Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQJJ1TM2Y157AMP35NKYGE

The knock came at half past nine, three sharp raps that cut through the drone of the television and the perpetual horn-and-siren symphony of Brick Lane below. Rory startled on the sofa, a stack of Eva’s research notes sliding off her lap and fanning across the threadbare rug in a flutter of arcane diagrams. Ptolemy, the tabby sprawled on the radiator, lifted his head with a disdainful chirrup, tail lashing against the metal bars. She wasn’t expecting anyone. Eva was in Edinburgh until Thursday chasing a lead on seventeenth-century ley lines, and Rory had been using the flat as a bunker, licking wounds that had nothing to do with the crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist. The curry house beneath them had stopped serving an hour ago; the smell of cardamom and fenugreek still clung to the walls, but the delivery drivers had gone home, and Rory’s own delivery jacket—emblazoned with the golden characters of Yu-Fei’s Golden Empress—lay crumpled over a chair, the day’s shift long finished. Rory approached the door on bare feet, her straight black hair still damp from the shower, hanging heavy against her shoulders. Through the peephole, the hallway distorted into fisheye bleakness: bare bulb, peeling wallpaper, empty. Another knock. Closer. Lower. Her hand hovered over the first deadbolt. Eva’s flat had three; Rory had thrown them all the moment the sun went down, old habits from Cardiff that London hadn’t cured, especially not after Evan. The metal was cold under her palm. She twisted the first lock, then the second, the third, each clicking open with a sound like a bone snapping back into place. She pulled the door open six inches, keeping the chain on, and stopped breathing. Lucien Moreau filled the gap. He stood in the hall's sodium glare, immaculate and impossible, raindrops gleaming on the shoulders of his charcoal suit like diamonds on obsidian. His platinum hair was slicked back, severe and gleaming, revealing the stark architecture of his face. But it was his eyes that stalled her—the left amber as honey trapped in resin, the right a depthless black that seemed to drink the hallway light. Heterochromatic. Unsettling. Exactly as she remembered them, and exactly as she’d tried to forget for the last three months. “Bonsoir, Aurora,” he said. His voice carried the faint rasp of a Marseille childhood, polished by years of negotiating in London’s supernatural underworld. He rested his weight on the ivory handle of his cane, the silver tip clicking once against the linoleum—a sound that made her stomach tighten, knowing the slender blade concealed within the shaft. He wore no gloves despite the November chill, his long fingers bare and still. “You’re trespassing on my panic room,” Rory said. Her voice came out steady, cool-headed, the barrister’s daughter schooling her features into neutral territory even as her pulse hammered against her throat. “Eva’s not here.” “I didn’t come for Eva.” He didn’t move. Didn’t push. He simply stood there, five inches taller than her but carrying himself like he loomed over cities, occupying space with the tailored precision of a weapon sheathed in silk. The last time they’d stood this close, she’d been in his flat in Soho, his hands framing her face, her bright blue eyes wide and trusting. He’d leaned in—not to kiss her, but to press his forehead against hers and tell her to leave. To run. That the realm of Avaros bleeding through his bloodline would burn her alive if she stayed. She’d run. But not because he’d told her to. Rory released the chain. The door swung open. The flat swallowed him as he stepped across the threshold, the cramped space suddenly too small, the ceiling too low. Ptolemy darted between his ankles, rubbing his tabby face against Lucien’s trouser leg with a purr that rumbled like a diesel engine. Traitor, Rory thought. Lucien glanced down, a flicker of something almost soft crossing his sharp features, then his mismatched gaze swept the room—the teetering towers of books, the scrolls pinned to every wall with masking tape, the takeout containers from the Golden Empress stacked by the sink because she hadn’t mustered the energy to walk them down to the bins. “You’ve moved,” he observed. “I’m subletting sanity,” she said, pressing her back against the bookcase. It put three feet of cluttered air between them, but she could still smell