Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMRCRX8A5KQSMWDANFRDGFX

The third deadbolt stuck, the way it always did. Rory had to lean her shoulder into the door and jiggle the key with the precise quarter-turn that Eva had shown her months ago. When the door finally gave way, she was already reaching down to scoop up Ptolemy, who had a habit of darting for the stairwell the moment he heard tumblers turning. But Ptolemy wasn't there. She found the cat on the kitchen counter, hunched low with his ears flat against his skull, staring at the sitting room. Lucien Moreau was sitting in Eva's armchair like he owned it, one leg crossed over the other, the ivory handle of his cane resting against his knee. He'd helped himself to the kettle — a cup of something steaming sat on the side table atop one of Eva's Sumerian translation notes, and Rory felt a spike of irritation at that before she felt anything else. The lamplight caught his mismatched eyes when he looked up at her: the amber one warm and almost welcoming, the black one giving away nothing at all. "The locks," Rory said flatly. "All three of them." "Were charming." He didn't smile, not exactly. His mouth did something more complicated than that — a slight compression of his lips that could have been regret or amusement or both. "Eva should invest in wards rather than hardware. I've told her this." "Eva's in Exeter." "I know. I came to see you." The words landed in the space between them like a stone dropped into still water. Rory set down her delivery bag — it still smelled of garlic and five-spice from the last run to Hackney — and closed the door behind her. She turned the deadbolts one at a time. All three. A pointless gesture, given the man sitting ten feet away, but the ritual of it steadied her hands. She hadn't seen him in six weeks. Not since the night at the canal, when things had gone sideways with the Harker job and she'd ended up with demon blood on her jacket and his hand pressing a cloth against the gash on her forearm and his voice in her ear telling her to breathe, just breathe, and she'd turned her head and his mouth had been right there and — And then she'd told him to leave. Not politely. He looked the same. Of course he did. The charcoal suit was impeccable, the platinum hair slicked back without a strand out of place. But there were details she caught now that she hadn't let herself catalogue before — the faint hollows beneath his cheekbones, the way his long fingers wrapped around the cane handle with a tension that didn't match the rest of his studied ease. He looked like a man who had not been sleeping well and was determined that no one should notice. "How did you know I'd be here?" she asked. "Yu-Fei mentioned you'd taken the Brick Lane run tonight. She worries about you, incidentally. She thinks you're too thin." "Everyone is too thin according to Yu-Fei." Rory crossed to the kitchen, putting the counter between them. She ran her hand along Ptolemy's back, and the cat arched into her touch without taking his eyes off Lucien. Smart animal. "You could have called." "You blocked my number." "I blocked your numbers. Plural. All four of them." That almost-smile again. "Five, actually. You missed the Belgian one." "I'll remedy that." A silence opened up. Rory filled the kettle because she needed something to do with her hands, and because the act of making tea in someone else's kitchen felt like armor. She could hear the distant bass thrum of music from the curry house below, smell the ghost of turmeric and cumin that had seeped permanently into the walls. A scroll about Mesopotamian binding rituals was unrolled across the counter. She weighed down its curling edge with the kettle's base. "You look well," Lucien said quietly, and something about his tone — stripped of its usual sardonic lacquer — made her fingers tighten around the handle of Eva's chipped mug. "Don't do that." "Do what?" "Sit in my friend's chair and drink her tea and say things like that in that voice. As if the last time we spoke, I didn't —" She stopped herself. Set the mug down carefully. "Why are you here, Lucien?" He was quiet for a moment. Then he uncrossed his legs, planted both feet on the floor, and leaned forward with his forearms on his knees. The posture shifted something fundamental about him — stripped away the broker, the fixer, the man who traded in secrets and favors across four languages. What was left looked almost vulnerable, and that frightened her more than anything. "There's a contract," he said. "On you." The words didn't register immediately. Rory blinked. Ptolemy jumped off the counter and disappeared under the couch, as if even the sound of it was too much. "What kind of contract?" "The kind I traffic in. The kind people pay for. Someone wants you found, Rory, and they're not being particular about the condition you're delivered in." Her first thought, quick and shameful, was Evan. Her ex-boyfriend's name rose in her mind like a reflex, a flinch. But Evan was a human problem — possessive and mean-spirited and ordinary — and this was Lucien's world, the world he moved through like smoke, the world she had stumbled into through Eva's research and her own reckless curiosity. "Who?" she asked. "I don't know yet." "You don't know, or you won't tell me?" His jaw tightened. The amber eye flared — actually flared, a brief pulse of something luminous behind the iris that she'd only seen twice before. "If I knew, I would have dealt with it already and you'd never