Run: 2026-02-19-01KHT0EDWD5NAGSG83RA5Z6Y66

The door swung open and the smell of cumin and frying oil from the curry house below rolled in with the draft. Lucien Moreau stood on the landing in a charcoal suit that had no business being on Brick Lane at eleven o'clock at night. Rain had darkened the shoulders of his jacket and flattened a few strands of platinum blond against his temple — the only evidence that anything in the world had ever dared to inconvenience him. His mismatched eyes — one amber, one black — settled on her with that particular stillness she remembered too well. Not surprise. He never looked surprised. Rory gripped the edge of the door. Ptolemy wound between her ankles, purring at the newcomer like a traitor. "No." "Aurora." "I said no. Whatever it is." She pushed the door. His cane — ivory handle, the one she knew hid a blade thin enough to slide between ribs — caught the frame. Not forceful. Just present. Like him. "Five minutes." "You got five minutes three weeks ago. You used them to lie to my face." Something shifted behind his expression. Not guilt, exactly. Lucien didn't wear guilt the way other people did. It sat deeper on him, in the way his jaw tightened and his gaze dropped half an inch before snapping back. "I did not lie. I withheld." "Oh, brilliant. The Frenchman's here to split hairs." She stepped back anyway. Not because she wanted to. Because Ptolemy had already trotted toward him, and because the hallway was narrow and cold and she wasn't wearing shoes, and the draft from the stairwell cut right through Eva's oversized Cardiff University jumper she'd stolen from Rory's suitcase and Rory had stolen back. He entered like he always entered rooms — assessing corners, exits, the placement of objects. His gaze swept across the chaos of Eva's flat: the books stacked in columns on the kitchen counter, the scrolls pinned open with coffee mugs, the research notes taped to the wall above the sofa in a web of red string that Eva swore made sense. The three deadbolts on the door he'd just come through. He noticed those. His black eye lingered on them a beat too long. "Eva is away?" "Doesn't matter where Eva is." "It matters if someone is listening." Rory crossed her arms. The crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist pressed against the inside of her elbow. "Say what you came to say." He set his cane against the bookshelf by the door, leaning it just so, and turned to face her fully. Without it, he looked less like a character from a period drama and more like a man standing in a cramped flat with nowhere to put his hands. He put them in his pockets. "The deal with the Marchetti family fell through." "Good." "Not good. They believe you were the reason." The kitchen faucet dripped. Ptolemy jumped onto the counter and knocked a pen to the floor. "Why would they think that?" "Because I told them." The silence that followed was the kind that fills a room the way water fills a sinking car — slowly, then all at once. Rory stared at him. He held her gaze with that infuriating steadiness, both eyes fixed, the amber one catching the bare bulb light from the ceiling fixture Eva kept meaning to replace. "You told a supernatural crime family that I — a human delivery girl with a pre-law degree she never finished — was the reason their deal collapsed." "I told them you had information that made the terms untenable. Which is true. You found the discrepancy in their shipping records. I merely... attributed the discovery." "Attributed." She laughed, and it came out sharp enough to make Ptolemy's ears flatten. "You painted a target on me so they'd come after me instead of you." "So they would come to negotiate with you instead of killing me, yes." He said it plainly. No flinch. No softening. That was the thing about Lucien — he never dressed up the ugly parts. He just laid them on the table like cards and watched you decide what to do with them. "Get out." "Aurora—" "You don't get to do that. You don't get to stand there in your stupid suit looking like that and say my name like it's something worth saying, and then tell me you've put my life in danger because it was convenient. Get out." He didn't move. Rain tapped against the window behind her. A motorbike growled past on Brick Lane, its headlight swinging a bar of white across the ceiling. "I came to fix it." "You came because you need something." "Both." She hated that he admitted it. She hated more that the admission made her believe him. Lucien was a liar by trade, an information broker who dealt in secrets the way other people dealt cards. But he had this one quality that undermined every wall she built — he never pretended to be better than he was. Not with her. "Three weeks." Her voice dropped. "Three weeks and nothing. Not a call, not a message, not even one of your cryptic little notes folded into a restaurant napkin. I thought—" She stopped. Swallowed. The scar on her wrist itched the way it always did when her pulse climbed. "You thought what?" "It doesn't matter what I thought." He took a step closer. Just one. The flat was small enough that one step changed everything — the distance between them compressed from across-the-room to close-enough-to-touch. She could smell his cologne, something dark and resinous that she'd caught on her pillow once and hadn't washed for four days, which