Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMR85DJN5V0B4RYEN4N8R53

The three deadbolts clicked open one by one, and Rory pulled the door back expecting Eva with forgotten keys and a sheepish grin. Instead, the hallway light caught platinum blond hair and mismatched eyes—one amber, one black—and her stomach dropped through the floor. Lucien Moreau stood on the threshold in a charcoal suit that probably cost more than three months of her delivery wages, his ivory-handled cane tucked under one arm. He looked exactly as she remembered from four months ago: immaculate, unreadable, and entirely too beautiful for someone who'd left her standing alone on Waterloo Bridge at two in the morning. "Aurora." His voice carried that particular French inflection that used to make her name sound like music. Now it just made her want to slam the door in his face. "No." She started to push the door closed. His hand caught it—not forcefully, just enough pressure to hold it open. "Please. I would not be here if it were not important." "That's funny, because you had no trouble being elsewhere when it was important." The words came out sharper than she'd intended, but she didn't take them back. Four months of silence. Four months of checking her phone like an idiot, of jumping every time she saw a tall blond figure on the street, of pretending she didn't still smell his cologne in her dreams. Something flickered across his features—pain, maybe, or something like it. With Lucien, it was always hard to tell what was real and what was performance. "I deserve that." "You deserve a lot more than that." But she stepped back from the door, hating herself for the weakness. "Five minutes. Eva's not home, and I'm not explaining to her why London's most notorious information broker is bleeding on her doorstep because I stabbed him with a butter knife." The corner of his mouth twitched—that almost-smile she used to spend hours trying to coax out of him. "You would need something sharper than a butter knife." "Don't tempt me." He stepped inside, and the flat immediately felt smaller. It wasn't just his height, though at five-eleven he had five inches on her. It was the way he occupied space, the way the air seemed to rearrange itself around him. She'd forgotten that. Or she'd tried to forget it, which wasn't the same thing at all. Ptolemy, Eva's tabby, emerged from behind a stack of books on medieval demonology and wound himself around Lucien's ankles with a purr that bordered on obscene. Traitor. "Your friend's cat remembers me." Lucien bent to scratch behind Ptolemy's ears, and Rory caught herself staring at the line of his jaw, the way his hair fell forward despite the product meant to keep it in place. "Ptolemy has terrible judgment in people." She crossed her arms over her chest. "Clock's ticking, Lucien. What do you want?" He straightened, and when his eyes met hers, the amber one seemed to glow faintly in the dim light filtering through Eva's cluttered windows. The black one, as always, absorbed light like a void. His father's eye, he'd told her once. The part of himself he couldn't hide no matter how many tailored suits he wore. "There is a contract on your head." The words hung in the air between them. Rory felt them land somewhere in her chest, cold and heavy, but her voice stayed steady when she spoke. "And you came to collect? Business must be slow." "Do not." For the first time, his composure cracked. He took a step toward her, and she held her ground even as her heart rate spiked. "Do not make jokes about this, Aurora. They are serious. A demon house from Avaros has put a price on you that would make most of the supernatural underworld consider turning saint just to claim it." "Why?" The question came out smaller than she wanted. She thought of Evan, of the bruises she'd hidden under long sleeves, of the way she'd fled Cardiff like something was chasing her. But that was human violence. Human cruelty. This was something else entirely. "Because of me." Lucien's voice dropped, rough at the edges. "Because they know what you—" He stopped, jaw tight. "Because of Marseille." Marseille. A weekend four and a half months ago that had changed everything. She'd helped him with a job, something she never should have been involved in, and somewhere between the danger and the adrenaline and the way he'd looked at her like she was the only solid thing in a shifting world, she'd fallen. Hard and fast and stupid. And then he'd vanished. "So this is your fault." She laughed, but there was no humor in it. "Of course it is. Of course you show up now, after I've finally stopped—" She bit down on the rest of that sentence. Stopped hoping. Stopped hurting. Stopped lying to herself about