Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQZF0RBCJSEDCQZCRRB6M0

The first deadbolt turned with a sound like a gunshot in the quiet hallway. Then the second. Then the third. Rory pulled the door open expecting the Thai delivery she'd ordered on Eva's account as penance for eating the last of the hummus, and instead found Lucien Moreau standing on the landing with rain darkening the shoulders of his charcoal suit and his mismatched eyes catching the jaundiced light of the corridor. Neither of them spoke for three full seconds. Somewhere below, the curry house exhaled its perpetual cloud of turmeric and fenugreek up through the floorboards. "No," Rory said, and moved to close the door. His cane caught the frame. Not aggressively — he simply placed the ivory handle against the wood the way someone might rest a hand on a friend's shoulder, easy and unhurried, and the door stopped as though it had decided on its own not to shut. "Five minutes," Lucien said. "You don't get five minutes. You don't get five seconds. You used up your time three weeks ago when you vanished from the Highgate meeting and left me standing in a crypt with a —" "I know what I left you with." "Then you know why I'm closing this door." She pushed harder. The cane didn't budge. She hated that about him — the way he could hold ground without seeming to exert any effort, as though the laws of physics were guidelines he followed only when it suited him. "Rory." His voice was quieter now. The accent thickened when he was being careful, the Marseille bleeding through the polished London diction. "Please." That word cost him something. She could see it in the way his jaw tightened, in the slight downward cast of his amber eye while the black one remained fixed on her, unreadable as ever. She'd spent enough hours across tables and car seats and rooftops from him to know the geography of his restraint, to know that *please* was a country he rarely visited. She stepped back from the door. Not an invitation — a retreat. He understood the difference, but he came in anyway, ducking slightly under the frame though he didn't need to. Habit, maybe. Or performance. With Lucien, the line between the two had always been gossamer-thin. Eva's flat closed around them like a fist. Books everywhere — stacked on the kitchen counter, fanned across the sofa, teetering in columns along the baseboard. Research notes in Eva's cramped handwriting papered the walls like conspiracy-theory wallpaper. Ptolemy, the tabby, watched from his throne atop a pile of Sumerian lexicons, his green eyes tracking Lucien with the frank suspicion that cats and women apparently shared where this particular man was concerned. Lucien took in the flat with one slow sweep. She watched him catalogue it — exits, sight lines, the window that opened onto the fire escape. Old habits. Then his gaze returned to her, and something shifted behind it, something that wasn't tactical. "You look well," he said. "You look wet. Say what you came to say." He leaned the cane against the arm of the sofa and reached into his jacket. She tensed — hated herself for tensing — but he only produced a folded piece of paper, rain-spotted along one edge. He held it out between two fingers, the way he held everything, like the world was a series of delicate objects he was trying not to break. "Lucien." "Take it." She crossed the small kitchen and took the paper from his hand, careful not to let their fingers touch. She unfolded it. An address in Whitechapel, a time — tomorrow, 2 a.m. — and a name she didn't recognize, written in Lucien's precise European hand. "You could have sent this," she said. "You have my number. You have Eva's number. You probably have Yu-Fei's number, and she changes hers every two weeks." "I could have sent it." "But?" He didn't answer immediately. Instead, he moved to the window — three steps in a flat this size — and looked down at Brick Lane through the rain-beaded glass. The neon from the curry house signs painted him in bands of orange and green. She noticed he was favoring his left leg more than usual, a hitch in his stride that the cane normally disguised. It was the kind of thing you only caught if you'd spent time memorizing the way someone moved. She had. She hated that too. "I needed to see that you were alright," he said, still facing the window. The words landed in the center of her chest like a stone dropped into still water. She folded her arms. "I'm alright." "You weren't answering." "I wonder why." He turned then, and the full force of those eyes hit her — amber warm as whiskey, black deep as a well. She'd asked him once, half-drunk on the roof of Silas' bar, which eye came from which parent. He'd smiled and changed the subject. She'd pretended not to mind, the same way she pretended not to mind a lot of things about Lucien Moreau: the secrets, the half-truths, the way he moved through the supernatural underworld like smoke through a keyhole, belonging everywhere and nowhere. "The Highgate situation was not what it appeared," he said carefully. "It appeared like you set me up." "I know how it appeared." "Then don't tell me what it wasn't. Tell me what it was." Ptolemy chose this moment to leap from his lexicon tower with a heavy, graceless thud, winding between Lucien's ankles with the treasonous affection of a cat who had no loyalty whatsoever. Lucien looked down at the tabby, and something close to a genuine smile crossed his face. It was gone before it fully formed. "I received information that the meeting was compromised," he said. "Twenty minutes before. I could not reach you by phone — the signal interference in the crypt, you