Run: 2026-02-19-01KHT0ABWM8HP2B75BC9JCM47A

The three deadbolts slid back with heavy clunks. Aurora pulled the door open, her delivery bag still slung over one shoulder, the scent of cumin and turmeric clinging to her clothes from the Golden Empress. Lucien Moreau leaned against the doorframe of Eva’s cramped Brick Lane flat, his silhouette cutting a sharp line against the dim hallway light. He wasn’t supposed to be here. He was never supposed to be here. “Rory.” His voice was a low rasp, the single syllable carrying the weight of the six months since she’d last seen him. Her knuckles turned white on the door edge. “You’re lost, Luc. This isn’t your side of the river.” “I have a proposition.” “I’m not in the business anymore. We settled that.” She made to shut the door. His ivory-handled cane came up, not to block it, but to rest gently against the wood. A polite, immovable barrier. The charcoal wool of his sleeve brushed her wrist, the one with the small crescent scar. “It is not that kind of business. It is a personal favor. And it concerns Eva.” A chill, sharper than the draft in the hall, went through her. She looked past him, down the empty stairwell. “Eva’s in Edinburgh. Research.” “She was. She returned to London this morning. She went directly to the British Library. And then she vanished.” His heterochromatic eyes—one amber, one black as a starless night—held hers. “There are signs. Unpleasant ones. I believe she stumbled into something she should not have seen.” Aurora’s cool-headed logic warred with a sudden, visceral fear. Eva, her anchor, the reason she’d fled Cardiff. Gone. She stepped back, a silent, reluctant admission. Lucien moved inside, his presence immediately making the book-cluttered flat feel smaller, more charged. He closed the door behind him, the three deadbolts engaging with soft, final clicks under his practiced hand. He took in the chaos—the scrolls spilling off the kitchen table, the towers of texts on the floor, the tabby cat Ptolemy watching balefully from a top shelf. His gaze returned to her. “You look tired.” “I deliver noodles for a living. Tired is the baseline.” She dropped her bag, not offering him a seat. There wasn’t one clear anyway. “What signs?” “A residual energy signature at her last known location. Metallic, cold. It tastes of sealed tombs and broken oaths.” He spoke of taste as others spoke of sight. “It is demonic in origin, but not of my father’s house. Something older. Hungrier.” “And you came to me why? I’m a law school dropout with a bicycle and a part-time job.” A faint, humorless smile touched his lips. “You are Aurora Carter. Who, when cornered in an alley by a ghoul last autumn, used a stolen traffic cone and a lighter filled with habanero oil to blind it before breaking its kneecaps with a tyre iron. Your thinking is… unorthodox. Eva needs that. I need that.” The reference to that night, a night that had ended with them in his private rooms above the gambling den, his hands carefully cleaning the ghoul’s ichor from her face, his mouth dangerously close to hers before they’d both pulled away—it hung between them now, a ghost in the cramped space. “We didn’t part as friends, Luc.” “We did not part as enemies. We parted as two people who recognized that entanglement was a risk neither could afford. The calculus has changed. Eva is the variable.” She crossed her arms, a defensive gesture she instantly regretted. “You have a network. Spirits, imps, witches on retainer.” “They are looking. But they will not care for her as you do. And they lack your particular perspective.” He shifted his weight slightly onto the cane. “I am asking you to work with me. Just until she is found.” The word ‘work’ did nothing to dispel the memory of his fingers tracing the line of her jaw, the forbidden heat that had flared and been ruthlessly banked. The hurt was quieter, a dull ache of something that had been almost kindled, then snuffed out by mutual, pragmatic fear. “What’s in it for you?” she asked, her voice harder than she intended. “Eva’s a good researcher, but she’s not connected to your world. Not really.” Lucien was silent for a long moment. He reached into his inner suit pocket and withdrew a small, faded photograph, holding it out. It showed a younger Eva, maybe nineteen, laughing with a dark-haired young man on the steps of the Bodleian. The man had Lucien’s sharp cheekbones, his same severe mouth softened by a genuine smile. “His name was Julien,” Lucien said, the name leaving his lips with a soft, almost painful precision. “My younger brother. Fully human. He wanted to be an archivist. He and Eva were… close, for a time. At university. He died five years ago. A mundane car accident. Or so it was made to appear. Eva never knew what he was. Who I was. She only knew she lost a friend.” Aurora took the photo, the edges worn soft. She looked from the boy’s face to Lucien’s, seeing the resemblance now, seeing the loss etched in the new lines around his eyes. This was the unsaid thing. The anchor for his impeccable calm. “You never told her.” “It was safer. For her. After Julien, I made it my business to watch from a distance. To ensure her curiosity did not lead her into the same shadows that consumed him.” He took the photo back, slipping it away. “I have failed in that. So now I am asking for your help. Not as a fixer. As a man who owes a debt to his brother’s memory.” The flat was dead quiet. Ptolemy jumped down from his shelf, weaving around Lucien’s tailored trousers, a silent, furry judgment. Aurora watched the cat, buying time, her mind racing through the implications, the dangers, the sheer insanity of being near Lucien Moreau again. “What’s the first move?” Some of the rigid tension left his shoulders. “We go to the Library. To the last place she was seen. I can trace the signature more precisely with you there.” “Why with me?” “Because you are not magical. You are a void. A quiet place in the noise. The signature may cling to you where it would avoid me. It is a theory.” “Great. I’m supernatural bait.” “You are intelligent, quick, and stubborn. The bait is incidental.” He offered a slight, real smile this time. It changed his face, made him look younger, more like the brother in the photo. She grabbed her leather jacket from the back of a chair. “We take my bike. It’s faster through traffic.” “The bicycle?” His polished demeanor cracked for a second. “You got a better idea? Your car screams for attention. Mine whispers.” She headed for the door, unlocking the deadbolts. “And if we’re doing this, we do it my way. No secrets, no half-truths. You tell me everything you know, the second you know it.” He followed her onto the narrow landing. “That was always the problem between us, Rory. You demanded everything. I am built on secrets.” She turned, looking up at him, the faint light from the flat catching the platinum of his hair, the strange duality of his eyes. “Then consider this your chance to learn a new foundation. Starting now.” She started down the stairs, not waiting to see if he followed. His footsteps, measured and solid alongside the soft tap of his cane, echoed behind her all the way down to the street.