost died," she said quietly. "In that warehouse. The circle was designed to trap half-bloods, and I was just collateral damage, but I still almost died. And the whole time, the only thing I could think was that I never got to tell you—" She stopped. Couldn't finish the sentence. Lucien closed the distance between them in two strides. He didn't touch her—just stood close enough that she could see the faint lines of tension around his mouth, the shadows under his eyes that suggested he hadn't been sleeping any better than she had. "Tell me what?" His voice was barely above a whisper. Aurora looked up at him, at the face that had become so familiar it hurt, at the impossible contradiction of those mismatched eyes. The amber one was warm, almost human. The black one held depths she still didn't fully understand. "That I'm not afraid of your father's people," she said. "That I'm not afraid of what you are. That the only thing that scares me is the thought of going through all of this—the demons and the binding circles and the things that go bump in the night—without you there to watch my back." Something in Lucien's expression cracked open. He reached out, slowly, and brushed a strand of black hair away from her face. His fingers were cool against her skin. "I'm not a good man, Aurora. My blood is half poison. There are things in my past that would make you—" "I know what you are." She caught his hand, held it against her cheek. "I've known since the night you told me about Marseille. About your mother. About the price she paid for loving your father." She turned her head, pressed a kiss to his palm. "And I'm still here. I'm still choosing this. Choosing you." The sound Lucien made wasn't quite a laugh and wasn't quite a sob. He pulled her close, and she went willingly, wrapping her arms around him and breathing in that familiar scent of sandalwood and shadow. His heart beat against hers, faster than she would have expected, and she realized with a start that he was trembling. "I don't deserve you," he murmured into her hair. "Probably not." She pulled back just enough to look at him, to see the raw vulnerability in his face that he hid from everyone else. "But I'm not particularly interested in what you think you deserve. I'm interested in what we both want." "And what do you want, Aurora Carter?" She reached up, traced the line of his jaw with her fingertips, felt him shiver at the touch. "I want you to stop running. I want you to trust me with all of it—the demon politics, the family secrets, whatever it is you've been protecting me from. I want—" He kissed her. It wasn't like the kiss in the cab, rushed and half-desperate. This was slow, deliberate, like he was memorizing the shape of her mouth. Aurora's fingers curled into the fabric of his shirt, and she pulled him closer, closer, until there was no space between them at all. When they finally broke apart, breathless, Ptolemy had retreated to the windowsill and was watching them with what Aurora could only describe as feline judgment. "The wine," Lucien said, his voice rough. "It's a very good vintage. I thought we could—" "Later." She grabbed his tie and pulled him back down to her. "Much later." Outside, London carried on with its evening—the curry house below filling with customers, black cabs crawling through traffic, the first stars appearing above the city's orange glow. Inside the cramped flat on Brick Lane, surrounded by books and scrolls and three months' worth of unspoken words, Aurora finally stopped fighting the feeling she'd been running from since the night she first saw Lucien Moreau. And when he smiled against her lips—a real smile, unguarded and bright—she knew she'd made the right choice.