Run: 2026-02-18-01KHQ91XQANASWN85QPSFQ6P6E

The second deadbolt gave her trouble, the way it always did when the weather turned damp, and Rory was still wrestling with her key when the third one finally clicked free. She shouldered the door open and stepped inside, already pulling off her jacket, already cataloguing the evening ahead — tea, a bath, and approximately six hours of not thinking about anything complicated. She didn't look up until Ptolemy made a sound she'd never heard him make before. Not a meow. Something closer to a warning. Lucien Moreau was sitting in Eva's armchair. He had one leg crossed over the other, his ivory-handled cane balanced against the armrest, and he was reading — actually reading, with the calm of a man in a private library — a slim hardback he'd presumably pulled from one of the towers of books threatening structural collapse on the side table. He looked up when she came in, the way a person looks up when they've been expecting you, and said nothing. Rory said nothing either, for a long moment. She stood in the doorway with her jacket half-off one shoulder and her keys still in her hand and looked at him. Lucien had the kind of face that rewarded looking. She'd always hated that about him. "The door was unlocked," he said. "It was not." "The first one wasn't." She pulled her jacket the rest of the way off and hung it on the hook by the door, mostly because she needed something to do with her hands. "Eva's not here." "I know." "Then what are you doing in her chair?" "Waiting." He closed the book and set it on the stack beside him with the same unhurried care he applied to everything. "For you." Ptolemy had retreated to the kitchen doorway, where he sat with his tail curled around his feet and watched them both with amber eyes that missed nothing. Rory sympathised. She crossed her arms and leaned against the doorframe and made herself meet Lucien's gaze — the mismatched eyes that she'd spent a considerable amount of effort trying not to think about over the past four months. The amber one was warmer, somehow. The black one was just dark, flat and depthless as a well. "You couldn't have texted?" "I didn't think you'd respond." She wouldn't have. That was the honest answer, and they both knew it, and the fact that he'd said it so plainly, without apology or accusation, was somehow more infuriating than if he'd lied. "Lucien." She said his name carefully, like she was setting something heavy down. "Whatever this is—" "I owe you an apology." That stopped her. He stood, which she hadn't expected, and the movement was smooth and deliberate and took up more of the small room than it should have. He wasn't particularly tall. He didn't need to be. There was a quality to the way Lucien occupied space — something she'd clocked within the first ten minutes of knowing him and had never fully found the words for. Like he'd decided, a long time ago, exactly how much of the world belonged to him, and the world had agreed. "I said things," he continued, "that were unkind. More than that — they were inaccurate, which is worse." He paused. "I don't generally permit myself to be inaccurate." Rory laughed before she could stop herself, a short sound that wasn't quite humour. "That's your apology? You were inaccurate?" Something shifted at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. "I'm working up to it." "Four months, Lucien." "Yes." "You let four months go by and then you broke into my best friend's flat—" "First lock," he said again, mild as anything. "—and sat in her chair and waited for me to come home so you could tell me that you were inaccurate." She uncrossed her arms, then didn't know what to do with them. "Did you consider that I might not want to hear it?" "Constantly." He said it without drama, without the self-pity she might have expected, and it landed like a stone into still water. "I considered it every day for four months. I considered it rather more than I'd like to admit." He picked up his cane, not leaning on it, just holding it, fingers wrapped around the ivory handle. A habit, she'd learned. Something to do with his hands. "And then I considered that I have spent a great deal of my life declining to say difficult things to people on the grounds that they might not want to hear them. And I decided that was cowardice, dressed up as courtesy." The flat was very quiet. Downstairs, the curry house was hitting its Friday evening stride — she could smell cardamom and something deep-fried, and through the floorboards came the distant percussion of a busy kitchen. Ptolemy had crept back in and was now winding himself around Lucien's ankle with the betraying affection of a cat who'd been charmed. Traitor, Rory thought. "What did you want to say to me?" she asked. Her voice came out steadier than she felt. Lucien looked at her. The amber eye and the black eye and the particular quality of attention he gave things when he had decided they mattered. "That you were right," he said. "About what I was doing. Using distance as a pre-emptive measure. Deciding for you that the complications involved in knowing me weren't worth your while." He paused again. He had a habit of pausing — not from uncertainty, she'd come to understand, but because he chose his words like a man counting money, wanting to be sure of what he had before he spent it. "I've known a great many people who found the complications involved in knowing me very much not worth their while. I made an assumption. It wasn't based on evidence." Rory pressed her thumbnail against the crescent scar on her left wrist. An old habit. Grounding. "And if I told you," she said slowly, "that you'd got it wrong — that I was worth your while, actually, and you wasted four months being a coward dressed up as courteous—" She stopped. "What would you do with that?" "I'd like to find out," he said. She looked at him for a long moment. The cane. The suit, charcoal and impeccable even after what must have been God knows how long sitting in Eva's overstuffed armchair. The platinum hair with one strand fallen loose across his forehead in a way that struck her as almost offensively human, for a man so composed. "I'm going to make tea," she said finally. "You can stay." It was not, precisely, forgiveness. It was not, precisely, anything yet. But when she moved past him toward the kitchen, she didn't leave much space between them, and she heard him follow, and she thought — with the careful, measured part of her that had learned to take things one step at a time — that it might, eventually, become something. Ptolemy trotted after them both, satisfied with the proceedings.