Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMR5J3DCQA50FZ0FKWPA8HX

The first knock was a polite tap. The second, impatient. By the third, Rory had already slid the last of the three deadbolts back, heart thudding a touch faster than seemed reasonable. She’d told Eva that keys were a boundary, even for friends. Brick Lane carried sound like a busy throat; old pipes clanked, traffic hissed, curry spices seeped through the floorboards. But this knock had weight and rhythm—intent threaded through wood. She cracked the door and saw him framed in the dim hall light. Lucien Moreau, immaculate even with drizzle jeweling his lapels. Slicked-back platinum hair darker at the temples where the rain had kissed it. Tailored charcoal suit refusing to surrender its shape to the damp. The ivory head of his cane winked between his gloved fingers. And his mismatched eyes—one amber catching the lamplight like a coin, the other black and depthless—fixed on her face as if they had been deprived. “Bonsoir, Rory,” he said, voice smooth and low, the vowel shaped like a habit he couldn’t kick. Her spine went very straight. Her name sounded different in his mouth. Softer, more expensive. “Lucien.” They hadn’t used each other’s first names the last time they spoke; they’d used weapons. “May I come in?” he asked, glancing past her shoulder. The hall smelled of wet wool and someone’s overenthusiastic cumin. Footsteps below rattled the stairs as someone carried up a takeaway bag, grease shadowing the paper. Rory didn’t move. The small crescent scar on her left wrist itched, a memory with its own weather system. She dug her thumb into the tender spot out of habit and saw his gaze flicker. Of course he noticed everything. That had been the problem. “It’s not a good time,” she said. Behind her, a paper tower of Eva’s notes listed like a drunk. Ptolemy, Eva’s tabby cat, lifted his head from the back of the sofa and made an inquisitive chuff. Lucien tilted his head, focused as if he could make her objection into a door he could pick. “I wouldn’t be here if I had a better one.” For a beat, pride thinned his voice. He reined it back. “Please.” He didn’t ask for many things. He traded, he promised, he slid. A please from him had edges. She stepped aside because the corridor was too public for certain conversations, because the smell of wet pavement was curling under her nose, because she’d once liked the way he filled a doorway. She stepped aside because she was tired of jumping at every knock. “Wipe your shoes,” she said, and it came out dryer than she meant. “Always,” he murmured, as if they had domestic history. He brushed his soles on the mat with care, then crossed the threshold. The flat seemed to contract around him, not in a claustrophobic way, more like a room remembering how much space a person could occupy when they knew exactly where to put their shoulders. He didn’t remove his gloves. He set the cane gently to lean against the coat rack, which groaned under the weight of scarves and raincoats that weren’t his. Ptolemy uncoiled, stretched to scandalize a yogi, and padded over to sniff Lucien’s trousers. The cat made a pleased chirp and threaded a figure-eight around his ankles. “Traitor,” Rory muttered, scooping him up. Ptolemy draped over her arm like a stolen fox, motorboat purr engaged. She shut and slid the deadbolts back into place because her body did it of its own volition, because this was Eva’s space and she handled it the way Eva did: precise, ritual, safe. Lucien stood in the eye of the clutter. Books spilled from shelves, stacked on the floor in toppling columns. Loose-leaf papers lay like fallen leaves across the coffee table. A parchment scroll, real and brittle, dozed in a velvet-lined box, a bit of indulgence Eva had acquired at God-knows-what expense. A corkboard bristled with pinned maps and scrawled notes. “New system?” he asked, humor ghosting the edge of his mouth. He had taken off his rain beaded coat now, revealing the line of a chalk-stripe waistcoat and the gleam of a watch cuff. He looked like a photograph from a magazine fallen into the wrong life. “It’s Eva’s system,” Rory said, carrying Ptolemy back to the sofa and settling him in his worn spot. “And I’ll thank you not to breathe too hard on her ‘organizational strategy’ in case it collapses.” He smiled with his eyes only. He had the sort of face that could sell you a bridge and leave you thinking you’d wanted a river. It hurt to look at him directly. “What do you want?” she asked, and watched him hear every weight in that question. “I could say information.” He moved closer to the small kitchen like he knew the space, but he didn’t touch anything. “But that isn’t why I came.” His accent thickened slightly when he told the truth, as if sincerity and French had been bedmates too long to separate. “You didn’t come to apologize.” Rory folded her arms over her chest. Her hair slid forward and she tucked it behind her ears. She’d cut it blunt again last week, impulsively, in a bathroom with terrible lighting. He’d once curled a strand around his finger, a tether he hadn’t known he was making. “I did.” He glanced at his hand, at the glove as if it were suddenly ridiculous. “I am sorry.” A pause, and then, from a man who traded in precision, an imprecise thing: “For a great many particulars.” Rory blew out a breath she hadn’t been counting. “Particulars like lying about who you were working for? Particulars like using me to get to Silas?” Her voice sharpened at his ally’s name, and she saw, with bitter satisfaction, the flicker of something in his eyes—regret or strategy, indistinguishable at a distance. He lifted a hand as if to calm a spooked horse, then thought better of the gesture. He let it sink to his side. “Particulars like leaving without calling, yes,” he said