Run: 2026-02-19-01KHT0YZ1WJGKE2YRJ9QVWSYR4

The door swung open and the smell of garlic and cumin from the curry house below rushed in with the cold. Lucien stood on the landing, one hand resting on the ivory head of his cane, the other holding a brown paper bag spotted with grease. His platinum hair caught the jaundiced light of the hallway bulb. He looked exactly the same. Charcoal suit cut close to the body, pocket square folded into a precise triangle, shoes polished to a mirror finish. That was the infuriating thing about Lucien Moreau — even when he showed up uninvited at half past ten on a Tuesday night, he looked like he'd stepped out of a fitting at Savile Row. Rory gripped the edge of the door. She'd only opened it because Ptolemy had been scratching at the wood, and she'd assumed the tabby had knocked something off the landing shelf again. "No." "I brought spring rolls." "I don't care if you brought the Crown Jewels." She started to push the door shut. His cane caught the frame — not forcefully, just enough. The ivory handle clicked against the wood like a punctuation mark. "Five minutes. That's all I need." "You said that last time. Then I spent three days pulling glass out of my hair." His mismatched eyes — the amber one warm, the black one fathomless — held hers without blinking. A muscle worked in his jaw. "This isn't that kind of visit." Rory looked at his hands. No rings on the fingers except the thin silver band on his left thumb that she knew contained a ward against scrying. No blood under the nails. No tremor. She checked his breathing next — even, controlled, not the shallow pattern she'd learned to associate with him running from something. She stepped back and let the door swing wide. Lucien crossed the threshold and immediately had to navigate the topography of Eva's flat, which was less an apartment and more a geological formation of accumulated knowledge. Stacks of books rose from the floor like stalagmites. Scrolls poked out of coffee mugs. Research notes blanketed the sofa, the kitchen counter, the top of the microwave. He moved through it all with the precise, practiced gait of someone used to stepping around obstacles — or over bodies — and settled himself against the edge of the kitchen counter. Ptolemy jumped down from the bookshelf by the window and wound between his ankles. "Traitor," Rory muttered at the cat. She locked all three deadbolts. Habit. Then she turned and leaned against the door and folded her arms. Lucien set the paper bag on the counter and began rolling his sleeves back to the elbow with the methodical care of a surgeon prepping. Forearms corded with lean muscle, the skin there a shade darker than the rest of him — evidence of whatever blood ran from his father's side. "So." "So." He mirrored her tone exactly, which she hated. "Five minutes. Clock's running." "You stopped returning my calls." "That's generally what people do when they want someone to leave them alone. Most pick up on the hint." "I'm not most people." "Yeah, Lucien. I'm aware." He pulled a spring roll from the bag and bit into it. Chewed. Swallowed. The audacity of a man eating a spring roll in her kitchen — Eva's kitchen — while she stood there with her pulse hammering in her throat. "I heard about the incident at Borough Market," he said. Casual. As though he were discussing the weather. Her left wrist throbbed. The crescent scar there had nothing to do with the supernatural, but it ached all the same in moments like these, as though her body remembered what it felt like to be small and afraid. "That wasn't your business." "A revenant nearly tore your arm off." "A revenant nearly dislocated my shoulder. There's a difference." "Semantics." "Precision, actually. I thought the French valued that." He set the spring roll down. His black eye seemed to absorb the kitchen light. The amber one caught it and threw it back. It was like being watched by two different creatures at once — one of them patient, the other hungry. "I could have helped." "You were in Marseille." "I would have come back." "I didn't want you to come back." The words landed between them with the flat weight of a stone dropped into still water. Ptolemy stopped purring. Somewhere below, a door slammed in the curry house and someone shouted in Bengali. Lucien was quiet for a long time. He picked up the spring roll, looked at it, put it back in the bag. "I know what I did," he said. "At the Blackfriars job. I know what it looked like." "What it looked like? You sold the location of the safe house to Hargrove's people. Eva had to burn six months of research. Six months, Lucien. She nearly—" "I sold them a location. Not the location. I gave them an address in Deptford that was rigged with enough hex traps to keep Hargrove's enforcers busy for a week." Rory blinked. "The real safe house was never compromised. Eva's research was never in danger. I couldn't tell either of you because the