Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQYBG6DD6DZ1YANECXFMAV

# The Reunion The knock came at half past eight on a Thursday night, when Eva's flat smelled of curry from downstairs and Rory was deep in her fourth cup of tea, trying and failing to concentrate on a true crime documentary. She'd been in London for six months, though some days it felt like six minutes, and others like six years. The knock was firm, insistent—not Eva's rhythm, which was always three quick taps followed by her voice calling out. Rory moved toward the door cautiously, her mind cycling through the usual suspects. The landlord? No, he never knocked. A delivery? Nothing was scheduled. She checked the peephole and saw nothing but the warped fishbowl view of an empty hallway. "Who is it?" she called. Silence. Then, a voice that made her stomach drop like she'd missed a step on the stairs. "It's me." The words hung there, suspended in the space between them. She knew that voice—the slight rasp beneath the refined accent, the way he curled his r's just barely French enough to be interesting. She hadn't heard it in four months, not since that night at Silas' bar when everything had gone sideways. Rory's hand was on the deadbolt before she'd made a conscious decision. Her fingers traced the crescent scar on her left wrist—an old habit, a grounding thing—before she stopped herself. She shouldn't open that door. Every sensible part of her brain was screaming that truth. She opened it anyway. Lucien stood in the narrow hallway like he belonged there, impeccable as always in a charcoal suit despite the late hour, despite what had to have been months since they'd last spoken. His platinum blond hair was slicked back from his face, catching the yellow light of the hallway fixture. But it was his eyes that stopped her—heterochromatic, one amber and one black, and both of them fixed on her with an intensity that made her chest feel too small. "You can't just show up," she said. Not hello. Not what are you doing here. Something sharper, more necessary. "Yet here I am." He held an ivory-handled cane loosely in one hand, weight shifted onto his left leg. She didn't remember him having that before. "I have information you need." "You could have called." "Would you have answered?" Fair point. Rory's lips thinned. She stepped aside anyway, because of course she did, because she'd never been able to do the sensible thing when it came to Lucien Moreau. Her flat was a disaster—Eva's research materials had migrated into the sitting area, books stacked on the coffee table, and Ptolemy the tabby was sprawled across the armchair like he owned it. Lucien entered with the grace of a man who'd never felt out of place anywhere. He surveyed the chaos with something that might have been amusement, though his expression never quite shifted into a smile. That was one of the things that had drawn her to him initially—the sense that he was always holding something back, some private joke or dark observation locked behind those mismatched eyes. "Tea?" she offered, because the alternative was to acknowledge why he was actually here, and she wasn't ready for that yet. "Please." She made the tea in silence, aware of him in the kitchen doorway like a piece of furniture she'd rearranged and couldn't quite remember how to position. Lucien had a way of taking up emotional space that had nothing to do with his physical size. When she handed him the mug, their fingers didn't quite touch, but they might as well have—the air between them crackled with all the things that had been left unsaid. "The Blackwood Circle," he said without preamble. "You've been researching them." It wasn't a question. Eva must have mentioned it—Eva, who had no sense of discretion and even less fear of Lucien's reputation in London's supernatural underground. Rory had asked her friend not to, specifically, but Eva had never been good at following orders. "Eva talks too much," Rory said. "Eva talks precisely the right amount." He took a sip of tea, and something in the domesticity of the gesture—Lucien Moreau, half-demon fixer, drinking tea in her flat—made her throat feel tight. "You're in over your head with them, Rory. You need to stop." "I can handle myself." "I'm aware. That's not the point." He shifted his weight, and she caught the way he favored his left leg. He'd definitely had that cane before—or at least, not the last time they'd been in a room together. "The point is that the Blackwood Circle handles their problems with finality. You are a problem to them now." Rory sank onto the sofa, curling her feet underneath her. It was a gesture she'd picked up from Eva, something defensive and young. "How do you know what I'm researching?" "Because I make it my business to know things." His amber eye caught the light as he turned to look at her fully. "Because I was already tracking their movements when Eva mentioned your involvement. Because—" He paused, and she watched something flicker across his face, some emotion too quick to name. "Because I didn't stop caring about what happens to you just because we stopped fucking." The word hung in the air between them like a bell that had been struck. Rory felt heat rise in her cheeks, a flush that was anger and something else, something that twisted low in her stomach. "That's not fair," she said quietly. "No. It isn't." Lucien set down his tea with careful precision, the kind of control he applied to everything except her—he'd never had that control when it came to her. "Fair would have been if I'd been honest about what I was when we started. Fair would have been if you hadn't found out the way you did." She closed her eyes. She didn't want to relive that night—finding him in Silas' back office, the moment she'd realized that the man she'd been sleeping with for three months was half-demon, that his entire background was a careful construct of information brokering and supernatural intrigue. That he'd lied about things so fundamental she'd wondered what else had been a lie. "Why are you here?" she asked, opening her eyes to look at him directly. "Really?" Lucien was quiet for a long moment. He studied her with both eyes now, that mismatched gaze taking her in like he was cataloguing details for future reference. Like she was a problem he needed to solve. "Because the Blackwood Circle will move against you within a week, and I would rather they didn't," he said finally. "Because you're brilliant and stubborn and you're going to get yourself killed pursuing this, and I can't—" He stopped, jaw tightening. "I can't have that on my conscience." "Liar," Rory whispered. "You have more conscience than anyone I know. That's not why you're here." The look he gave her then—it was like watching someone unlock a door and let you see what's on the other side. Hurt, raw and unhealed. Desire, still bright and terrible after all this time. And underneath it all, something that looked uncomfortably like love. "No," he admitted. "It isn't why I'm here."