was pathetic, and she'd never told anyone, and she never would. "You thought I had disappeared. That I had decided you were not worth the complication." His voice was low, the French accent thickening the way it only did when he was tired or honest. Right now he looked both. "You thought that what happened between us was a transaction. Something I could close like a ledger." "Wasn't it?" The question hung between them. Ptolemy, sensing the tension or simply bored, hopped off the counter and padded into the bedroom. Lucien's hand came out of his pocket. He reached toward her face — slow, deliberate, giving her every chance to pull away. His fingers stopped a breath from her jaw. "Tell me to leave and I will leave. But do not tell me it was a transaction." She should have told him to leave. Every practical bone in her body screamed it. He was half-demon. He was a fixer. He'd sold her out to people who wouldn't hesitate to hurt her. And yet his hand hovered there, not touching, waiting — and the waiting was the thing that undid her. Evan had never waited. Evan had never given her the choice. Her jaw tightened. "You don't get to show up when it rains and look wounded and expect me to fold." "I expect nothing. I am here because there is nowhere else I could make myself go." She breathed out through her nose. A shaky exhale she couldn't quite control. His fingers still hung in the air between them — long, steady fingers that she'd watched shuffle documents and uncork wine bottles and, once, press a cloth against a cut on her forehead with a gentleness that didn't match a single other thing about him. She closed the distance herself. Not his hand to her face — her hand to his wrist. She gripped it and pulled it down, and for a fractured second she saw something flash through his mismatched eyes: fear. Actual fear. That she would push him away. Instead she held his wrist between them like evidence. "You fix this. Whatever you've done, whatever you've told them — you undo it. And you don't keep things from me again. Not about my safety. Not about anything." "Aurora—" "Rory. My friends call me Rory, and if you're going to stand in my flat at eleven at night looking like a drowned cat in couture, you're at least going to use my actual name." A ghost of something crossed his mouth. Not quite a smile. Something more dangerous. "Rory." He said it like he was learning a new language. His accent turned the R soft, the vowels rounder. "I will fix it." "Swear." "On what? I am half-demon. My oaths are literally binding." "I know. That's why I'm asking." His eyes searched her face. The amber one. Then the black. Back again. She watched him calculate — not whether to agree, but the weight of what agreement meant. For someone like him, a binding oath wasn't metaphor. It was chain and lock and thrown-away key. "I swear I will undo what I have done. I swear I will keep nothing from you that concerns your safety." He paused. "Is that sufficient, or shall I also swear to stop wearing stupid suits?" Her grip on his wrist loosened but didn't release. "The suits can stay." "Generous." "I'm a generous person. It's a flaw." The rain picked up outside. The curry house below had closed; she could tell because the bass note of the extraction fan had cut out, leaving only the patter against glass and the creak of old floorboards. The flat felt smaller than it ever had. Warmer. His free hand — the one she wasn't holding — found the edge of her sleeve and tugged it gently, just enough to expose the crescent scar on her left wrist. He looked at it. He always looked at it. She'd told him the story once, the childhood accident, the fall from the garden wall in Cardiff. He'd listened without commenting, and later she'd realized that was its own kind of intimacy — someone seeing a mark on your body and not needing to narrate it. "You should eat something," he said. "You look thin." "That's not the compliment you think it is." "It is not a compliment. It is a concern." She released his wrist. Stepped back. The space between them opened again, breathable, but charged — like the air before a storm chooses whether to break or pass over. "There's leftover Szechuan in the fridge. Yu-Fei gave me the end-of-shift extras." "From the Golden Empress?" "Don't sound so horrified. It's good." "I have eaten at the Golden Empress. The mapo tofu gave me a nosebleed." "You're half-demon and you can't handle spice?" "The demon half is from Avaros. We are suited to cold." She pulled open the fridge. Containers of food crowded the shelves alongside Eva's unlabeled jars of things Rory had learned not to ask about. She grabbed the Szechuan chicken and set it on the counter. Lucien shrugged off his damp jacket and draped it over the back of a kitchen chair. Underneath, his shirt was white, pressed, and slightly translucent where the rain had soaked through at the collar. She didn't look. She looked. She looked away. He noticed. Of course he noticed. He was a broker of information. Noticing was what he did. But he didn't say anything, and that restraint — that deliberate, maddening restraint — was why she'd let him in. She put two forks on the counter. No plates. They'd eat from the container like civilized adults at the end of the world. "Five minutes is up," she said. He picked up a fork. "So it is." Neither of them moved toward the door.