Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMR4C62M6R07S93A6HE5H79

The third deadbolt stuck, the way it always did, and Rory had to throw her shoulder into the door to get it open. She was already talking before she looked up, half-turned back toward the hallway because the Tesco bag was slipping off her wrist and Ptolemy was threading himself between her ankles with the desperate urgency of a cat who believed he hadn't eaten in six years rather than six hours. "Move, you absolute menace, I will step on you and then we'll both be—" She looked up. Lucien Moreau was sitting on Eva's sofa. Or rather, he was arranged on it—one leg crossed over the other, his ivory-handled cane propped against the armrest, his charcoal suit so perfectly pressed it made the rest of the flat look like a crime scene. Which, to be fair, it nearly was. Eva's research notes had colonized every horizontal surface, towers of old books and photocopied scrolls rising from the floor like stalagmites. Lucien sat among them like a man in a waiting room he found faintly distasteful but was too polished to mention. He looked exactly the same. That was the infuriating thing. The platinum blond hair slicked back from his face, the sharp jaw, the mouth that always seemed like it was deciding whether to smile or say something cutting. And those eyes—one amber, one black—watching her from across the room with an expression she couldn't read and had never been able to. The Tesco bag hit the floor. A tin of baked beans rolled out and came to rest against a stack of Sumerian lexicons. "The cat let me in," Lucien said. "The cat doesn't have thumbs." "Your friend Eva left a key under the mat. I assumed the invitation extended." "You assumed wrong." Rory's voice came out steadier than she felt. She bent to retrieve the bag, mostly to have something to do with her hands, and kicked the door shut behind her. Ptolemy, traitor that he was, had already relocated to Lucien's lap. "Eva's in Glastonbury until Thursday. You know that." "I do." "So you came when you knew she wouldn't be here." Lucien didn't deny it. He scratched behind Ptolemy's ear, and the cat went boneless with pleasure, purring loud enough to rattle the empty teacup on the side table. The silence stretched. Rory carried the bag to the kitchen—four steps; that was the entire journey—and set it on the counter beside a bread knife and a grimoire Eva had bookmarked with a takeaway menu. "How did you know I'd be here?" she asked, not turning around. "You've been staying here since the incident at the Golden Empress." His voice was careful, the way it always got when he was choosing each word like it cost him something. The French accent thickened slightly on *incident*, and she hated that she noticed. "Yu-Fei told me." "Yu-Fei needs to stop telling you things." "Yu-Fei is worried about you. As am I." Rory turned around then. She leaned back against the counter and crossed her arms, the sleeve of her jumper riding up just enough to expose the small crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist. She saw his gaze drop to it and then lift away, the way it always had—noticing, cataloging, saying nothing. "You don't get to be worried about me," she said. "Not anymore." Something moved behind his mismatched eyes. He set Ptolemy gently aside and stood, using the cane more than she remembered him needing to. That was new. The way he shifted his weight to the right was new. She filed it away and hated herself for caring. "Rory—" "Three weeks." She held up three fingers, as if he might need the visual aid. "Three weeks, Lucien. You disappeared for three weeks. No word. No message through the usual channels. Nothing. And then you just—what, let yourself into my friend's flat and sit on her sofa like you're waiting for afternoon tea?" "I brought biscuits." He gestured toward the coffee table, where, indeed, a box of Fortnum & Mason shortbread sat nestled between a demonology text and Ptolemy's catnip mouse. "I don't want your biscuits." "They're the lemon ones you like." "I don't—" She stopped herself, jaw tight. Because he was right. They were the lemon ones she liked, and he'd remembered, and that was the whole problem with Lucien Moreau distilled into a single box of overpriced shortbread. He remembered everything. Every offhand comment, every preference mentioned once in passing, every small revealing thing she wished she could take back. He collected details about people the way other men collected watches or grudges. It was what made him so good at his work. It was what made him so dangerous to care about. He took a step closer. Just one. The cane tapped softly against the bare floor, and Ptolemy watched from the sofa with the detached interest of a spectator at a tennis match. "I couldn't send word," he said quietly. "There were reasons." "There are always reasons with you." "Yes. And they are usually good ones." "Good for whom?" That landed. She saw it in the way his fingers tightened around the ivory handle of the cane, the knuckles going white for just a moment before he smoothed his grip. He was close enough now that she could smell his cologne—something understated, woody, probably worth more than her weekly wages from the delivery rounds. Close enough that she had to tilt her chin up slightly to hold his