quietly. “And like allowing you to think I am cruel, when I am merely—” His mouth twisted. “Cowardly.” She laughed then, not kindly. “No, Lucien. You’re not cowardly. You’re careful. You never step without checking the ground twice over. You walked me right up to a cliff and made sure your footing was perfect.” “Rory.” He said her name differently this time, as if maybe it could stop her mouth. He took a step toward her. Close enough that she smelled the cologne that clung to him beneath rain: cedar, something smoky and peppered, like an expensive apology. His eyes searched her face not with hunger but with an inventory he couldn’t help doing. “I am many things,” he said, soft. “Not all of them useful. But I didn’t—” His gaze flicked to her left wrist again. “I didn’t know about him.” She didn’t flinch. Evan’s name didn’t need air anymore; it floated heavy regardless. Old bruises didn’t ache from outside weather. Still, she folded her left hand into her right and saw both of them notice the motion. “You didn’t ask,” Rory said. “It’s not your business.” “I wanted to ask,” he said, and now there was heat in his voice that wasn’t anger. “I wanted to ask a hundred things. Why your hands shook in your pockets when the music got too loud. Why you drank water when everyone else ordered whiskey. Why you smiled with your teeth but your eyes did something else. I wanted to ask and instead I asked you to distract a man while I stole a ledger.” He laughed, brittle. “The ledger was easier.” “You didn’t seem troubled at the time.” The cat purred against her thigh, and she rested her fingers in Ptolemy’s fur like an anchor, feeling the vibration steady her. “I’m troubled all the time,” he said. Something about the way he said it made her stomach drop, as if a floor had given way she hadn’t known she was standing on. He looked at the kettle; his gaze caught on the switch. He flicked it on without thinking and the low hum filled the room, familiar, domestic. It made the distance feel stranger, as if they had stepped into a version of themselves who boiled water for each other because it was winter. Rory set Ptolemy down and walked to the cupboard. Her body moved ahead of judgment in matters of tea; Eva’s flat had its own rules. “You can have Assam or the thing she swears is tea but tastes like a haunted flower shop.” “Assam,” he said, and then, because he had to make everything a negotiation, “Unless you want the flower shop. Then we both shall suffer the same.” She snorted despite herself. “Assam,” she confirmed, dropping bags into two chipped mugs. “You don’t get to suffer with me like it’s intimacy.” “I am not that foolish,” he said. “If we are intimate, it will not be over tea.” The water clicked ready. Heat breathed against her hand and she poured, focused on not scalding her fingers, on placing the kettle back with a careful hand. His line hung in the air between them, low voltage. “You said you came to apologize,” she said, sliding a mug in his direction without eye contact. “You’ve done the noun. What do you want, Lucien? Because you don’t just—appear. Not here. Not without a list and a plan and three exits.” He took the mug as if it were a delicate instrument. Steam clouded his black eye first, then the amber one, leaving both matching ghosts. “I want—” He stopped, frowned at the insufficiency of language. “I want to explain.” “That’s not the same as apologize.” “I know.” He lifted the tea and didn’t drink. The steam curled around his face like new skin. “You are very good at knowing the difference between words.” She didn’t reply. She took a breath and the steam made her eyes prickle. He stepped closer again and this time she let him. He set his mug down with care on a bare corner of table. Without his gloves, his hands looked less like weapons, more like hands. Fine bones, long fingers, old scars along the knuckles that looked like history rather than hobby. “My father—” He started, then cut it short, jaw tight. He swallowed. Changed tack. “I did not tell you everything. Not because I wanted to harm you. Because I wanted to keep you clean of certain names. Names that notice being spoken.” She watched his lips around the word clean. It made his mouth look softer. She had kissed him once, in a stairwell with music pounding through the walls and her pulse matching it. He’d tasted like whiskey then, and rain, and a promise he didn’t intend to keep. They had pretended afterward it had been an experiment. She had pretended she hadn’t needed air for thirty seconds that felt like a door blowing open. “I don’t want protection from you,” she said. “I want honesty or nothing.” “I know,” he said, and his smile—small, pained—was as honest as anything he’d given her. “Which is inconvenient.” She shook her head, a short, incredulous laugh escaping despite the ache that sat like a coin under her tongue. “Unbelievable.” “I am here,” he said, the two words heavy with an unfamiliar courage. “Not for information. Not to bargain. Because I cannot seem to leave you alone in my head. It is—” He attempted a joke and failed. “Inconvenient.” “Stop saying that.” “It’s inadequate, too,” he agreed. He took another half-step, so that the line of their bodies found the strange rightness they’d found once before, the fit that had surprised and infuriated her. The rain outside rattled like thrown pins against the window. Someone on the street shouted and laughed, voices sliding up through the floorboards. Ptolemy leaped onto the armchair and began washing one leg with obscene focus. Rory couldn’t back up without bumping the table. She didn’t want to move anyway. The air between them warmed by degrees. She could see the fleck of a darker gold near the iris in his amber eye. He smelled like cedar and rain, and under it something hot and metallic she told herself