Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMR8AXF3RRPAPYB3EPQ1G89

The third deadbolt clicked free with a metallic snap that echoed in Eva's narrow hallway. Rory hesitated, her fingers still resting on the cold brass knob, listening to the muffled cacophony of Brick Lane below—honking taxis, the curry house's exhaust fan rattling against aged brick, someone shouting about parking permits in Punjabi. She hadn't buzzed anyone up. Eva was buried in the British Library's rare manuscripts section until eight, and Rory was only housesitting, feeding Ptolemy, trying not to think about the stack of delivery receipts she needed to sort for Yu-Fei's books. She pulled the door open. Lucien Moreau filled the threshold, one hand white-knuckled around the ivory head of his cane, the other tucked in the pocket of his charcoal suit. The stairwell's single bulb caught the platinum sweep of his hair, slicked back with the kind of precision that made him look carved from marble and expensive malice. His eyes—one amber like aged whiskey in sunlight, one black as the void his father called home—fixed on her with the unnerving, predatory focus of a creature who'd finally cornered his quarry after a long hunt. "Rory," he said. His voice carried that Marseille lilt, velvet stretched over steel. Her left wrist throbbed, phantom pain radiating from the crescent-shaped scar she'd earned at eight years old, falling from her father's library ladder onto an open law book. She resisted the urge to touch it, to cover the pale mark that suddenly felt like a target. "You're not Eva." "Neither are you," Lucien observed. He tilted his head, studying her with the methodical patience that had made him terrifying on his best days and devastating on his worst. Three months. It had been three months since she'd watched him walk down the stairs of her building—Silas' building—with his spine straight and his shoulders set, taking her questions about his father's realm with him like stolen property. "May I come in?" She should say no. The last time they'd occupied the same space, he'd lied by omission about the spectral mark on her aura, or she'd lied about not needing him to stay—she still couldn't parse which wound had bled harder when he'd closed the door. But the hallway reeked of stale onions and diesel exhaust, and Lucien looked exhausted, violet shadows bruising the skin beneath his mismatched eyes, his perfect suit bearing the dust of London's underground. She stepped back. The flat swallowed him whole. He moved with the slight limp he claimed was affectation but wasn't, navigating between Eva's towers of research on Ottoman necromancy and the stacks of Rory's own discarded cardigans. Ptolemy, Eva's ginger tabby, observed from atop a tottering pile of thirteenth-century grimoires, tail twitching with aristocratic suspicion. Lucien didn't sit. He never did, not until invited, not since that night in Soho when she'd demanded answers he couldn't give and he'd actually listened. He leaned instead against the bookshelf, cane resting between his polished Oxfords, the silver tip clicking a nervous rhythm against the floorboards. "You're working for Cheung now," he said. Not a question. "Delivering kung pao chicken and wonton soup, yes. Thrilling stuff." Rory crossed her arms, then uncrossed them, then settled for gripping her own elbows, her thumbs brushing the raised skin of her scar through the knit of her sweater. "How did you find me? I didn't tell anyone I was staying here. Not even the landlady." "I find everyone." He smiled, but it didn't reach the black eye, that pit of liquid darkness that reflected no light. "It's my vocation, Aurora. Information broker, remember? Half-demon with a network of imps and blood-debtors? You're not difficult to track. You leave trails—coffee shops near Covent Garden, library cards under your middle name, the specific way you check locks three times before attempting sleep." The intimacy of it winded her. She'd spent six months running from Cardiff, from Evan's fists and her father's disappointed barrister silence, building walls with three deadbolts and a fake surname. Lucien had walked through them like they were morning mist, carrying the scent of brimstone and bergamot. "Why are you here, Luc?" The nickname slipped out, traitorous and soft, an intimacy she hadn't permitted herself in the ninety days of silence. His jaw tightened, a muscle leaping in his cheek. Outside, a siren wailed down Commercial Street, dopplering into silence against the curry house walls. "There's a price on your head," he said quietly, each word measured and dropped like stones into deep water. "Posted in Avaros three days ago. A bounty for a human woman, twenty-five years, black hair, eyes bright blue. Distinguishing feature: a small crescent-shaped scar on the left wrist, product of a childhood accident involving legal texts." His gaze dropped to her hands, to the thumb currently worrying that exact mark. "Someone wants you brought to the realm alive. They weren't specific about the condition of the rest of you." Rory's blood turned to ice, then to fire. She touched the scar openly then, couldn't help it, her fingers circling the pale crescent as if she could shield it. "Evan? He swore he'd—" "Worse," Lucien interrupted, his voice going flat and dangerous. "Your ex is still drinking himself to cirrhosis in Wales, threatening barmaids. This is older. Deeper." He pushed off the bookshelf, closing the distance between them with three precise steps that ate up the cramped space. He smelled of expensive cologne and sulfur, the brimstone that marked his bloodline burning beneath his skin like a fever. He stopped just short of touching her, the heat of him radiating against her chest like an open oven. "You didn't tell me you were marked, Rory. You didn't tell me someone had already carved