Run: 2026-02-19-01KHT0WM6EW6YGGJRCVSD0NXY4

The third deadbolt clicked back with a solid thunk, and Rory twisted the handle. She'd expected the Deliveroo cyclist, or perhaps Eva returning for the notes she'd forgotten that morning. Instead, Lucien Moreau filled the doorway, his shoulders blocking the sodium-yellow glow from the corridor. He hadn't changed. The charcoal suit hugged his lean frame, the platinum hair slicked back to catch the dim bulb's glare like spun metal. His ivory-handled cane rested against the doorframe, silver tip hovering above the scuffed floorboards. But it was his eyes—mismatched, one amber as whisky, one black as pitch—that rooted her to the threshold. They held six months' silence. "Rory." Her name carried that Marseille lilt, round and deliberate, as though he were tasting it. She gripped the edge of the door. The metal of the security chain bit into her palm. "You're not supposed to be here." "Eva gave me the address." He shifted, and the movement brought the scent of bergamot and cold London night into the flat. Behind him, Brick Lane roared—the curry house's extractor fan humming, the clatter of bins, a distant siren. "May I come in?" Ptolemy chose that moment to weave between Rory's ankles, his orange tabby tail lashing against her calves. The cat paused, nostrils flaring, then hissed—a guttural sound that raised the fur along his spine. Lucien's black eye glinted. "Even the cat knows." "He knows you don't belong in Eva's space." Rory didn't move aside. Her pulse hammered against her collarbone, a frantic bird beneath skin. Six months ago, she'd walked away from him in a Soho alleyway, her wrist burning where he'd caught her—the same wrist that bore the crescent scar from childhood, still pale against her pulse point. She'd told herself it was the demon in him. She'd told herself a lot of things. "You left your jacket. At my place." Lucien shifted his weight, the floorboard creaking. "The leather one with the Cardiff University patch." "I don't need it." "It's November. You're cycling through Camden in a thin hoodie." Rory blinked. He knew her route. Of course he knew; information was his currency, traded in the shadowed corners of the Golden Empress and backrooms she didn't have clearance to enter. She worked for Yu-Fei Cheung delivering takeaway, but Lucien dealt in secrets and souls. The gap between them had always been a chasm lined with razor wire. "Why now?" She tilted her chin up, her black hair swinging forward to shield the scar on her wrist. "Six months, Lucien. You don't get to knock on my door like—" "Like what?" He stepped closer, breaching the threshold's invisible boundary. His cane tapped the wood. "Like I miss the sound of your voice when you argue with me? Like I feel the shape of your absence in every room I enter?" The words landed heavy and unvarnished. Rory's breath stuttered. In the narrow hallway, with its walls lined by Eva's tottering stacks of grimoires and archaeological journals, there was nowhere to retreat. The flat smelled of old paper and turmeric from the curry house below, the scent turning suffocating. "You lied." The accusation scraped her throat raw. "About the contract with the Avarosian lord. About what you were delivering to that warehouse in the docks." "I omitted." Lucien's hand whitened around his cane. The amber eye softened; the black one remained fixed, unreadable. "There's a difference, Aurora. You know there is." "Not to me." But her hand had fallen from the door. She wasn't closing it. She wasn't telling him to leave. Ptolemy wound across the threshold and butted his head against Lucien's shin. Lucien looked down, surprise flickering across his sharp features. He reached down with his free hand—long fingers, pale, capable of violence—and scratched behind the cat's ears. Ptolemy purred, loud and unashamed. Lucien didn't look up from the cat. "Eva said you were staying here until the Council clears your paperwork. She said Evan's associates have been asking questions in Whitechapel." Rory's stomach dropped. She wrapped her arms around her ribs, pressing her palms hard enough to feel her own heartbeat. "You spoke to Eva about my safety?" "I spoke to everyone. I bled debts dry and called in markers I shouldn't have touched." He straightened, and now the hallway felt smaller, the ceiling lower. His gaze locked onto hers with predatory intensity, but when he spoke, his voice was stripped of its usual polish, raw and human. "You think I let you walk away because I didn't care? I let you walk because my shadow was long enough to cover you. I stayed back so they wouldn't see the connection." The air contracted, dense with electricity. Rory could see the pulse beating in his throat, fast and irregular. She could smell the bergamot stronger now, mixed with something metallic—fear, or perhaps injury hidden beneath the perfect tailoring. In the six months she'd known him before the split, she'd never seen him discomposed. The Lucien Moreau she'd known was silk and poison, glib explanations and dangerous smiles. This man before her, with his tired eyes and his confession spilling into the cramped corridor, was someone else entirely. "You should have told me." The whisper barely carried past her lips. "And risked you staying? Risked you becoming collateral in a war between realms?" He lifted his cane, the ivory catching the light, and for a terrible moment she thought he might strike her. Instead, he set the tip against the floor and leaned his weight on it, sagging. "I watched over you. Every night. When you finished your shift at Golden Empress, when you cycled home. I was there." Rory's throat closed. She remembered the prickle of awareness on her back, the footsteps that stopped when she turned. She'd thought it was Evan's people. She'd thought it was fear. "You idiot." Tears pricked at the corners of her bright blue eyes, hot and unwelcome. "You absolute fool. Do you know what I thought? That you were using me. That the half-demon fixer was just playing with the human delivery girl, collecting another pretty toy for his collection of secrets." Lucien flinched—a small movement, barely perceptible, but she saw it—the tightening of his jaw, the brief closure of those impossible eyes. "Is that what you believe?" "I don't know what I believe anymore." She stepped back into the flat, her socked feet silent on the floorboards. The motion created space for him to enter. Lucien hesitated at the threshold, looking for the first time uncertain, a man poised on the edge of a decision that could damn or save him. Lucien crossed the threshold. The door clicked shut behind them, the deadbolts engaging with a final sound. In the sudden hush, with only Ptolemy's purr filling the silence, they stood in Eva's cramped hallway, six months of separation compressing into the inches between their bodies. "You left your jacket." "I left everything." She looked at the scar on her wrist, pale crescent against skin, then at his hand where it gripped the cane—at the fingers trembling around the ivory. "Including the chance to ask you why your eyes look like shattered glass under moonlight. Or why you smell like my childhood summers in Cardiff, even though you've never been there." Lucien's breath hitched. He reached out, his hand hovering in the air between them, not quite touching her cheek. "May I?" Rory didn't answer. She closed the distance herself, her black hair brushing his shoulder as she moved into the space he'd invaded. Her palm found his chest, felt the heart hammering there, fast and alive and terrified. "You don't get to protect me from the shadows, Lucien." She spoke against his collar, where the charcoal wool smelled of smoke and lost things. "Not when you are the shadow I've fought not to need." His cane clattered to the floor, forgotten. His arms came up around her, tentative, as though she might burn him. As though she were the danger in the room. "Then let me stand in the light with you." The words breathed warm against her scalp. "Just for tonight. Let me be honest, if only until morning." Outside, London continued its roar. Inside Eva's flat, with three deadbolts thrown and a cat weaving circles around their ankles, Rory Carter and Lucien Moreau stood wrapped in the complicated, painful, necessary silence of two people who had finally stopped running.