both of those things. "I stayed away to protect you." The words seemed to cost him something. He leaned on his cane, and she noticed for the first time that he looked tired. Not disheveled—Lucien could never be disheveled—but worn somehow. Thinner at the edges. "I thought if there was enough distance between us, they would lose interest. I was wrong." "You're the great Lucien Moreau." She gestured at the cramped flat, the towers of books, the curry smell seeping up through the floorboards. "Fixer to the supernatural elite. You're telling me you miscalculated?" "I miscalculated you." He closed the distance between them, and this time she did step back, her hip catching the edge of Eva's desk. Papers scattered. Neither of them looked down. "I thought I could walk away. I thought it would hurt for a while and then stop. I was wrong about that too." "Don't." Her voice cracked on the word. "You don't get to do this. You don't get to disappear for four months and then show up at my door and say—" "Say what?" He was too close now. She could see the individual stitches in his lapel, smell the sandalwood and smoke that clung to him. "That leaving you was the hardest thing I have ever done? That I have thought about you every day since? That I can hear your heartbeat right now and it is making it very difficult to think clearly?" "That's creepy," she said weakly. "Half-demon." He almost smiled. "The hearing comes with the territory." "Lucien." She pressed her palm flat against his chest, intending to push him away. She could feel his heart beating under the expensive fabric, faster than his composed expression suggested. "This is a terrible idea." "I know." "You left me." "I know." "I cried for two weeks. Eva had to hide my phone so I wouldn't text you." Pain flickered across his face, real and raw. "I know. I had someone watching, to make sure you were safe. They told me." "You had someone—" She shoved at his chest, and he let her move him back a step. "You absolute bastard. You had someone watching me and you couldn't pick up a phone?" "Every communication is traceable. Every contact is a thread they can follow." He ran a hand through his hair, destroying its careful arrangement. "I have spent four months trying to make this go away, trying to give you a normal life, and I have failed. They are coming, Aurora. Within the week. And I will not—" His voice broke. "I cannot let them hurt you because of what I feel for you." The flat went quiet except for Ptolemy's purring and the muffled sound of traffic from Brick Lane below. Rory stared at him, at the man who'd taught her that monsters were real and that some of them wore beautiful faces and spoke four languages and kissed like they were memorizing you. "What you feel," she repeated slowly. "You never said. Before. What you feel." "No." He met her eyes. "I was a coward." "And now?" He reached out, slow enough that she could pull away, and touched the crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist. His thumb traced the old wound with a gentleness that made her throat tight. "Now I am a coward who cannot afford to be one anymore." He lifted her wrist to his lips, pressed a kiss to the scar. "I love you, Aurora Carter. I have loved you since Marseille, and I will very likely love you until something finally manages to kill me, which given current circumstances may not be long. But I am not leaving again. Not unless you tell me to go." Her hand was shaking. She realized it when she lifted it to his face, when her fingers touched the sharp line of his cheekbone. His eyes closed, and he turned into her palm like a man starved for contact. "I should tell you to go," she whispered. "Yes." "I should be smarter than this." "Yes." She pulled him down and kissed him, and it was nothing like the careful, controlled kisses they'd shared in Marseille. This was messy and desperate, four months of silence turned into something that tasted like longing and fury and the terrifying relief of finally stopping the pretense. When they broke apart, his forehead rested against hers, and he was breathing hard. "That was not telling me to go," he murmured. "Shut up." She fisted her hand in his lapel. "You're going to tell me everything. About the contract, about Avaros, about what we're going to do. And then we're going to figure out how to survive this." "Together?" She thought about deadbolts and curry houses and the way his heart had raced under her palm. About a bridge at two in the morning and four months of silence and the fact that she'd never been good at walking away from complicated things. "Together," she said. "But you're still in trouble." His almost-smile bloomed into something real. "I would expect nothing less."