Run: 2026-02-19-01KHT05J7S85EY29DD4999NMSG

The door swung inward and the smell of cardamom from the curry house below rushed up the stairwell like a warm hand at Rory's back. Lucien stood on the landing. No umbrella despite the rain that had turned his charcoal jacket two shades darker across the shoulders. His platinum hair, usually slicked into architectural precision, hung in damp strands against his forehead. One amber eye caught the hallway light. The other — the black one — absorbed it. He leaned on his ivory-handled cane with both hands folded over the top, and the posture might have looked casual on anyone who hadn't been trained to make everything look casual. "No." Rory moved to shut the door. His cane caught the edge — not hard, just enough to hold it open by three inches. "I would not be here if there were alternatives." "Find some." "Aurora." Her full name in his accent did something to the air between them. She hated that it still did. She pressed her forehead against the doorframe and stared at the cane wedged in the gap, at the thin seam where the ivory handle met the shaft, where the hidden blade lived. "Eva's not home." "I know. I came to speak with you." Ptolemy threaded between her ankles, pressed his orange face into the gap, and purred at the visitor like a traitor. Rory nudged the cat back with her foot and considered her options. Three deadbolts on this door. She could break his cane if she threw her weight into it. She could call Silas, who'd be closing up the bar downstairs from her own flat across town. She could do a lot of things. She opened the door. Lucien stepped inside and his gaze moved across Eva's flat the way it always moved across rooms — cataloguing exits, surfaces, angles. The stacks of books on every horizontal plane. The scrolls pinned to the walls with thumbtacks. Research notes in Eva's cramped handwriting fanning across the kitchen table like a paper avalanche frozen mid-slide. He did not sit. He stood in the narrow channel between the sofa and the bookshelf and turned his cane slowly in his hands. "You look well." "You look wet. Say what you came to say." Something flickered behind his expression. Not hurt — Lucien didn't do hurt where people could see it. More like recalibration. "There is a contract on a woman named Malphora. Someone in the Avaros expatriate community put it out three days ago." The name dropped through her stomach. Her working alias. The name she'd used exactly twice, both times on jobs Lucien had arranged, both times in rooms full of people she never wanted to see again. "That's not my name." "No. But it is attached to your face." She crossed to the kitchen, not because she wanted tea but because she needed something between them — the counter, distance, the illusion of doing something ordinary. She filled the kettle. Set it on the burner. The blue flame caught and she watched it instead of watching him. "How did you find out?" "I am an information broker, Aurora. I found out because this is what I do." "Right. And you came straight here out of the goodness of your heart." The cane stopped turning. She heard it — the subtle cessation of movement, the way the room thinned when Lucien went still. "I came because whoever placed this contract used details that only someone in my network could have provided. Which means I have a leak. Which means I have a professional problem. But I also came because someone wants you dead, and I find that I have opinions about that." Rory gripped the edge of the counter. The crescent scar on her left wrist stood out pale against her white knuckles. "You had opinions about a lot of things six weeks ago too. Right up until you didn't." There it was. The thing in the room. She hadn't meant to open that door so soon. Maybe she'd meant to keep it shut entirely, the way she'd tried to keep the front door shut, but Lucien had a talent for finding the gaps in things. He set his cane against the bookshelf. The gesture was deliberate — she understood the language of it. He was unarming himself. "What happened in Bermondsey—" "Don't." "—was a failure of judgment on my part." "A failure of judgment." She turned from the counter. "You left me in a room with a Veil-touched arms dealer and two of his people because your contact offered you a better deal on the other side of the building. That's not a failure of judgment, Lucien. That's a choice." "Yes." He held her gaze with both mismatched eyes. "It was." The kettle ticked as the water heated. Ptolemy jumped onto the kitchen table and sat on a pile of Eva's notes about ley line convergences, his tail curling over a diagram of something Rory didn't understand. "I made a calculation," Lucien said. "The deal Vasilis offered would have given us leverage over the entire South London corridor. I believed you could handle Marchetti alone for the four minutes it would take me to—" "I had a chair leg through my shoulder, Luc." His jaw tightened. The muscle worked beneath the sharp line of his cheek. He took one step toward her, then stopped, as though he'd walked into glass. "I know." "You know because you came back and found the blood. Not because you were there." "I know because I carried you to the car. I know because you bled through my jacket and didn't make a sound. I know because you sat in my passenger seat and looked at me like I was something you'd scraped off the bottom of a delivery box, and you were right to." The kettle screamed. Neither of them moved. It shrieked into the small flat for five full seconds before Rory reached back and pulled it off the burner. Silence rushed in to fill the space. "Why didn't you call?" Her voice came out quieter than she wanted. "After. You had my number. You had Eva's number. You could have shown up at the restaurant, at my flat — Silas would have let you up. You just vanished." Lucien pulled a hand across his mouth. For the first time since she'd known him, he looked like a man who'd run out of languages. "Because you were right." The words came rough around the edges. "I made a calculation, and the calculation was wrong, and the cost was you. And I did not know how to stand in front of you and be the man who did that." "So you stood nowhere instead." "Yes." "For six weeks." "Would you have wanted to see me?" Rory opened her mouth, and the honest answer stuck sideways in her throat. She picked up two mugs from the drying rack — muscle memory, the hospitality her mother had drilled into her since childhood, making tea for people even when you wanted to throw the kettle at their head. She dropped a teabag into each. Poured the water. The ordinary choreography of it steadied something inside her chest. "I don't know," she said finally. "But I wanted you to try." Lucien's hand found the back of Eva's kitchen chair. His fingers curled over the wood. Long fingers, scarred across the knuckles. She remembered the specific weight of them on her arm, pulling her behind him when things went sideways at the Whitechapel auction. She remembered the specific absence of them in that room in Bermondsey. "I am trying now." "You're here because someone wants to kill me." "I am here because someone wants to kill you, and I could not sit in my flat and know that and do nothing. Not again. The contract is the reason. You are the cause." He said it the way he said everything — precise, structured, like a man building a sentence the way an architect builds a bridge. But something underneath the structure was shaking. Rory set his tea on the table. Ptolemy sniffed it and looked disappointed. She wrapped both hands around her own mug and leaned against the counter and looked at Lucien Moreau, half-demon information broker, the most put-together man she'd ever met, standing in her best friend's cluttered flat with rain still dripping from his hair, and she saw the cracks. She'd always been able to see the cracks. That was the problem. "Who placed the contract?" "I have three names. Two are proxies. The third is someone I need to meet in person to confirm." "And you want me to come with you." "I want you alive. If that means you come with me, then yes. If that means you lock this door and let me handle it alone, also yes. But I will not make another calculation about what you can handle without asking you first." She took a slow breath. The flat smelled like cardamom and old paper and the ghost of whatever spell Eva had been working on before she left. Rain tapped the window in uneven rhythms. "You broke something, Luc. When you walked out of that room." He nodded. Not a performance, not a deflection. Just a nod. "You don't get to fix that by showing up with a crisis." "I know." "But you're here." "I am here." Rory looked down at the scar on her wrist. Crescent-shaped, childhood accident, the oldest wound she carried. Every scar since had been more complicated. She looked back up. "Drink your tea. Then show me the names." Lucien picked up the mug. His fingers brushed the spot where hers had been. He didn't sit down. She didn't invite him to. But he drank, and she drank, and Ptolemy purred between them on his bed of stolen research, and the rain kept falling on Brick Lane.