information had to look genuine when it was extracted. If you'd known — if your reactions had been anything less than authentic — Hargrove's reader would have caught it." She stared at him. Her nails bit crescents into her palms. Three months. Three months she'd carried the weight of his betrayal around like a stone in her chest, had lain on Eva's sofa listening to Ptolemy purr and replaying every moment, every conversation, looking for the lie at its root. Three months of training herself not to think about the particular way he tilted his head when he listened to her, the way his accent thickened when he was tired, the single time he'd touched her face and she'd let him. "You could have told me after." "I tried. You changed your number." "You could have come here." "I am here." Another silence. Longer this time. The radiator clicked and groaned. Ptolemy jumped onto the counter and stuck his head into the paper bag. Rory pushed off the door and moved through the maze of books until she stood close enough to see the faint network of scars along his forearms, close enough to smell bergamot and smoke and something underneath both that she'd never been able to name — something warm, something not entirely human. "Three months," she said. "Do you know what three months felt like, thinking you'd—" "Yes." His voice was stripped bare. No charm. No posture. "I counted every single day of it." She wanted to hit him. She wanted to grab the lapels of that immaculate suit and shake him until the pocket square fell out. She wanted to press her face into his chest and breathe. Instead she said, "The spring rolls better be from Golden Empress." Something shifted behind his expression. Not a smile — he was too careful for that, too aware of how thin the ground was between them. But the black eye softened. The amber one held its light. "Yu-Fei sends her regards. She also said to tell you that you're late on your Thursday shift." "It's Tuesday." "She seemed to think you'd need the reminder." Rory took the bag from the counter before Ptolemy could destroy the contents. She pulled out a spring roll and sat on the only clear patch of sofa, drawing her knees up. Lucien stayed by the counter. Giving her space. Watching with that uneven gaze that saw too much. "Sit down," she said. "You look ridiculous standing there like you're waiting for an audience with the queen." He crossed the room and lowered himself into the armchair opposite, cane propped against the side. Ptolemy immediately relocated to his lap. Lucien's hand found the cat's spine and stroked once, long and slow, and Rory watched his fingers and hated herself for watching his fingers. "The thing at Borough Market," she said through a bite of spring roll. "It wasn't random. Something sent the revenant. Something knew where I'd be." His hand stilled on the cat. "You're certain?" "It knew my name, Lucien. It said my name." The amber eye went flat. The black one became a void. She'd seen him angry before — cold, surgical, channeled into precise and devastating action. This was different. This was the other half of him rising to the surface like something dark stirring in deep water. "Tell me everything." "I will. But first you're going to sit there and explain what you've actually been doing in Marseille for three months, because I know it wasn't visiting your mother." He exhaled slowly. "You won't like it." "I haven't liked anything since October. Try me." Lucien leaned back in the chair. Ptolemy resettled. The light from the single overhead bulb threw half his face into shadow, and in that shadow the black eye disappeared entirely, leaving only the amber one burning like a coal. "My father's people made contact," he said. "From Avaros." Rory set the spring roll down. "They had information about a series of breaches — thin points between their realm and ours. London, Manchester, Edinburgh. And a name attached to whoever is engineering them." He paused. "Your name came up in the file, Aurora." Her full name. He never used her full name. The sound of it in his accent — the soft roll of the R, the way he clipped the final vowel — did something to the air between them, thinned it, charged it. "Why me?" "I don't know yet. That's why I'm here. That's why I brought spring rolls and knocked on a door I wasn't sure would open." She looked at him across the chaos of Eva's flat, across three months of silence and hurt and the careful architecture of walls she'd built to keep this exact thing from happening. Ptolemy purred. The curry house clattered beneath them. London groaned outside. "You should have come sooner." "I know." "And for the record, this counts as that kind of visit." The faintest trace of something crossed his mouth. Not a smile. Not yet. "Noted." Rory picked the spring roll back up. She bit into it and chewed and did not look at his hands or his eyes or the way the lamplight found the sharp line of his jaw. She looked anyway.