Run: 2026-02-18-01KHQ93RBMH6340P7G4X18MZM9

The third deadbolt gave a stubborn click before the door swung open, and Rory stood there in her delivery jacket with a cold cup of tea in one hand and Ptolemy draped over her opposite shoulder like a warm, purring scarf. Lucien Moreau looked exactly as he always did. That was somehow the most infuriating thing about him. Charcoal suit without a wrinkle. Platinum hair slicked back without a strand out of place. The ivory-handled cane resting loose in his left hand, tipped against the landing floor as though he had all the time in the world. His mismatched eyes — one amber, burning like a lit candle, one black as something deeper than night — moved from her face to the cat to the tea and then back to her face. "You look terrible," he said pleasantly. Rory took a long sip of the cold tea. It was awful. She drank it anyway. "Eva's not here," she said. "I know." "Then you've wasted a trip." She started to close the door. He didn't move, didn't step forward, didn't do anything so graceless as wedge his foot in the frame. He simply said her name — not Rory, not Carter, but *Aurora* — in that low, careful way of his, the way he only did when he was being serious, and the door stopped moving. She hated that. She hated it quite a lot. Ptolemy butted his head against her jaw and purred. Traitor. Rory looked at Lucien for a moment — at the shadows under those impossible eyes, at the faint tension around his mouth that his expression was working very hard not to show — and stepped back from the door. He took that for the invitation it was. He crossed the threshold and she felt the flat contract slightly, the way it always did when Lucien entered any small space. It wasn't a supernatural thing, or not entirely. It was simply that he occupied rooms differently from other people. More deliberately. Like he had decided to be there and the room had agreed to the terms. Rory closed the three deadbolts behind him — habit, Eva's insistence, six months of muscle memory — and turned to find him surveying the flat with the quiet attentiveness he gave to everything. The stacked books. The scrolls curling at their edges on the kitchen table. The two mugs on the counter, one Eva's, one Rory's, because she hadn't bothered to put them away in the weeks since Eva had gone to follow whatever lead had taken her god-knows-where. Ptolemy dropped from Rory's shoulder to the floor, sniffed once at Lucien's polished shoes, and wandered off toward the bedroom with great dignity. "How long have you been staying here?" Lucien asked. "A while." She moved past him into the kitchen and put the kettle on, because it gave her something to do with her hands. "Eva asked me to look in on the cat." "That was six weeks ago." She looked at him over her shoulder. "Keeping track?" "It's what I do." It was, she knew. Information was currency in the world Lucien moved through, and he collected it the way other men collected debts. She'd understood that about him from the beginning, which was part of why what had happened between them had been — well. What it had been. "Why are you here, Lucien?" He had moved to the kitchen table without making any sound worth mentioning. He looked at the scrolls laid out there, at Eva's cramped handwriting in the margins, at the half-translated passage Rory had been working on at two in the morning because she couldn't sleep. He didn't touch anything. "I have information you'll want," he said. "You could have rung." "You blocked my number." She had. She'd done it sitting on the stairs outside Silas' bar at half past midnight with her thumbnail over the screen, feeling very calm and very certain. She still felt it was the right call. She also felt something complicated and unwelcome now, looking at his profile in the low light of the flat. "I unblocked it three weeks ago," she said. The small silence that followed was very loud. Lucien turned from the table. His expression hadn't shifted exactly, but something had moved through it, the way a current moved through deep water — invisible from the surface but present. "I didn't know that," he said. "No." She turned back to the kettle. "What's the information?" She heard him set the cane against the table. She heard him move — two steps, three — and then he was standing beside her at the counter, close enough that she could smell the cedar and something darker underneath it that she had never been able to name, had stopped trying to name sometime in February when naming it had started to feel dangerous. He didn't touch her. He was very careful about not touching her. "There's a man," he said, quietly. "Or something wearing the shape of one. He's been asking about Eva. About her research. About her friends." Rory set down the mug. "How long?" "A month. Perhaps more." "You're telling me now?" "I'm telling you now because I've only just established that the inquiry extends to *you* specifically." He paused. "I wanted to be certain before I brought it to your door." She turned then, which was a mistake, because turning meant they were facing each other in the narrow kitchen with very little space between them, and Lucien was watching her with that expression she had only ever learned to read very late and at considerable personal cost. The one that looked like composure and was actually something else entirely. "Rory." His voice was quiet. "I am aware that we left things—" "Complicated," she said. "Yes." "That's a generous word for it." "I have been told I'm a generous man." "You've been told a lot of things that aren't true." Something moved in the amber eye, quicksilver-fast. He almost smiled. It was worse than the real thing would have been. "I didn't come here to—" he started. "I know why you came," Rory said. "And I'm grateful. Genuinely." She pressed her thumb against the small crescent scar on her left wrist, the old reflex she'd never managed to break. "I'm also not ready to pretend the last four months didn't happen." "I'm not asking you to." "Aren't you?" He looked at her for a long moment. Outside, Brick Lane moved through its usual evening noise — the clatter and spice smell rising from the curry house below, a cab horn somewhere in the distance, the city doing what the city did. "No," he said finally, and it sounded like it had cost him something. "I'm not." Rory nodded slowly. She turned back to the kettle, which had boiled and gone quiet without either of them noticing. "Tell me about the man," she said. "The one asking questions." And after a beat, Lucien reached past her — carefully, deliberately, the way he did everything — and pulled down the second mug.