a claim into your soul before we—before I—" "Before you what?" Her voice cracked, sharp as broken glass. She tilted her head back to meet those impossible eyes, refusing to retreat. "Before you decided I was too fragile for your underworld? Before you walked out because I asked one question about your father's realm and you shut down like a bank vault on a holiday? Before you made me feel like loving you was a mistake I'd survived?" The air between them thickened, humid with old pain. Three months of silence, of missed calls she'd refused to make and texts he'd stopped sending after the third unanswered attempt, compressed into the cramped flat with its smell of vindaloo wafting through the floorboards and Eva's magical detritus crowding every surface. Lucien's hand twitched toward his cane, not for the thin blade concealed within the ivory shaft—she knew about that particular trick, had watched him slit a kelpie's throat with it once—but because he needed to hold something solid. His knuckles whitened around the carved head. "I walked out because I cared," he said, his accent thickening with emotion, French and something older, darker. "Because the thing hunting you, the mark you carry, it leads back to Avaros. To my father's house, to the court of Avaros where I am still, despite everything, a prince of sorts. And if I'd stayed, if I'd let what was happening between us continue—the way you looked at me, the way I couldn't stop touching you—I would have been the one to deliver you to them eventually. Blood calls to blood. The realm has laws about unclaimed humans with old scars. I couldn't risk being the instrument of your destruction." "You didn't ask what I wanted." Rory stepped forward, invading his space, her sneakers bumping his polished shoes. She craned her neck to see his face, that aristocratic nose, the mouth that had once traced her collarbone and whispered Marseille street French in her ear. "You decided. Like Evan. Like my father deciding I should study law until I suffocated. Everyone decides what's best for Rory Carter, the poor fragile thing who runs from abuse but apparently runs straight into the arms of a demon who thinks he knows better." "Half-demon," he corrected automatically, but his gaze had dropped to her mouth, his pupils blown wide, the black eye bleeding into the amber until she couldn't tell where humanity ended and the abyss began. "Still hurts," she whispered. He reached out, finally, his fingers circling her scarred wrist with the delicacy of a safecracker or a bomb technician. His skin was burning hot, feverish with the hellfire that sustained him. "This?" he asked, his thumb tracing the crescent. "Everything." The word came out ragged. "The way you left. The way you took my choice. The way you look at me now like I'm already gone." His grip tightened, not painful, but anchoring. "I can fix the bounty," he said, his voice dropping to a register that vibrated in her sternum. "I can call in debts that would bankrupt nations, make you untouchable by every creature that crawls between here and the Seventh Gate. But I can't fix us. Not if you don't want me to. Not if you'd rather I take the information and leave you to your kung pao and your three locks." Rory looked at him—the perfect suit rumpled from the stair climb, the hair falling slightly out of place, the eyes that held galaxies of darkness and pools of honeyed light. She thought of the deadbolts, how she'd turned them every night not just against Evan, but against the memory of this man who'd made her feel safe and then proved, by leaving, that she shouldn't be. "You lied to me," she said, though her pulse hammered against his thumb. "In the beginning. About what you were." "I concealed it. There's a difference." His other hand came up, hovering near her cheek, not quite touching. "Lying is falsehood. Hiding is survival. I wasn't sure if you could love the monster half. I wasn't sure if I could survive you not loving it." "And now?" "Now I'm standing unannounced in your friend's flat, risking rejection I've spent three months avoiding, because the thought of you dragged through the Avaros gates is worse than the thought of you hating me in safety." His hand finally landed, cupping her jaw, his fingers threading into the black hair at her temple. "I would rather you despise me breathing than lose you to my father's court." Rory felt the words land like stones in deep water, rippling outward through the resentment she'd nursed since he'd closed her door that final time. The flat was too hot, the curry smell cloying, and Lucien was too close, his demon nature radiating off him in waves of heat that made her want to either flee or burn. She chose to burn. Her free hand found his lapel, charcoal wool rough against her palm, pulling him down to meet her. She tasted bergamot and smoke, ash and apology. He made a sound like breaking glass, his cane clattering to the floor between Eva's scattered notes, and then his arms were around her, lifting her slightly off her feet, his mouth desperate and seeking against hers. The heat of him surrounded her, hellfire and humanity, and she clung to his shoulders, her fingers digging into the muscle there, anchoring herself to the one thing she'd been sure she couldn't keep. When they broke apart, gasping, his forehead rested against hers, his mismatched eyes swimming in her vision, wide and wild and hers. "The bounty," she reminded him, though her hands were fisted in his shirt, though she could feel his heart hammering rabbit-quick against her ribs. "Will wait an hour," he murmured, and kissed her again, deeper, the half-demon and the delivery girl with the scarred wrist, surrounded by Eva's books and the noise of London, the door standing open behind them but neither caring, not anymore, not with three deadbolts and a new promise between them.