Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQQ18JR9MGK6YQTAADJ91F

The curry from the restaurant downstairs was a familiar, cloying ghost, a spice-heavy shroud that clung to the stairwell carpet and the peeling paint on the walls. Rory was used to it. She was less used to the sharp, insistent knock that wasn't Eva’s usual frantic tattoo. She’d been expecting her friend back an hour ago, laden with books from the British Library and complaints about the Tube. Rory unfastened the top deadbolt, then the second, her fingers fumbling with the third. “Finally,” she muttered, pulling the heavy door inward. “I was about to send out a search party.” The words died in her throat. It wasn't Eva. The man on the landing filled the space, a figure carved from shadow and smoke, tailored in charcoal wool. His slicked-back platinum hair caught the weak light of the hall bulb, a stark contrast to the gloom. One of his eyes was the color of warm amber, the other a flat, fathomless black. He leaned lightly on an ivory-handled cane. “Lucien.” His name was a puff of air, devoid of warmth. A stone dropping into a very deep, very still well. “Aurora.” He inclined his head, a gesture so crisp and economical it was almost an insult. His voice was the same as she remembered—a low timbre with the ghost of a French accent, smooth as hundred-year-old cognac. And just as intoxicating. Her hand tightened on the edge of the door. The immediate, stupid impulse was to slam it in his face. To bolt all three locks and pretend he was just a hallucination brought on by cheap takeaway and too much research. “What are you doing here?” she asked. Her voice came out steadier than she felt. “I need to speak with you.” He didn't ask. He stated it as fact, as if six months of absolute, crushing silence were a minor inconvenience that could be brushed aside. “No.” She started to push the door closed. The tip of his cane shot out, wedging itself in the frame with a soft thud. It was a gentle but immovable block. “Please,” he said, and the word sounded foreign on his tongue. He never pleaded. Rory stared at the polished ivory handle, then back up at his face. He looked different. Thinner, maybe. There were faint lines of exhaustion spidering from the corners of his mismatched eyes that she didn't remember. Or perhaps she’d just never been close enough to see them before. A gust of wind rattled the window at the end of the hall, carrying with it the scent of rain and damp tarmac. It mingled with his scent, something clean and ruinously familiar—sandalwood and something else, something uniquely him. Her stomach clenched. “You have five minutes,” she said, pulling the door open just wide enough for him to enter. He stepped inside, his polished shoes silent on the worn floorboards. The cramped flat seemed to shrink around him, his tailored suit and immaculate presence an affront to the organized chaos of Eva’s home. Books spilled from shelves, scrolls were piled on the small dining table, and research notes covered every available surface in a tide of paper and ink. A fat tabby cat uncurled itself from a stack of Ptolemaic star charts and trotted over, winding around Lucien’s legs with a throaty purr. “Ptolemy, you traitor,” Rory whispered under her breath. Lucien’s gaze swept the room, taking it all in without judgment, his expression unreadable. “Eva’s research seems to be proceeding apace.” “We’re not here to talk about Eva.” Rory crossed her arms, hugging them tight against her chest. It was a defensive posture, and she hated herself for it. “Your five minutes are ticking. What do you want?” He turned his full attention to her. It felt like being pinned by a searchlight. His amber eye seemed to warm, to glow with an inner light, while the black one absorbed everything, giving nothing back. It was a disconcerting combination she had once found fascinating. Now it just made her feel exposed. “I need your help,” he said. A laugh, sharp and humourless, escaped her. “My help? That’s rich. Where were you when I needed help, Lucien? When I was stuck cleaning up the mess from that job in Prague?” The words tumbled out before she could stop them, laced with a bitterness she thought she’d buried. The unanswered calls. The dead-end messages left with contacts who suddenly didn't know his name. The slow, dawning realization that he was simply gone. A flicker of something—regret? annoyance?—crossed his features. “That was unavoidable. Complications arose.” “‘Complications arose’,” she repeated, the words tasting like ash. “You sound like a corporate memo. You disappeared. Left me high and dry with a pissed-off necromancer and a Golem that wouldn’t stop quoting Vogon poetry. Don't talk to me about complications.” He took a step closer. The space between them crackled. Rory held her ground, forcing herself not to retreat. She could feel the worn wood of the floorboards under her thin socks, could hear the frantic beat of her own heart against her ribs. “I am aware of my deficit in that matter,” he said, his voice dropping lower. “And I would not be here now if it were not a matter of extreme urgency.” “There’s always a matter of extreme urgency with you.” She looked away from his face, her eyes landing on her own left wrist, where the faint, crescent-shaped scar stood out pale against her skin. She rubbed it with her thumb, a nervous habit. She remembered him tracing that scar once, in the quiet of a hotel room in Budapest, his touch so light it was barely there. The memory was a fresh sting. “This is different,” he insisted. He reached out, not to touch her, but as if to gesture at the entirety of their shared, messy history hanging in the air. “I have… run afoul of a certain faction. They have something of mine. Something I cannot afford to lose.” “So hire someone else. London’s full of people who’ll do your dirty work. People you haven't abandoned.” “They can’t do what you do.” His amber eye held her, earnest and intense. “I don’t need a thug or a thief. I need a mind that sees the angles no one else does. I need you, Aurora.” He used her full name, and it hit her with the force of a physical blow. He rarely did. It was always *Carter* on a job, a professional distance. It was a soft, murmured *Rory* in the moments between, the moments she’d foolishly let herself believe meant something. She wanted to say no. Every self-preservation instinct screamed at her to throw him out and shoot all three deadbolts. Letting him back into her life, even for a day, was like willingly inviting a hurricane into her living room. All she’d be left with was the wreckage. But she didn't say no. Because under the anger and the deep, throbbing hurt, a different feeling stirred. The old, familiar hum of a problem to be solved. The dangerous, addictive thrill that she only ever felt when she was working a puzzle that others deemed impossible. It was a part of her he had always understood, had always known how to exploit. He saw her hesitation. He always saw everything. “They operate out of the old Clink,” he said, pressing his advantage. “The whole network is a puzzle box. Locks within locks. Not physical, but… informational. Bureaucratic. Magical.” She could already feel her mind starting to turn, the tumblers clicking into place. The Clink. A prison museum on the South Bank, steeped in centuries of misery. A perfect place to hide something in plain sight. “What did they take?” she asked, her voice quiet. A muscle in his jaw tightened. “A grimoire. It belonged to my father.” Her breath caught. He never spoke of his family. She knew the barest facts—human mother, demon father—and nothing more. He guarded his past as if it were a state secret. For him to volunteer that information now… the situation had to be more desperate than he was letting on. He stood before her, not the untouchable, impeccably tailored fixer, but a man backed into a corner. The exhaustion she’d glimpsed was real. The slight tremor in the hand that wasn’t holding his cane was real. And in that moment of vulnerability, the walls she’d so carefully constructed around her heart began to crumble. She hated him for it. She hated him for vanishing, for hurting her, and most of all, she hated him for showing up on this dingy landing and making her feel that old, treacherous pull all over again. She looked at his face, at the amber eye that promised fire and the black eye that promised the void, and knew she was standing on the edge of a precipice she’d sworn never to approach again. “Tell me everything,” she said.