Run: 2026-02-18-01KHQ9229CVJ9T74TY5B8PTNCW

The second deadbolt was the stubborn one. Rory had learned to coax it — a half-turn left, then right, then a firm shove with her hip — but tonight her hands were full of Yu-Fei's leftovers and her patience was running on fumes. She'd already worked a double, her feet ached, and the smell of cardamom from the curry house below had saturated her jacket so thoroughly she suspected it was permanent. The knock came just as she'd finally wrestled the door open. She turned, one hand still braced on the frame, and there was Lucien Moreau standing in the narrow stairwell like he'd been conjured out of something expensive and inconvenient. Charcoal suit, not a crease out of place. Ivory cane held loosely in his left hand. His platinum hair caught the yellow light from the single bulb overhead and turned it gold, which seemed unfair. His mismatched eyes found her immediately — the amber one warm, the black one unreadable, as always. "You're not Eva," he said. "Brilliant deduction." Rory didn't move from the doorway. "What are you doing here, Lucien?" "Eva told me she'd be home." He had the audacity to check his watch. "It's half ten." "Eva's in Manchester until Thursday. She texted you." Rory had been there when Eva had sent the message, had in fact been the one to suggest she send it, given that their previous arrangement with Lucien had produced something nobody had anticipated and everyone had been carefully not discussing for approximately six weeks. "She told you specifically not to come." A pause. The amber eye did something complicated. "She may have mentioned that." "And here you are." "And here I am," he agreed. Ptolemy chose that moment to appear between Rory's ankles, a streak of tabby fur and bad timing, and wound himself with great purpose around her shins. The cat regarded Lucien with the same slow blink he gave everyone, which Rory had once found charming and now found infuriating because it meant Ptolemy had no useful opinions. She exhaled through her nose. Stepped back. It wasn't an invitation so much as a failure of resolve. Lucien entered the way he did everything — unhurried, taking stock. He paused just inside the threshold while she relocked the deadbolts, all three, including the stubborn one, which cooperated immediately for her this time as if to prove a point. She heard him navigate the stacks of Eva's books without disturbing them. He'd been here before. He knew the terrain. "You've been working," he said, not a question. "I do that. It's called employment." She set the takeaway containers on the kitchen counter, the only surface with any free space, and turned to find him standing in the middle of the room with his cane planted and his eyes moving over the notes pinned to every available wall. Eva's research. Circles and translations and photographs of things that had no business being photographed. "You look tired," Lucien said. "You look like you have something to say and you're working up to saying it." She crossed her arms. "Just say it." He turned to face her fully. In the lamplight his features were composed into that particular arrangement she'd spent weeks cataloguing without meaning to — the slight tension at the corner of his mouth, the way he held his jaw when he was choosing words instead of simply producing them. Lucien spoke four languages. He was, in her experience, never at a loss for one. Which meant the silence was deliberate. "I owe you an apology," he said finally. Rory went very still. "For what I said. The night at Silas' bar." He held her gaze steadily. "I was —" A brief pause, as though the word cost him something. "Unkind. I said things that were unkind, and I said them because you were right, and I didn't want you to be right, and that is not an excuse." She'd replayed that conversation many times. At two in the morning when sleep wouldn't come. On her delivery routes, the familiar streets blurring past. She'd edited it in her memory, sharpening the cruelty of certain phrases, softening others, trying to arrive at some interpretation that made more sense than the obvious one, which was that he had looked at her across Silas' battered bar top and said, with complete precision, exactly what would hurt most. "You called me naive," she said. "I did." "You said I didn't understand how the world I'd stumbled into actually worked." "Also true." He didn't flinch. "Also cruel, given the context." "Given the context." Her voice was remarkably level. She was rather proud of it. "You mean given that I'd just pulled you out of a situation that would have killed most people." "It would have killed anyone else," he said, and something shifted in his voice then, something underneath the composure. "That's rather the point, isn't it." Ptolemy jumped onto the arm of the sofa and sat between them like a small, indifferent mediator. "I don't understand what you want from me," Rory said. "You apologize and then what? We go back to how it was?" "How it was," Lucien repeated slowly, as though he were examining the phrase. "How was it?" "Complicated." "Mm." He tilted his head slightly. The amber eye caught the lamp again. "That's a careful word." "I'm a careful person." "You're really not," he said, and it wasn't unkind. It was something else — something with warmth buried in it like a coal under ash. "You're brave, which some people confuse with carefulness, but it isn't the same thing at all. A careful person wouldn't have gone into the Haverstock building alone. A careful person wouldn't have argued with Malthorne for twenty minutes in a language she'd learned from a three-hundred-year-old pamphlet." "It worked, didn't it." "Spectacularly." The word came out with something that was almost a smile. "Which was when I realized you terrified me." The room contracted slightly. Or maybe Rory's understanding of it did. "I terrify you." "Considerably." He said it with the same frank evenness he might use to confirm a dinner reservation. "You are twenty-five years old and you walked into my world like you'd always belonged in it, and you were right about things I've spent a decade being wrong about, and I handled that extraordinarily poorly." He paused. "So. Yes. I came here to tell you that." Rory looked at him for a long moment. At the mismatched eyes, the careful stillness, the hand resting on the ivory handle of the cane. She thought about six weeks of silence. She thought about standing in the rain outside Silas' bar with her jaw tight, telling herself it didn't matter, telling herself she'd misread something that had never been there to read. She thought about the moment in the Haverstock stairwell when he'd looked at her — really looked, stripped of the irony and the armour of the suit — and said her name in a way that suggested she might be the most alarming and inexplicable thing he'd encountered in thirty-two years of a life that had included quite a lot of alarming things. She'd been carrying the memory of that, too. Quietly. The way you carry something you don't entirely trust yourself to put down. "The takeaway's going cold," she said. He blinked. The composure cracked, slightly. "I beg your pardon?" "I have enough for two. It's from the Golden Empress." She turned back to the counter and started opening containers. "You can stay or you can go. But if you stay, you're explaining to me what you actually came here to say, because 'I owe you an apology' is not the whole sentence and we both know it." A silence stretched behind her. She heard him move — the soft tap of the cane on the floorboards, then nothing, which meant he'd stopped. "The whole sentence," he said carefully, "is rather longer." "Good." She found two mugs and put the kettle on. "We've got time." Ptolemy relocated from the sofa arm to Lucien's vacated spot, curled into a precise circle, and closed his eyes with an air of profound satisfaction, as though the entire evening had gone exactly as he'd intended.