she didn’t notice. She lifted her chin. “What is it you think you feel?” “How clinical,” he murmured, and it wasn’t cruel. He considered. He did not try to sell her the bridge this time. “I think of you when the music gets too loud and I want to leave. I think of you when I choose the street with better lighting and fewer doorways. I think of you when I am about to do something unwise and then do it anyway.” He inhaled. The breath seemed to cost him. “When I told myself I had to keep you away, I didn’t do it for you. I did it because I am greedy. I wanted to be the one who decided. That was wrong.” The kettle hissed its residual complaint as it cooled. Rory felt an old brittle place in her, the one Evan had hammered thin, start to bristle and soften at once. None of this erased anything. None of this meant it would be simple. She could see herself from the outside—idiot with tea, idiot with a scar, idiot with a heartbeat that took orders from the wrong people. “Do you want me to forgive you tonight,” she asked, quiet, “so you can wake up tomorrow and pretend it’s the same as yesterday?” He blinked slowly. “No.” “Good,” she said. Her voice didn’t shake, which felt like a small miracle. “Because it won’t be.” “I had hoped,” he said carefully, as if stepping across black ice, “that perhaps—” He lifted his hand. Stopped. Let it fall inches from her cheek rather than risk touching. “That perhaps you would allow me to try again. With fewer omissions.” “You don’t get to curate my fear,” she said, and it was the truest thing in the room. He nodded, a quick bow—deference she had never seen from him to anyone but an old woman selling him black-market saints medals. “Understood.” They stood in the small full silence that followed, the kind that made old houses reveal their seams. A drip somewhere. A cat’s sigh. Streetlife humming in a register below hearing. “Tell me something now,” she said finally. “One thing you didn’t tell me before. Not a grand confession. A thing. I require proof of concept.” His mouth twitched, acknowledging the contract language. He lifted one shoulder, dropped it. “I play the piano,” he said, as if confessing a crime. “Poorly. I had a tutor when I was a child until he discovered he enjoyed gin more than scales. I kept at it. Quietly. There is not a great deal of joy in it, but there is order. It—helps.” Rory watched his face as he spoke, looking for tells. The small relaxation at the corners of his mouth, the way his gaze went somewhere inward for a second to recall not notes but the posture of a posture. The detail felt useless and human. It threaded through something inside her, tugged. She could hand him his coat. She could ask him to leave, keep the bright line she’d drawn and traced and defended. She could go to sleep on Eva’s sofa with the lamplight on because shadows in old flats bothered her less when the light had a job to do. Instead, she reached up and put her palm against his cheek. He froze like a wild thing freezing, not from fear but from reverence for a moment he didn’t want to scare. His skin was warm against her hand. The rasp of afternoon stubble caught at the base of her thumb. He closed his eyes the way you do on rollercoasters, and when he opened them again there was nothing strategic left. Just the fact of him. “I hated that you left without a word,” she said, not looking away. “I hated that you made me doubt my own read on people again.” Her voice dropped. “Don’t do that to me twice.” “I won’t,” he said. It could have been a vow. He didn’t reach for her, didn’t turn the contact into something else. He let her decide the distance. She slid her hand down, traced the line of his jaw, and then stepped closer because her body had remembered a map he’d once given it and demanded to check the route. He breathed her in like warmth after cold. “Tea,” Rory said abruptly. He blinked, thrown. “Tea?” “If we’re going to try,” she said, the flick of a smile in her mouth a deliberate mercy, “we start with ordinary. Tea. Talking. Maybe you tell me which streets you take at night when you’re careful and I tell you why I sometimes sleep with the lamp on.” He exhaled a laugh that seemed to unkink something along his spine. “Ordinary,” he repeated. “I can do that.” He picked up his mug. She picked up hers. They stood shoulder to shoulder for a moment, not touching, sharing a ridiculous, solemn breath as if they were at the altar of the kettle. The rain tapped its own applause against the glass. Lucien turned a fraction so that their sleeves brushed. The contact was brief, accidental by design. She felt it up to her throat anyway. “So,” he said, as if the word itself might behave if he handled it gently, “do you like the piano?” “I like the idea of you being bad at something,” Rory said, and he smiled, a real one, the kind that opened his face and made the black of his eye less abyss and more night sky with one star. Ptolemy leapt between them and head-butted Lucien’s thigh. “Traitor,” Rory said again, softer. Lucien crouched, scratched the cat’s chin with elegant fingers. “We should listen to traitors sometimes,” he said. “They are good at survival.” She rolled her eyes and sipped her tea. Assam bit her tongue in a way that felt right. When he stood again, they resumed the careful geometry they were inventing—two bodies in a cramped flat above a curry house, a thousand unsaid things settling into place like books on a sagging shelf. Outside, Brick Lane went on being Brick Lane; inside, they let the quiet carry them across the worst of the distance. They didn’t solve anything monumental. They didn’t make a grand declaration. They drank their tea. They started, awkward and ordinary, the way any two people might when they’d already burned through lightning and needed, finally, to learn the weather of each other.