Run: 2026-02-17-01KHNFMXE8HYKD60BJYZT1KT3E

The knock came at half past nine — three sharp raps that echoed through the narrow hallway and into the cluttered sitting room. Aurora looked up from the sheaf of papers spread across the coffee table, Ptolemy dozing against her ankle. She wasn't expecting anyone. Eva was working the late shift at the hospital, and aside from the delivery rounds she'd finished hours ago, the world had been disturbingly quiet. She crossed the room barefoot, the floorboards cold beneath her feet, and glanced through the peephole. The distortion made the figure in the hallway look slightly inhuman anyway, but she would have known that face anywhere. Her hand stopped on the deadbolt. "Lucien." She said it through the door, not quite a question, not quite a greeting. The platinum hair. The impossible eyes — one amber, one black — catching the dim light of the corridor. He wore charcoal, as always, the suit immaculate, the ivory-handled cane resting against his thigh. Five months. Five months since she'd walked out of his office in Shoreditch without looking back, and now here he stood on Eva's doorstep like something she'd conjured in a fever dream. "I know." His voice carried that familiar lilt, the French accent that had never quite softened despite years in London. "I know I shouldn't be here." "Then don't be." A pause. She could picture him on the other side of the door, those mismatched eyes narrowing slightly, that patient half-smile he wore when he was calculating something she couldn't see. She pressed her forehead against the cool wood. "Rory." The nickname hit her somewhere under the ribs. "Please." The deadbolt slid back. She opened the door just wide enough to see him properly, the hallway light carving shadows into the sharp planes of his face. He looked the same. He looked older. There was grey at his temples now, or maybe she'd never been close enough to notice before. "This is a bad idea," she said. "Yes." "Eva's not here." "I know." Her eyes narrowed. "How do you know where she lives?" "I know many things." He held up a hand before she could speak. "I did not come to harm anyone. I did not come to drag you back into whatever you think I was dragging you into. I came because—" He stopped, and something shifted in his expression. Something she didn't have a name for. "I needed to see you. That's all. Just to see you." The words hung between them. Aurora looked at him — really looked — and saw the tension in his shoulders, the slight tremor in the hand that gripped his cane. Lucien Moreau, who never wavered. Who always had a plan, a price, a way out. He looked like a man standing on the edge of something. "You look tired," she said, and hated that she noticed. Hated that she cared. "I haven't been sleeping well." He laughed softly, a sound without humor. "Strange things happen when you stop pretending the silence doesn't bother you." She should have closed the door. Should have said goodnight and gone back to her papers and Ptolemy and the safe, small life she'd built since leaving him. But her hand was already moving, pulling the door wider, stepping aside. "There's tea," she said. "If you want tea." "I want a great many things," he said, stepping inside, "and tea is not anywhere on the list." The flat was small, cluttered, overwhelmed with the evidence of two minds that never stopped working. Books lined every wall, stacked in columns that reached the ceiling. Scrolls and papers covered the kitchen table. Maps of London with pins and annotations covered one entire wall, connected by red string in a web that would have looked paranoid if it weren't so meticulously organized. Lucien stopped in the middle of the room, cane tapping lightly against the floor, and looked around with the expression of a man visiting a museum. "You live like this now?" "I stay here sometimes. When Eva works nights." She moved past him toward the kitchen, needing something to do with her hands. The kettle. The cups. The ritual of tea. "She doesn't mind." "I didn't know you were friends with a nurse." "We've been friends since we were eleven." She found two cups, both slightly chipped, and set them on the counter. "She doesn't know what I do. What I am. She just knows I needed somewhere to go, and she gave me a key." The pause told her he understood more than she wanted him to. She'd left him in January, in the middle of a case that had gone sideways, in the middle of a conversation she couldn't finish. She'd left without explanation, without backward glance, and she'd spent five months trying not to think about the look on his face when he realized she wasn't coming back. "Sit down," she said, not turning around. "You're hovering." He sat. She heard the chair scrape against the floor, heard the creak of his weight settling. The cane leaned against the table within easy reach. She knew without looking that his hand would be resting on it — not gripping, just resting. A habit. A precaution. The kettle screamed. She poured the water, the tea steeping in the cups, and finally turned to face him. He looked smaller somehow, sitting in Eva's battered kitchen chair. Less like the king of the shadow-world and more like a man. "Why are you