Run: 2026-02-18-01KHQ92AV4WZ70KFJ3JGZF9EC8

The second deadbolt had stuck again. Rory was still wrestling with it when the knock came, and her first thought was that Eva had forgotten her keys, which she did at least twice a week, so she didn't bother smoothing her hair or checking that her jumper wasn't inside-out before she yanked the door open. Lucien Moreau stood in the corridor with rain darkening the shoulders of his charcoal suit and his ivory-handled cane hooked over his forearm like he'd simply stopped by to return a borrowed book. Rory didn't move. Ptolemy, the traitor, wound immediately around the doorframe and pressed his broad tabby head against Lucien's shin. "Carter," Lucien said. His mismatched eyes — amber and black, unsettling in any light, somehow worse in the dim yellow glow of the corridor — tracked over her face with that particular quality of attention she had spent three months actively trying to forget. Not staring. Cataloguing. "You have a phone," she said. "I do." "You could have used it." "I could have." He reached down and scratched Ptolemy behind the ear with two fingers, not breaking her gaze. "May I come in?" "No." But she stepped back, because Eva's flat was the size of a generous closet and she couldn't have this conversation in the doorway where Mrs. Osei from across the hall would hear every word of it. She was already imagining the commentary. Rory pulled the door wide and Lucien stepped through, bringing the cold and the smell of rain and something underneath it — cedar, and smoke, and the faint brimstone edge that clung to him like a rumour she'd never quite been able to confirm. She shut all three deadbolts behind him out of habit. He surveyed the room the way he surveyed everything, with a slow patience that suggested he had already decided nothing could surprise him and was simply being polite to appearances. Books stacked on the floor because the shelves were full. Eva's research notes in a language Rory still couldn't identify pinned to the wall above the radiator. A mug of tea gone cold on the coffee table, a delivery jacket hanging from the back of the kitchen chair, Ptolemy's food bowl painted in small blue fish. "Eva's not here," Rory said. "I know. I came to see you." She crossed her arms. She was very aware, suddenly, that her jumper was in fact inside-out, the white seams showing at the collar and cuffs, and that she was wearing the socks with the holes in the toes, and that her hair was doing the thing it did when she'd been pushing it back from her face all afternoon while reading. She was not dressed for this. She was not, in any measurable sense, ready. "You look well," Lucien said. "Don't." He tilted his head. "I was being sincere." "You're always being sincere. That's not the problem." She moved to the kitchen, needing something to do with her hands, and switched the kettle on. The light flickered — the flat's electrics were temperamental in the cold — and held. "What do you want, Lucien?" A pause. She heard the soft knock of his cane against the floor as he crossed the room, and she kept her eyes on the kettle. "There is some information moving through certain channels," he said. "About the incident in Whitechapel last month. Things that concern you specifically." She turned around. "Concern me how?" He was closer than she'd expected, leaning against the counter on the far side of the narrow kitchen, cane resting across it. His platinum hair was damp at the edges. He hadn't slicked it back tonight with his usual precision and a few strands had come loose at his temple, which was the most undone she had ever seen him look, and she was furious at herself for noticing. "Someone is asking questions about the girl who stopped a ritual binding on the Whitechapel Road," he said. "Someone with resources and a reason to find her. They have a description." "Lots of people have descriptions." "Five-foot-six. Black hair. Bright blue eyes." He paused. "A crescent-shaped scar on the left wrist." The kettle clicked off. The rain against Eva's single window was very loud for a moment. "Right," Rory said. Her voice came out steadier than she deserved. She turned back to the counter and opened the cupboard for mugs, because the alternative was standing very still and letting the full weight of that land on her, and she couldn't afford that yet. "So you came to warn me." "Yes." "You could have sent a message through Silas." "I could have." "Or through Eva. She knows how to reach you." She set two mugs down. "You didn't have to come yourself." Another pause. This one had a different texture to it. "No," Lucien said. "I didn't." She kept her hands around the mugs. Outside, a car horn. The distant percussion of the curry house below, the clatter of pans drifting up through the floorboards, the smell of cardamom faint and warm. Ptolemy had followed Lucien into the kitchen and was sitting squarely in the middle of the floor with his tail curled around his feet, watching them both with the judgmental impassivity that was his primary mode of existence. "You left without saying anything," Rory said. She hadn't planned to say it. It arrived without warning, the way the truest things always did. "In March. You were just gone." "I know." "I wasn't — " She stopped. Started again. "I'm not saying I had any claim on you. I know what we were and what we weren't. But you could have said something. Even a message through Silas. Even a note." She laughed, short and humourless. "I would have taken a note." "Rory." He'd used her name. Not Carter. She made herself turn around. Lucien's expression was the thing she'd always found most difficult about him — the careful composure that was never quite as total as he meant it to be, the way something moved behind his mismatched eyes that he didn't intend to be visible. He was doing it now. She could see it. Whatever he was holding in place, she could see exactly the effort it cost him. "I had reasons," he said. "I know you did. I'm not asking you to defend them." She set her jaw. "I'm telling you what it was like." He was quiet for a long moment. The rain intensified, sheeting against the glass. "Yes," he said finally, in a voice that was quieter than his normal register. "I know. And I should have — " He stopped. Lucien Moreau, who spoke four languages fluently and made his living on the precision of words, stopped. "I handled it badly." "Fluently put." The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile, but adjacent to one. "I deserved that." "You deserved worse." But something in her had loosened, fractionally. She poured the hot water and pushed one mug along the counter toward him. He accepted it. Their fingers didn't touch, but it was a near thing, the small radius of warmth between his hand and hers before she pulled back. Ptolemy made a sound of considerable opinion and walked out of the kitchen. "Tell me about the person asking questions," Rory said. "Tell me everything you know." Lucien wrapped both hands around the mug and looked at her across the narrow kitchen. The rain. The cardamom. The particular specific quiet of a conversation that had not actually ended. "I intend to," he said.