gaze, which she refused to break. "I went back to Marseille," he said. The words dropped between them like stones into still water. Rory's arms uncrossed without her permission. Marseille meant his mother. Marseille meant the human half of his life, the half he never talked about, the half he'd let slip only once during a late night in Silas's bar when he'd drunk enough Calvados to let his guard down and she'd been too tired and too close and too willing to listen. "Is she—" "She's alive. She's ill, but she's alive." He paused. "My father's people came. There were... negotiations." She understood then, or began to. When Lucien said *negotiations* in that particular tone, flattened and precise, he meant something closer to *threats*, something that involved the demon realm of Avaros and the complicated, ugly machinery of the supernatural underworld he navigated so carefully. He meant danger. He meant things he didn't want touching the people around him. He meant her. "You should have told me," she said, and was mortified by how small her voice sounded. "If I had told you, you would have come." "Of course I would have come." "Exactly." One more step. He was right in front of her now, and the kitchen was so small that the cane had to angle sideways or it would have knocked into the cabinet. She could see the fine lines at the corners of his eyes, the ones that hadn't been there six months ago. She could see the slight shadow along his jaw where he'd missed a spot shaving, which was so unlike him that it told her more about his state of mind than anything he'd said. "And I could not allow that. Not with them." "That wasn't your decision to make." "No," he agreed. "It wasn't." They stood there. The kitchen smelled like cumin from the curry house below and the lemon from the fancy biscuits she didn't want and the faint woody cologne she wanted to stop noticing. Ptolemy had begun washing his paw with the studied indifference of a creature who had decided this particular drama was beneath him. Rory exhaled. It came out shaky, and she watched Lucien track the tremor in her breath the way he tracked everything—with precision, with attention, with that devastating carefulness that made her feel like the most important informant he'd ever cultivated. "You're hurt," she said, nodding at the cane. "More than usual." "It will heal." "Lucien." His name in her mouth did something to the air between them. She saw his composure flicker—just a crack, just a breath's worth of something raw underneath the tailored suit and the careful distance. His free hand came up, slow enough that she could have stopped it, and his fingertips brushed a strand of black hair off her cheek. The touch was feather-light. His skin was warm, which always surprised her, as if she expected the demon half to run cold. "I thought about you," he said. "In Marseille. Every day. That is the truth, and I give it to you freely, which—as you know—is not something I do." Her throat ached. She thought of all the things she'd rehearsed saying to him if he ever showed up again—the cutting remarks, the door slammed in his face, the dignified silence. She thought about Cardiff, about Evan, about every man who'd ever made her feel like she was standing on ground that could give way without warning. She thought about how Lucien was the first person in London who'd looked at her like she was someone worth being careful with. "I was terrified," she said. "I thought you were dead. I thought—" She stopped. Swallowed. Started again. "You don't get to make me feel like that and then show up with lemon biscuits." "Would different biscuits have been better?" A laugh broke out of her, rough and unwilling, and his mouth twitched at the corner, and it was such a small stupid thing but it cracked something open between them that she didn't have the strength to seal back up. She grabbed the lapel of his charcoal jacket and pulled. Not to kiss him—not yet—but to close the last six inches of distance, to press her forehead against his collarbone, to stand in the cumin-scented kitchen of her absent friend's flat and just breathe. His arm came around her, careful of whatever injury he was carrying, and his chin rested on top of her head, and he didn't say anything. For once in his meticulous, calculating life, Lucien Moreau didn't say a single word. Ptolemy jumped down from the sofa, padded over, and sat at their feet, watching with great golden eyes. After a long time, Rory spoke into the charcoal wool of his jacket. "You're going to tell me everything. All of it. Marseille, your father's people, whatever happened to your leg. No editing, no omissions, no broker's half-truths." "That is a significant ask." "I'm a significant person." She felt his chest move with something that might have been a laugh. His hand found the back of her neck, fingers threading gently into her hair, and she let him, and she hated how good it felt, and she didn't pull away. "Yes," he said quietly. "You are." Outside, Brick Lane hummed with its evening noise—delivery scooters, the clatter of restaurant kitchens, someone shouting in Bengali two floors down. Inside, the flat was still, piled high with its books and secrets, and two people who had been very good at leaving things unsaid stood in the kitchen and began, haltingly, to say them.