Run: 2026-02-18-01KHQ9218TT86BQF2DF1Z3CXZX

The third deadbolt always stuck. Rory jiggled the key with practiced irritation, shouldering the door open into the familiar smell of cardamom and old paper. She was still in her delivery jacket, her hair damp from the drizzle outside, a plastic bag of leftover spring rolls dangling from two fingers — Yu-Fei's parting gift at the end of the shift. Ptolemy appeared instantly from behind a stack of grimoires, winding a figure-eight around her ankles before she'd even cleared the threshold. "Yeah, yeah," she muttered, toeing off her trainers. "I know you're starving. You're always starving." She was halfway to the kitchen when the knock came at the door she'd just locked behind her. Three precise raps. Not loud. Not urgent. Just — certain. Rory set the spring rolls on the counter and stood very still for a moment. She knew that knock. She crossed back to the door and pressed her palm flat against it, the wood cool under her hand. Three deadbolts. She'd thrown all three of them without thinking, muscle memory, the habit Eva had drilled into her. She stared at the chain lock she hadn't fastened. "I know you're standing there," said the voice on the other side. "I can see the shadow under the door." The accent was Marseille softened by years in London — that particular lilt that turned vowels into something between a question and a statement. Rory closed her eyes briefly. She opened the door. Lucien Moreau stood in the hallway with rainwater on the shoulders of his charcoal suit, his platinum hair slightly less pristine than its usual slicked architecture, one strand fallen across his forehead. He held his ivory-handled cane loosely at his side. His mismatched eyes — amber and black, always unnerving in the way that made your brain insist something was wrong with what it was seeing — moved over her face with an expression that was not quite the carefully assembled neutrality he usually wore. "You look terrible," he said. "You're at my door uninvited," she said. "We're both having a night." She stepped back, which was not the same as inviting him in, but he took it as such — which was very Lucien — stepping across the threshold and glancing around Eva's cramped, scroll-covered flat with the air of a man reassessing something he'd seen before and filed away and was now revising his notes on. Ptolemy approached him with great suspicion, sniffed his trouser leg once, and retreated to the windowsill to observe from a safe distance. "Eva's not here," Rory said. She folded her arms, leaning against the kitchen doorframe. "She's in Edinburgh until Thursday. If you need something from her—" "I don't need something from Eva." "Then what do you need?" He turned to look at her. The line of his jaw was tight. That was new, or — not new, she'd seen it before, once, but she'd told herself she'd imagined it. "There's a situation developing," he said. "In Vauxhall. You should know about it before it becomes your problem by proximity." "Then send a text, Lucien. Like a normal—" She stopped herself. "Like most people." "I tried," he said. "You've blocked my number." The flat was very quiet except for the muted noise of the curry house below — voices, the clatter of a pan, a brief burst of music. "I unblocked it last week," Rory said, which was true and which she hadn't meant to tell him. Something shifted in his expression, quick as a card turned face-down. He looked away, toward Eva's bookshelves, the spines of a dozen languages pressed together in no particular order. "I didn't know that," he said. "No." She pushed off from the doorframe and went to put the kettle on because she needed something to do with her hands and standing in the middle of the room looking at him felt like standing on a surface she wasn't sure would hold. She heard him move behind her, the faint tap of the cane on the floorboards, and then the creak of the chair at Eva's research table — the one with the wonky back leg. He'd always favoured that chair, which had annoyed Eva enormously. She got two mugs out. Then she stood there with a mug in each hand and thought about putting one back. She left them both on the counter. "Tell me about Vauxhall," she said. He told her. It was, as he'd said, a situation — a border dispute between two entities neither of them wanted near their respective orbits, a crossing of influence that had already resulted in two missing persons cases the Met would never solve. He spoke concisely, no wasted words, the way he always did when the information was the point and not the performance. She listened, her back still half-turned, watching the kettle. When he finished, she poured the water. "How long have you known?" she asked. "Four days." "And you came here tonight." "Yes." She turned around and put his tea on the edge of the table near his elbow — no milk, no sugar, she still knew that — and carried her own mug back to the kitchen doorframe. He was watching her with both eyes, amber and black, and she met them steadily because she'd learned early that looking away from Lucien Moreau felt like conceding something. "The last time I saw you," she said, "you told me that getting involved in my problems wasn't something you did for free." "I remember what I said." "And then you left." "I remember that as well." His hands were around the mug now, and she noticed that his knuckles were slightly split on the right hand, which meant he'd been somewhere he shouldn't have been recently, or that the Vauxhall situation was less preliminary than he was making it sound. "Lucien." "Rory." It was the name, that was what did it — the way he said it, not the clipped Carter he used when he was keeping his distance, but Rory, two syllables that he didn't soften or stretch, just said plainly, and it meant something different in his mouth than it did in anyone else's, and she was very aware that she'd spent four months not thinking about that and was now thinking about it in Eva's cramped flat with rain against the windows. "You didn't come here about Vauxhall," she said. He was quiet for a moment. Outside, a car passed, headlights moving across the ceiling. "No," he said. "Not entirely." She looked at him — at the rain still drying on his shoulders, the fallen strand of hair, the split knuckles around the mug. Thirty-two years old and half something that had no business sitting in a kitchen chair drinking tea and looking at her like that. "You could have texted," she said again, quieter this time. "I know." He turned the mug slightly in his hands, a small unconscious movement. "I didn't want to." Ptolemy dropped from the windowsill and padded across the floor with great dignity and jumped into Lucien's lap without invitation, turned twice, and settled. Lucien looked down at the cat with an expression of mild alarm that he smoothed almost immediately into something more composed. Rory, against her better judgment, laughed. It broke something in the room — not fixed it, nothing as neat as that, but loosened it, made the air a little easier to breathe. Lucien looked up at her, and the careful architecture of his face had slipped another degree. "He hates me," he said. "He sat on you," she said. "He hates me and he's making a point." "He does that." She pushed off from the doorframe one more time and crossed the room and sat in the chair across from him — close enough that their knees were nearly level, the small table between them with their two mugs steaming. She set her wrist on the table edge without thinking, and the crescent scar caught the lamplight, a pale curve on her skin. He noticed it — she saw him notice it — and looked away. "Tell me the rest," she said. "The part that isn't Vauxhall." He was quiet long enough that she thought he wouldn't. Then he set down his mug, and his mismatched eyes settled on her face, and he said, "I was wrong. About what I said. Before." The curry house music drifted up through the floor. "Okay," she said carefully. "I'm not — good at this," he said. "At whatever this is." "I know." "That's not an excuse." "I know that too." He looked at her. She looked back. Ptolemy shifted and began to purr, indifferent to both of them, and the rain picked up against the glass, and Rory thought about the three deadbolts on the door and how she'd opened it anyway, and how that probably said everything she hadn't said out loud. "Stay and finish your tea," she said. "And tell me the rest." Something in him settled. Fractionally, barely visible, but she'd learned to read him in small increments. "All right," said Lucien Moreau.