here, Lucien?" "I told you." "You told me you wanted to see me. That's not the same thing." She set a cup in front of him, steam rising between them. "You have other people you could see. People who aren't complicated. People who didn't walk out on you without explanation." "You had an explanation." "I had excuses." She sat across from him, cradling the cup in her hands. The heat was almost painful, but she held on anyway. "I was scared, Lucien. Of what was happening between us. Of what you were becoming to me. Of—" She stopped, shook her head. "It doesn't matter now." "It matters to me." "It was five months ago." "And yet here I am, sitting in a stranger's kitchen, wondering why I can't stop thinking about someone who left without a word." His amber eye caught the light, the black one too dark to read. "I told myself I was done. Told myself you were just another mark, another human who stumbled into my world and couldn't handle it. But you weren't. You never were." Aurora stared at him. The words she wanted to say tangled in her throat — that she'd thought about him every day, that leaving had been the hardest thing she'd ever done, that she'd lain awake in Eva's guest room and replayed every conversation until she could quote them backwards. But the words wouldn't come. They'd never come where he was concerned. "The case," she said instead. "The Marchetti thing. Is it over?" He blinked at the change of subject, but answered anyway. "Yes. Resolved." "And the thing with the Fae courts?" "Also resolved." A pause. "Are you asking because you care, or because you're trying to change the subject?" "Both." He laughed — a real laugh this time, surprised out of him. His hand moved across the table, stopped just short of hers. Not touching, but close. She could feel the warmth of him, the almost-there presence that had haunted her dreams for months. "I looked for you," he said quietly. "After you left. I told myself I was checking to make sure you were safe, but I think you know that's not entirely true." "I know." "You could have come back. At any point. I would have—" "I know that too." She finally looked up, met his eyes. The mismatched gaze that had fascinated her from the first meeting, when she'd walked into his office with a case she didn't understand and a attitude she couldn't afford. "But I didn't know if I wanted to. Didn't know if what I felt was real, or just... the intensity of everything. The danger. The way you made me feel like I was standing on the edge of something huge." "And now?" She considered the question. Considered him — the sharp suit, the elegant hands, the demon-eyes that had once frightened her and now just looked like home. The scar on her wrist ached faintly, an old wound from an older life. She'd spent twenty-five years being careful. Being small. Being safe. "Now I think," she said slowly, "that maybe the edge isn't such a bad place to stand. As long as you're not standing there alone." Lucien's hand moved the last few inches. His fingers brushed hers, warm and deliberate, and he held on. "That sounds like an invitation," he said. "It might be." She turned her hand over, let her palm press against his. "But you're still an idiot for coming here." "I am." He smiled, and it was the smile she'd been trying to forget for five months — the one that made him look younger, less guarded, almost human. "But I'm your idiot now, if you'll have me." Ptolemy appeared in the kitchen doorway, stretched, and began washing his face as if two strangers holding hands in his territory was nothing unusual. Aurora laughed, a sound that surprised her, and Lucien raised an eyebrow at the cat. "I don't believe I've been introduced." "That's Ptolemy. He's an ass. Don't take it personally." "I never do." He was still smiling. His thumb traced a slow circle on her palm, and she shivered despite the warmth of the kitchen. Outside, Brick Lane hummed with the sound of late-night traffic, voices, the distant thrum of a city that never stopped. Inside, in a cramped flat above a curry house, two people who had walked away from each other sat with their hands intertwined and their cups of tea growing cold. "I'm not good at this," Aurora said. "The... whatever this is." "Neither am I." Lucien lifted her hand, pressed a kiss to her knuckles — courtly, old-fashioned, entirely him. "But I'm willing to learn, if you are." She looked at him for a long moment. At the grey at his temples and the weariness in his eyes. At the cane he never went anywhere without and the suit he'd apparently worn to come beg on her doorstep. At the half-smile that had once made her angry and now just made her feel something she hadn't felt in a very long time. "Okay," she said. "Okay. But we're taking it slow." "Take all the time you need." He didn't let go of her hand. "I've waited this long. I can wait forever, if that's what you need." "That's dramatic." "I'm a half-demon, darling. Dramatic is in my blood." She laughed again, and this time when she smiled, it reached her eyes. The papers could wait. The pins and strings and red thread could wait. The world outside could keep spinning without her for one night. One night. Then another. Then whatever came after. It was a start.