him—oud wood and something darker, mineral-rich, like thunderstorms over iron. “How did you find me?” “I’m an information broker, Rory. You’re working for Yu-Fei three nights a week, delivering dim sum to vampires and ghouls in Spitalfields. You’re not precisely invisible.” His cane tapped once, twice, against the floorboards. “Though you’ve been avoiding your flat above Silas’ bar. Three weeks now.” “I’ve been busy.” “Avoiding me.” The bluntness of it struck the air between them, heavy as a bell. Rory’s hand went to her left wrist, thumb finding the raised crescent scar without conscious thought—a childhood fall from a climbing frame, long before Evan, long before London. But the gesture betrayed her. Lucien’s gaze tracked the movement, his black eye widening slightly, the amber one narrowing. “I left because you told me to,” she said quietly, the words precise, intelligent, cutting. “I told you to leave the situation. The danger.” He took a step closer, and the room seemed to tilt. “Not to vanish.” His French accent thickened slightly, a crack in the veneer. “You didn’t say goodbye.” “What was there to say? You made it clear what you are. What I’d be signing on for.” She gestured vaguely at him—the demon heritage, the fixer’s life, the ivory cane that could become a sword in the space of a breath. “I’d just finished excavating myself from one grave, Lucien. I wasn’t looking to lie down in another.” His jaw tightened, a muscle jumping beneath the pale skin. “You think I’m your Evan?” “I think you’re both dangerous.” “Then why open the door?” Because I’m stupid, she thought. Because I’ve been dreaming about your eyes. Because I’m tired of running. She said nothing. Lucien set his cane against the bookshelf, carefully, like laying down a gun. Then he crossed the distance, and Rory’s back hit the spines of Eva’s occult encyclopedias. He stopped just short of touching her, close enough that she could see the flecks of gold in the amber iris, close enough to count the faint scar bisecting his right eyebrow—an old wound from a deal gone wrong in the underworld, she’d never asked. “I am not him,” Lucien said, low and fierce. “I am not human, yes. I carry Avaros in my veins. But I’ve spent three months trying to convince myself that pushing you away was mercy, not cowardice. It was neither. It was a mistake.” The curry house’s exhaust fan rattled outside the window, a mechanical heartbeat. Rory’s breath came shallow. She could feel the heat radiating from him, unnatural, fever-hot, a furnace against the damp London cold. She should step sideways. She should unlock the door and point him toward the street. Instead, her gaze dropped to his mouth. The hurt was still there, a bruise in her chest that had ached every day since Soho, but beneath it flared something sharper, brighter—the out-of-the-box thinking that had always been her curse, the reckless intelligence that whispered *risk it*. “You broke my trust,” she whispered. “I know.” “You can’t just walk in here with your cane and your Marseille French and—” “Then tell me to leave.” She looked up. The black eye held no reflection, no light, only depth. The amber one burned. “Stay,” she said. The word hung between them, fragile and dangerous as glass. Lucien lifted his hand, slowly, giving her time to flinch, to deny him. When she didn’t, his fingertips brushed the scar on her wrist, tracing the crescent moon with infinite gentleness. His skin was hot, too hot, searing and exquisite. “I missed the way you think,” he murmured. “Three months of silence, and I could still hear you solving problems in my sleep.” Rory’s chest tightened, tears prickling sharp and sudden behind her eyes. She hated that he could still do this—dismantle her walls with observation, with presence. She reached out, her own hand hovering over his heart, feeling the rhythm there, steady and inhuman and perfect. “You’re an idiot,” she said, her voice cracking. “Oui,” he agreed. “But I’m here.” Outside, a siren wailed down Brick Lane, distant and dopplering. Inside, Ptolemy jumped onto the sofa with a thump, and the silence stretched, heavy with everything they hadn’t said, everything that might yet be mended. Rory let her hand settle against his chest, fingertips curling into the charcoal wool, and felt him exhale, a shudder running through the rigid line of his shoulders. She hadn’t forgiven him. Not yet. But the door was open now, and neither of them moved to close it.