Run: 2026-02-19-01KHT06HJQ1622CC4GPXE64ZYJ

The third deadbolt gave its familiar, grudging click, and Rory pulled the door open expecting Eva. It was not Eva. Lucien Moreau stood in the narrow hallway with one hand resting on the ivory handle of his cane, his charcoal suit immaculate despite the rain that had clearly caught him outside. Water beaded on his shoulders. A single dark strand had escaped his usual slicked-back platinum, and it curved against his jaw like a brushstroke. His mismatched eyes — one amber, warm as candlelight, the other black as a stopped clock — moved over her face with an unhurried patience that made her stomach clench. "No." Rory gripped the door. "Absolutely not." "Good evening, Rory." "How do you know this address?" "You know how I know things." He tilted his head slightly. "May I come in?" "No." Ptolemy chose that moment to wind between Rory's ankles and push his tabby nose through the gap, sniffing at Lucien's shoes. Lucien looked down at the cat. The cat looked up at Lucien. Some silent, irritating negotiation seemed to occur, and Ptolemy walked directly over his foot and into the hall as though personally escorting him inside. "Traitor," Rory said, to the cat. She stepped back. It wasn't an invitation so much as a surrender to the geometry of the situation. Lucien came in, and she caught the scent of rain and something underneath it — cedar, smoke, the faint mineral sharpness that was simply him and had no name she'd ever found. She closed the door and turned to find him taking in the flat with a measured sweep. Books stacked three deep on every surface. Eva's research notes fanned across the kitchen table, weighted down by a ceramic mug. Scrolls she couldn't read tucked into the gap between the sofa and the wall. Ptolemy had already claimed the armchair and begun washing a paw. "This is Eva's flat," Rory said. "I know." "So you came looking for Eva." "I came looking for you." He set his cane against the bookshelf with a deliberateness that suggested he'd already decided he was staying. "Eva told me where you were." Rory stared at him. "Eva told you." "She was persuaded that it was important." "That's—" She pressed her knuckles briefly to her mouth. "I am going to kill her." "After, perhaps." He turned to face her fully, and the amber eye caught the lamplight. "I need your help." "You need my—" She stopped herself from laughing, because the laugh that was forming had a dangerous, unhinged quality to it. She'd been in London seven months. She had successfully, deliberately, kept herself on the correct side of the very clear line she'd drawn between her life and the city's other life, the one that existed in the margins of maps, the one that Lucien Moreau occupied. She'd done well. She'd been cautious. "Sit down," he said. Not unkindly. "This is not your flat." "You're about to fall into the bookshelf." She wasn't. But her shoulder was closer to it than she'd realised, and she moved away from it with what dignity she could and dropped onto the sofa. Lucien remained standing. He always remained standing when it gave him an advantage, and he was honest enough about it to never pretend otherwise, which was one of the many things about him she found deeply aggravating. "Three months ago," she said, "you told me that whatever had happened between us was a complication that didn't serve either of us." "Yes." "Those were your exact words." "They were." "So now you're here, in Eva's flat, in my — in the flat where I live, without being invited, asking for help." She spread her hands. "What happened to the complication?" Something shifted in his face — not softening, exactly. Lucien didn't soften. It was more like a door opening an inch. "The complication is still there." "Right. Great. Brilliant." She stood back up, because sitting while he stood had begun to feel like a disadvantage, and she'd learned that from him. "Lucien—" "Rory." He said her name the way he said most things in English: cleanly, slightly too precisely, with the Marseille vowels tucked underneath it like something he'd been told to hide. "I know I have no right to be here. I know exactly what I said, and I know what it cost. I'm asking anyway." The rain had started again outside. She could hear it against Eva's single narrow window, and beyond that the muffled bass thump of something playing in the curry house below, and the ordinary sounds of Brick Lane carrying on completely indifferently. She looked at him. The wet shoulder of his suit. The slight tightness around his jaw that he'd never been able to fully school away when he was concerned about something. The way his hand had tightened on the cane, just once, and then released. "What kind of help?" she said. He reached into the inner pocket of his jacket and produced a photograph, folded once. He held it out to her. She crossed the room and took it, and their fingers didn't quite touch. She unfolded it. It was a picture of a woman she didn't recognise, standing outside a building she did — a small, undistinguished office front in Whitechapel she'd passed on her delivery route. The woman was perhaps fifty, with a deliberately unremarkable face. Someone had drawn a red circle around her left hand. On the woman's wrist was a small crescent-shaped scar. Rory went very still. "The scar is identical to yours," Lucien said, watching her. "Down to the placement." She raised her left wrist without thinking, the old habit, pressing her thumb to the curved mark. Her pulse beat against it. "Who is she?" Rory asked.