Run: 2026-02-17-01KHNEXN37CD574KB07KCZ69KA

The knock came at half past ten, sharp and deliberate — three raps that echoed through the narrow hallway and sent Ptolemy bolting from the kitchen counter with a indignated yowl. Aurora set down her coffee mug, the steam still curling from its surface, and frowned at the door. Eva wasn't expecting anyone. Neither was she, not at this hour, not without warning. Three deadbolts. The woman was paranoid about security, and rightly so, given what they all dabbled in. She crossed the room in bare feet, mindful of the stack of papers threatening to avalanche from the coffee table, and pressed her eye to the peephole. Her heart stopped. Through the distorted glass, she could make out the sharp line of shoulders beneath a charcoal coat, platinum hair catching the hallway light. The ivory handle of a cane. The particular way he stood, weight slightly shifted, as if he'd been standing there longer than just those few knocks — as if he'd been gathering his nerve. Lucien. Her hand hovered over the deadbolt. The rational thing would be to turn around, walk back to the kitchen, finish her coffee, and pretend she'd never heard anything. Rational had never been her strong suit, though. Not where he was concerned. She undid the three locks — thumb turn, key, deadbolt — and pulled the door open. The hallway smelled of curry powder and old wood, but Lucien filled her vision completely. He looked exactly as he had six months ago, when he'd walked out of her life without a word of explanation: immaculate in a suit the color of storm clouds, his cane in one hand, the other tucked into his pocket. His face was pale and sharp, those strange eyes — one amber, one black — catching the dim light from the bare bulb above. "Rory," he said. Her name in his voice was a knife she'd forgotten she was holding. She leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, because the alternative was doing something stupid like reaching for him. "You have the wrong flat." "I don't." "Eva's not here." "I didn't come to see Eva." The silence between them was a living thing. Ptolemy meowed somewhere behind her, oblivious to the tension thick enough to cut. Aurora became acutely aware of her own appearance — sweatpants, an old university hoodie with the Cardiff crest faded nearly to nothing, hair pulled into a messy knot that was already unraveling. She looked like someone who'd been trying to read through a hangover and failing. He looked like he'd stepped off a runway. "How did you find me?" she asked. "I have my ways." "That's not an answer." "It's the only one you're getting." She laughed, the sound hollow. "You haven't changed at all." "Neither have you." His gaze dropped to her wrist, to the small crescent scar visible where the sleeve had ridden up, then back to her face. "You're still not wearing the bracelet I gave you." The bracelet. A silver chain with a tiny charm — a crescent moon, because she'd once told him her birthday was during a full moon, and he'd laughed and said she was chaos personified. She'd thrown it at his chest the night he'd disappeared, watched it clatter to the floor of the restaurant kitchen where they'd been hiding like teenagers stealing moments between orders and deliveries. "I sold it," she lied. "Needed the money." Something flickered across his face — hurt, maybe, or the memory of it. "You're a terrible liar, Aurora." "Don't call me that." "Aurora." He stepped closer, just one step, close enough that she could smell his cologne — something dark and woody, expensive enough to fund a month's rent for this flat. "I need to talk to you." "We talked. Last time I checked, that's what people do before they vanish for half a year. Talk. Or at least, one person talks while the other walks away without explanation." "I had reasons—" "You had reasons." She pushed off the doorframe, suddenly furious, the anger she'd been nursing for months rising like a tide. "You had reasons, so you didn't bother sharing them. You had reasons, so you left me standing in that kitchen like an idiot, wondering what I'd done wrong. I replayed every conversation in my head, Lucien. Every moment. I looked for the part where I'd been too much or not enough, where I'd scared you off somehow—" "You didn't—" "Then what?" She was shaking. She hated that she was shaking. "What could possibly be important enough to just disappear? To not return my calls, my texts, to have your whole bloody network suddenly pretend they don't know who I'm talking about—" "My father." The word landed like a stone in still water. Aurora's mouth closed. She knew — everyone in their circle knew — what Lucien was. Half-demon. The son of something from Avaros, a realm she'd never seen and didn't want to. It was the reason he moved through London's supernatural underworld like a ghost, the reason his information network was so vast and so reliable. It was also the reason he'd never fully touched her, never let himself stay the night, always vanishing before dawn with some excuse about business. "Your