remember how it was. I had two choices: walk in beside you and let us both be taken, or remove myself from the equation and draw their attention outward so you could get out." "I didn't get out, Lucien. I fought my way out. There's a difference." "I know." His voice dropped. "I watched." The silence that followed was thick enough to lean against. Rory felt the blood rise in her cheeks and turned away, busying herself with the kettle because it was there and because her hands needed something to do that wasn't reaching for him. "You watched," she repeated flatly. "From the cemetery wall. I couldn't intervene without revealing the secondary —" "I had blood on my hands for two days. Under my nails. I couldn't get it out." She heard the tremor in her own voice and crushed it. The kettle clicked on. Steam began to whisper. "Do you know what that's like? Scrubbing your hands at three in the morning, and the water keeps running red, and you're wondering if the person who was supposed to have your back just — sold you out?" She heard him move behind her. Close. Not touching. Lucien occupied space with an intentionality that bordered on architectural — he was always exactly as near as he meant to be, and right now he was near enough that she could smell rainwater and sandalwood and the faint metallic undertone that was purely him, something elemental, something that came from whatever his father had left in his blood. "I would never sell you out." Each word placed with the precision of a surgeon's stitch. "I would sooner cut my own throat." "That's dramatic." "I am half-French and half-demon. Drama is my birthright." She almost laughed. She caught it behind her teeth and bit down, because laughing at his jokes was a door she wasn't ready to reopen. She stared at the kettle as though willpower alone could make it boil faster. "The information on that paper," he said, "concerns what was really happening at Highgate. Who arranged the compromise. And why they wanted both of us — together — in that crypt." "Both of us." "We have been watched, Rory. For some time." She turned. He was closer than she'd calculated, close enough that she had to tilt her chin to meet his eyes. The crescent scar on her left wrist itched the way it always did when her pulse climbed. She resisted the urge to cover it. "Watched by whom?" "That is what tomorrow night will answer." "And you need me there." "I always need you there." The words escaped him like something fumbled, a glass slipping from careful fingers. She saw the instant he heard himself — the micro-flinch, the controlled stillness that followed. He stepped back. Recovered. "Your instincts are better than mine in close quarters. You see patterns I miss. This is a practical assessment." "Sure it is." The kettle screamed. Neither of them moved to silence it. "Lucien," she said quietly. "Why did you really come here tonight?" He looked at her the way he'd looked at her on the roof that night — the night before Highgate, when the city had glittered below them and he'd traced the scar on her wrist with his thumb without asking where it came from, and she'd let him because his hands were warm and she was so goddamn tired of being careful. He'd almost kissed her. She'd almost let him. Almost was the territory they lived in, the two of them — a country of near misses and swallowed words and doors held open just long enough to feel the warmth from the other side. "Because I could not bear another day of you thinking I betrayed you," he said. "Because every contact I have, every thread I pull in this city — none of it means anything if you believe I am the kind of man who would leave you to bleed in the dark." The kettle clicked off. The flat was very quiet. Rain murmured against the window. Ptolemy purred somewhere near their feet like a small, furry engine of terrible timing. Rory reached past him and turned off the burner. Her arm brushed his chest. She felt him stop breathing. "Tomorrow," she said. "Two a.m. Whitechapel." "Yes." "And you'll actually be there this time." "On my life." She held his gaze for a beat longer than was necessary, longer than was safe. Then she stepped back and opened the door. "You're dripping on Eva's books," she said. "She'll kill us both." He collected his cane. Paused on the threshold. For a moment, he looked like a man standing at the edge of something vast, calculating the cost of a single step forward. "Rory." "Go home, Lucien. Dry off. Get some sleep." She paused. "And next time, call first. I nearly answered the door holding a bread knife." The ghost of a smile. "I would expect nothing less." She watched him descend the stairs, the tap of his cane echoing against the narrow walls, his platinum hair catching the last of the corridor light before the stairwell swallowed him. She closed the door. Turned all three deadbolts. Pressed her forehead against the wood and stood there until her pulse returned to something resembling normal. On the kitchen counter, the folded paper waited, his handwriting sharp and sure. She picked it up and read the address again, then pressed it flat against her sternum, feeling the damp of the rain seep through her shirt to her skin. Ptolemy leapt onto the counter and head-butted her elbow. "Don't look at me like that," she told the cat. "I said I'd go. I didn't say I'd forgive him." Ptolemy blinked, unimpressed, and went back to sleep on a first-edition grimoire. Outside, the rain kept falling on Brick Lane, and somewhere beneath it, a man with two different eyes walked into the dark, carrying nothing but a cane and the memory of her voice saying *tomorrow* like it might still mean something.