Run: 2026-02-19-01KHSSW0E67M4N1ZXP6VA0DNDA

The third knock was louder than the first two. Rory had ignored the first, assumed the second was meant for a different door, but the third rattled the frame and sent Ptolemy bolting off the arm of the sofa. She set down her fork. Eva was out — some errand she'd been cagey about, which meant Rory was alone with her leftover rice and a stack of Eva's research notes she wasn't supposed to be reading. She crossed the flat in four steps, which was all the flat allowed, and pressed her eye to the peephole. Lucien Moreau stood in the hallway, examining the ceiling with the patient disinterest of a man who had all the time in the world and knew it. His ivory-handled cane rested against his thigh. His suit was the colour of deep water. Rory stepped back from the door. She stood there for a moment with her hand flat on the wood, feeling the cold of it, thinking about the three deadbolts. "I can hear you breathing, chérie." She turned all three locks and opened the door. He looked the same. That was the irritating thing. Three months since she'd last seen him — three months since she'd told him, in a car outside a burning warehouse, that she needed him to leave her alone — and he looked exactly as he always had. Composure like armour. That one amber eye and one black eye that still, even now, made her feel slightly off-balance, like standing on a boat. "Lucien." "You look well." He glanced past her at the chaos of the flat. "Eva isn't here." "No." "Good. I came for you." Rory leant against the doorframe and crossed her arms. "You've got a phone." "You don't answer it." "That's not an accident." He held her gaze for a moment, that amber eye catching the light from the hallway bulb, and then he tilted his head very slightly in that particular way he had — not quite an apology, not quite a concession, something in between. "May I come in?" Every sensible instinct she had said no. She'd rehearsed this, actually — not this specific scenario, but the general shape of it, the possibility of him turning up somewhere and what she would say. She'd been very clear in those rehearsals. She stepped aside. He moved past her and she caught it — just briefly — the smell of him, cedar and something underneath it that wasn't quite smoke, that she'd never been able to name and had spent more time thinking about than she'd ever admit. Ptolemy reappeared from behind the sofa and went directly to Lucien, winding around his ankles. Traitor. "Sit if you want." Rory moved back to the kitchen area, put her fork in the sink, gave herself something to do with her hands. "What's happened?" "Nothing's happened." He settled into the armchair — Eva's armchair, the one with the broken spring that everyone else complained about, though it didn't seem to bother him. He set his cane across his knees. "Not yet." "Then why are you here?" "I told you. I came for you." "That's not an answer, Lucien, that's a sentence." One corner of his mouth moved. "There's information coming through my network. Something that touches on the work you and Eva have been doing. I wanted to bring it to you directly." "You could have sent a message through Eva." "I didn't want to go through Eva." The kitchen was only separated from the living space by about two metres of floor. There was nowhere to stand that felt like enough distance. Rory leant against the counter and looked at him — at the careful line of his posture, the way his hands rested on the cane, relaxed but not quite. "You said you understood," she said. "In the car. You said you understood what I was asking." "I did understand." "And?" "And I have information that could protect you." He said it without heat. That was the thing about Lucien — he never raised his voice, never pushed, which somehow made it harder to push back. "What would you have me do, Rory? Hold it back to respect the distance you asked for? That's not a trade I'm willing to make." She looked at the ceiling for a moment. "What's the information?" "In a moment." He leant forward, elbows on his knees, which was unusual enough that she noticed it. "First I want to know if you're all right." "Don't." "It's a simple question." "It's not. Coming from you it's not." She pushed off the counter. She didn't know what she meant to do — move to the sofa, move to the window — she just needed to not be standing still. "You know what you do, yeah? You ask simple questions and they don't feel simple when you're done with them. You look at me like—" She stopped. Ptolemy had jumped into Lucien's lap, and Lucien was watching her with both hands still on the cane, not moving, just watching. "Like what?" he said, quietly. "Like you're waiting for something." "Perhaps I am." "Well." Her voice came out steadier than she felt. "Stop." He was quiet for a moment. Outside, someone on Brick Lane was shouting about a delivery, and the curry house below breathed its warm smell up through the floorboards, cardamom and something fried and good. "I shouldn't have let you leave," he said. "The car. I should have said something and I didn't, and I have thought about that more than suits me." Rory's chest did something she didn't give it permission to do. "That's not fair." "No." He didn't look away. "It isn't." She stood in the middle of the flat with Eva's research notes on every surface around her and three deadbolts on the door she'd just unlocked and looked at Lucien Moreau, who had come to her unannounced, which he'd never done before. Not once. In all the time she'd known him. "What's the information?" she said.