father," she repeated. "He found out about you." The hallway seemed to contract. Aurora became aware of the weight of the words, of what they might mean. "Found out what, exactly?" "That I was..." He paused, and for the first time since he'd arrived, he looked uncertain. The mask slipped, just for a moment, and she saw the exhaustion underneath. "That I was falling in love with you. That I'd been compromised." She should have felt triumph, maybe, or vindication. Instead she felt sick. "Compromised." "It's what he calls it. What his kind calls it." Lucien smiled, but there was no humor in it. "A human. A distraction. A weakness. He made it very clear that such attachments were... inconvenient. For both of us." "So you left to protect me." "I left because he threatened to hurt you. Not to scare you, not to warn you off — to hurt you. To make me watch." His voice was flat, recounting something clearly rehearsed. "He's been watching. These past six months, I've been making sure he couldn't find you. Moving pieces. Cutting channels. Making myself so boring that he's lost interest." "By disappearing." "By making sure there was nothing left for him to leverage." He looked at her then, really looked, and the intensity in those mismatched eyes made her breath catch. "I was going to come back. I was always going to come back." "You didn't know that." "I knew it the way I know my own name." He reached out, slowly, giving her time to pull away. His fingers brushed her cheek, feather-light, and she felt the slight wrongness of his temperature — always a little too cool, a little too other. "I knew it the way I knew that I couldn't stay away forever. That I'd tried, and I'd failed, and that the only thing left was to come here and beg you to listen." Aurora's eyes burned. She wasn't going to cry. She absolutely was not going to cry, not in front of him, not over this. "Beg," she said instead, her voice thick. "You're begging." "Yes." "The great Lucien Moreau, information broker, fixer, the most put-together man I've ever met. Begging." "Desperately." He smiled, and this time it reached his eyes, that crooked half-smile that had made her stupid in the first place. "I've missed you. I've missed your terrible jokes and your stubborn refusal to ask for help and the way you snore when you fall asleep on the couch." "I don't snore." "You do. It's terrible. I loved it." She laughed, and it came out wet, and then she was crying, actually crying, and Lucien was pulling her into his arms with a sound that was half-sob and half-relief. He smelled like woodsmoke and money and something faintly sulfurous that she'd never noticed before — or maybe she'd noticed and simply ignored it, the way she ignored all the warning signs that said this was a man made of shadows and secrets. "I hate you," she muttered into his shoulder. "I know." "I hate that you're half-demon and your father is terrifying and I still—" She broke off, pressing her face harder against his coat. "I still want to know what happens next." Lucien pulled back just enough to look at her. His thumb brushed the tear track down her cheek, gentle as a promise. "What happens next is that I stay. If you'll let me. No more disappearing, no more silence. Just... us. Whatever us is." "Us is complicated." "I know." "Like, legally complicated. I'm on the run from my ex, you're a half-demon with a scary father, and I deliver Chinese food for a living." "I know." He was grinning now, properly grinning, the expression so unguarded that it made her chest ache. "I've never cared less about complications in my life." Aurora looked at him — at the platinum hair that was finally starting to show some disorder, at the cane he'd set aside without seeming to notice, at the amber and black eyes that had haunted her dreams for months. She thought about Evan, about the fear that still caught in her throat when someone knocked too hard. She thought about her parents in Cardiff, about the law degree she'd abandoned, about the strange and terrible and wonderful world she'd stumbled into when she'd run to London. She thought about Lucien, and all the ways he could break her heart. Then she thought about all the ways he'd already broken it, and how she'd survived, and how maybe survival was its own kind of hope. "One week," she said. "You get one week to prove you're not going to disappear again. And you're explaining everything — the Avaros thing, your father, all of it. No more secrets." "Done." "And you're buying me dinner. The good place on the corner, not the takeaway." "Done." "And—" She stopped, because he was kissing her, finally, the way she'd been dreaming about for months — unhurried and certain, his hand cupping her face like she was something precious. Ptolemy yowled from somewhere behind them, offended by the intrusion on his territory, and Aurora laughed against Lucien's mouth. "Welcome back," she said. Lucien Moreau, half-demon, information broker, and most complicated man she'd ever met, smiled at her like she'd given him the world. "It's good to be home," he said.