Run: 2026-02-19-01KHSSW0E6E18K1AZ4WJS62Z5P

The knock came at half past ten, three sharp raps that cut through the low hum of Brick Lane below. Rory looked up from the notes she'd spread across Eva's kitchen table — borrowed space while Eva was in Edinburgh for the week — and listened. Ptolemy lifted his head from the pile of scrolls he'd claimed as a bed, ears swivelling. Three more knocks. She crossed the room and pressed her eye to the peephole. The distorted fish-eye view gave her a pale figure in charcoal, silver-tipped cane resting against the corridor wall, platinum hair catching the single bare bulb overhead. She recognised the line of his shoulders before she'd even registered his face. Lucien. She held very still for a moment, one hand flat against the door, as if it were a living thing she was calming. Then she worked through the three deadbolts — Eva's paranoid installation, top to bottom — and pulled the door open. He looked, as he always looked, like something that had wandered in from a different and more expensive century. The charcoal suit was immaculate despite the hour, collar open by exactly one button. His mismatched eyes — amber and absolute black — moved over her with that particular efficiency of his, cataloguing, before they settled on her face. "Carter." "You have a phone," Rory said. "A very good phone. I've seen it." "I do." He reached down and retrieved his cane from the wall. "May I come in?" She leaned against the doorframe rather than stepping aside. The smell of the curry house drifted up the stairwell — turmeric, fenugreek, the ghost of a long evening service. Behind her, Ptolemy had relocated from the scrolls to the back of the sofa and was watching proceedings with professional disdain. "It's late," she said. "It is." He didn't elaborate, and he didn't apologise, and both of those things were so completely him that she felt something loosen in her chest despite herself. She stepped back. He moved through the doorway and his eyes swept the flat the way they always swept any room — exits, surfaces, occupants. He took in the tower of books on the side table, the research notes covering the floor in concentric circles of Eva's incomprehensible filing system, the remains of Rory's dinner still on the counter. He said nothing about any of it. She shut the door. Left the deadbolts. "Eva's away," she said, moving past him toward the kitchen. She needed something to do with her hands. "So whatever you need from her—" "I know she's away." Rory stopped. She turned around. He was still standing near the door, cane held loosely, watching her with that careful neutrality he'd perfected. It gave nothing away and it never had, except that she'd learned — over months, then absence, then the specific silence after Shoreditch — that the neutrality itself was information. "So you knew I'd be here," she said. "I thought it likely." "Right." She turned back to the counter, filled the kettle because the alternative was standing there with nothing between them but the question she wasn't going to ask. "Tea." It wasn't an offer. He accepted it anyway by pulling out a chair at the kitchen table, moving her notes aside with the kind of care that suggested he'd actually read them before touching them. The kettle ticked on its base. Ptolemy dropped from the sofa to the floor and walked directly to Lucien and sat on his shoe. Traitor. "You could have texted," Rory said to the kettle. "I could have." A pause. "I wasn't certain you'd respond." The honesty of that landed differently than she'd expected. She'd braced for the deflection, the lateral step he usually took around anything personal. She poured the water, fished out two mugs, and had to consciously loosen her grip on the handle of the second one. She set them both on the table and sat down across from him. The notes were between them — Eva's handwriting and Rory's, two different kinds of chaos overlapping. Lucien's hands rested on the table, long fingers loose, the faint old scar along his right knuckle catching the overhead light. He was looking at her rather than the tea. "You left," she said. It came out quieter than she'd intended. "I did." "After Shoreditch." She wrapped both hands around her mug. The heat was almost too much. "You were just gone." "There were complications." His jaw tightened, fractional, the only visible crack. "With the Avaros situation. I had to move quickly and I couldn't—" He stopped. Started again. "I made a calculation." "That's a very Lucien word for it." "Rory." The use of her name rather than her surname did something specific to the space between her ribs. He so rarely used it. She looked up. The amber eye and the black eye held equal weight when he looked at her like that — no hierarchy between them, no deflection. Just him, the real version she'd caught in unguarded moments and never been entirely sure she hadn't invented. "I calculated," he said, "that if I explained I was leaving, you would try to come with me." "I would have." "Yes." Something moved across his face. "That was the problem." The kettle had long since gone quiet. Somewhere below them, the curry house was closing up, the last of its noise filtering up through the floorboards. Ptolemy had curled himself across Lucien's foot and begun to purr at a volume entirely disproportionate to his size. Rory looked at the man across the table — the careful construction of him, suit and cane and fluency in four languages and the particular loneliness she recognised because she knew its shape from the inside — and felt the months of silence rearrange themselves into something she hadn't let herself name before. "You should have asked," she said.