have known I was here. I don't have a name. I have a thread, and I'm pulling it, and I came here tonight because the thread is getting shorter and I needed you to understand that this is real." He stood. The movement was fluid despite the cane, and he closed the distance between them in three strides. He stopped on the other side of the counter, and this close she could see the things his composure was working so hard to hide. The tightness around his mouth. The way his chest rose and fell just slightly too fast. "I also came," he said, lower now, "because six weeks is a long time, and I am not as proud as you apparently think I am." Rory's pulse kicked hard against the underside of her jaw. She pressed her thumb into the crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist — an old habit, grounding — and held his gaze. "I told you to leave because you were going to get me killed," she said. "Because you live in a world where people put contracts on other people, and every minute I spend near you pulls me deeper into it. That's not pride, Lucien. That's survival." "And yet here you are," he said. "Living above a bar owned by a man who distills moonshine from grave-water. Working for a woman who feeds protective charms into her dim sum. Sleeping under the roof of a friend who reads cuneiform tablets for a living and keeps a cat named after an astronomer." He gestured around the flat — the scrolls, the teetering stacks of occult texts, the sigils scratched into the windowsill that she'd mistaken for water damage the first week she'd moved to London. "You didn't stumble into this, Rory. You walked in. You keep walking in. And telling me to leave didn't change that. It just meant you were in it alone." The kettle clicked. Neither of them moved. He was right, and she hated him for it — hated the precision of it, the way he could anatomize a situation and leave her no room for comfortable lies. She had told herself, in those six weeks of silence, that she'd drawn a line. That the ache in her chest when she thought about the canal was just adrenaline's afterimage. That she didn't replay the almost-kiss in the small hours of the morning when the flat was dark and Ptolemy was a warm weight on her feet and the city beyond the window was too loud and too quiet at the same time. "You broke into my friend's flat," she said, and her voice came out rougher than she intended. "I did." "You drank her Earl Grey." "Lapsang souchong, actually. She has appalling taste in Earl Grey." A sound escaped her — not quite a laugh, something closer to a crack. She pressed her lips together and looked down at the counter, at the scroll with its careful cuneiform, at her own hands braced against the Formica. "The contract," she said. "How much time do I have?" "I don't know. Days, perhaps. Possibly less." "And you want to — what? Protect me?" "I want to help you protect yourself. There's a difference." He set his cane against the counter. The ivory handle gleamed under the kitchen light, and she thought of the thin blade hidden inside it, and of the man who carried it — half-human, half-something burning and old — and what it cost him to stand here offering help to someone who had told him, in no uncertain terms, to get out of her life. "Why?" she asked. The question wasn't about the contract. Lucien looked at her. Both eyes — the amber and the black — steady and unguarded in a way she had never seen from him before. "You know why," he said. The space between them was the width of a kitchen counter. Three feet, maybe less. She could see the faint pulse at the base of his throat, the way his fingers curled and uncurled at his side. She could feel the warmth coming off him — warmer than a human should be, always, that half-demon furnace beneath the impeccable suit. Rory exhaled. She reached past him and poured the water into two mugs, not one. She pushed the second across the counter toward him. "If you're staying," she said, "you're sleeping on the couch. And you're not touching Eva's Sumerian notes. She'll kill us both, and she won't need a contract to do it." The tension in his shoulders released by a single degree. He wrapped his hands around the mug, and his fingers brushed hers in the transfer — brief and electric and entirely deliberate, she was sure of it. "The couch," he agreed. Then, quieter: "Thank you." "Don't thank me. You still owe me a jacket. The one with the demon blood never came clean." This time, when his mouth did the complicated thing, it was closer to a real smile. It changed his whole face — softened the sharp geometry of it, crinkled the skin beside his amber eye in a way that made something dangerous turn over in her chest. She turned away before he could see what it did to her. But she suspected, from the way his breath caught almost imperceptibly behind her, that he already knew. Outside, Brick Lane hummed with its Friday-night restlessness. Below them, the curry house clanged and sizzled and someone laughed too loudly. Ptolemy crept out from under the couch and wound himself cautiously around Lucien's ankle, and Rory watched the half-demon look down at the cat with an expression of genuine surprise, as if he'd forgotten that small, soft things might choose to come close to him. She drank her tea. He drank his. And the things left unsaid between them filled the flat like smoke — not choking, not yet, but present, and impossible to ignore, and thick with the promise that before this was over, one of them would have to breathe it in.