Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTXKJEY2P56FKFWCWDYEGBY

The third deadbolt clicked and the door swung inward. Rory's heart stopped. She stood frozen in the doorway of Eva's flat, one hand still wrapped around the door handle, the other clutching her phone like a weapon. Ptolemy wound between her ankles, oblivious to the tension crackling through the air. Lucien Moreau leaned against the doorframe opposite her, ivory-handled cane tucked under one arm. His platinum hair was slicked back as always, though a strand had fallen loose across his forehead. His suit — charcoal, perfectly tailored — was rumpled at the shoulders. Dark circles shadowed the space beneath his heterochromatic eyes. One amber, one black. Both fixed on her with an intensity that made her skin prickle. "You're not Eva." "Brilliant observation." She didn't move aside. Didn't invite him in. "She's not here." "I can see that." His gaze swept past her into the cluttered flat, cataloguing the towers of books, the scrolls unfurled across every surface, the teacup rings staining Eva's research notes. "When will she return?" "Don't know. She didn't say." Rory tightened her grip on the door. Her knuckles had gone white. "You could try calling." "She doesn't answer my calls." "Wonder why." A muscle in his jaw flexed. In the dim light of the corridor, the amber eye caught the glow of the single flickering bulb while the black one swallowed it whole. An eternal reminder of what he was. What she'd tried so hard to forget. "May I come in?" "No." "Rory —" "It's Aurora." The words came out sharp, honed to a cutting edge. "You don't get to call me that anymore." He absorbed the blow without flinching. His fingers drummed once against the head of his cane — the only tell he ever allowed himself. She remembered that tell. Remembered watching it in smoky underground clubs while he negotiated deals with creatures that shouldn't exist. Remembered seeing it across a candlelit table in a restaurant that served blood wine to patrons who weren't human. She remembered the night he'd done it while lying to her face. "Three months," he said quietly. "You've been avoiding me for three months." "Good maths. Must be all those languages you speak." "Five, actually. I've learned another since we last spoke." "How lovely for you." She shifted her weight, ready to close the door. "Now if you'll excuse me, I was in the middle of —" "Delivering noodles?" His head tilted toward the paper bag on the table behind her, the Golden Empress logo stamped across its side in red. "Or perhaps you were busy pretending I don't exist?" The accuracy stung. She'd taken extra shifts at Yu-Fei's restaurant, filled her hours with drop-offs and pick-ups, anything to avoid the parts of London where she might run into him. Silas' bar had become a minefield. The supernatural underground she'd once navigated with him as her guide had become enemy territory. "I'm not pretending anything. I'm living my life. You should try it sometime." She stepped back, preparing to shut him out. "Goodbye, Lucien." "Wait." His hand shot out, not to grab her but to press something into the doorframe. A card. Black stock, silver lettering. An address she didn't recognize. "If something happens — if you're in danger — go there. Ask for Moira. She'll protect you." "I don't need protection." "Everyone needs protection." His voice dropped, and for a moment the mask slipped. Beneath the expensive suit and the half-demon composure, something raw flickered across his features. "Especially those who refuse to ask for it." She stared at the card. At his long fingers still pinning it to the wood. At the scar on his knuckle she'd traced a hundred times in the dark. "Why are you really here, Lucien?" He didn't answer immediately. The flickering bulb overhead cast shadows across his face, half-light and half-dark, and she thought not for the first time that he belonged to neither world fully. Not human enough for one. Not demon enough for the other. Straddling the divide, always. "I heard about the delivery. The one in Lambeth." Her stomach dropped. "How did you —" "Information is my trade, Aurora. Did you think I wouldn't hear about a rift opening in the middle of a council estate? About the creature that crawled through?" His hand fell away from the card. "About the woman who banished it?" She said nothing. Her tongue felt thick, her throat tight. The encounter had lasted less than ten minutes — a tear in reality, something with too many teeth pulling itself into her world, and then nothing. She'd acted on instinct. On knowledge she'd gathered from Eva's research, from nights spent poring over texts she barely understood. On things Lucien had taught her. "You could have died." "But I didn't." "That's not the point." He stepped closer, and she caught the scent of him — sandalwood and cigarette smoke and something underneath that was purely him, something that triggered memories she'd spent months burying. "You walked into a situation you didn't understand, against an enemy you couldn't predict, and you survived through sheer dumb luck." "Luck?" A laugh scraped out of her, brittle and hollow. "I've been studying. Training. Eva's been teaching me —" "Eva is a researcher. She knows theory, not combat. She's never faced a rift-spawn in her life." His voice hardened. "You could have called me." "Why?" The word cracked open something inside her, and suddenly three months of silence poured out. "So you could lie to me again? So you could use me as bait for whatever deal you were brokering with the Obsidian Court? So you could tell me you cared while you handed me over to —" "I never handed you over." "No. You just planned to." She was shaking now. She hadn't meant to say any of this, hadn't meant to let him see how deeply the blade had twisted. "You sat there, that night at the restaurant, and you let me believe we were... that you and I were..." She couldn't finish. The memory was too sharp — the candlelight, the wine she hadn't drunk, the way he'd reached across the table to take her hand. The way his thumb had traced the crescent scar on her wrist. The way his contact had stormed in and revealed everything. "Aurora." He said her name like a prayer. Like a wound. "I called it off. The deal. I refused the terms." "After you were caught." "Before." He stepped closer again, and this time she didn't retreat. Couldn't. The doorframe pressed into her shoulder blades. "The moment I realized what they wanted — what it would mean for you — I ended the negotiation. Antoine revealed it to hurt me. To punish me for walking away." "Convenient." "It's the truth." His hand rose, hesitated, then brushed a strand of hair from her face. His fingertips grazed her cheekbone, and she felt the touch like electricity, like a match struck in the dark. "I have never been honest with anyone the way I was honest with you. I have never wanted to be." Her breath caught. The amber eye searched her face. The black one reflected nothing. "Then why didn't you find me? After." She hated how small her voice sounded. Hated that she still wanted to believe him. "Three months, Lucien. You knew where I lived. You knew where I worked. If any of that was true, why didn't you come?" "Because you looked at me that night." The words were barely audible. "And I saw you'd already decided what I was. What I'd always be." He pulled back, and the loss of his touch left her cold. "I didn't come because I thought you'd made your choice." The card remained pinned to the doorframe. An address. A woman named Moira. Protection. She thought about the rift-spawn. About the terror that had seized her when it turned its attention to her. About the moment she'd realized she was going to die alone in a crumbling estate hallway, and the only person she'd wanted to call was the one she'd sworn never to speak to again. "I'm still angry." "I know." "I don't trust you." "I wouldn't expect you to." "But I..." She pressed her lips together. The words stuck in her throat, tangled up with pride and hurt and the memory of his hands in her hair. "I don't want to keep doing this. The avoiding. The pretending. It's exhausting." Something shifted in his expression. Hope, maybe. Or something more fragile. "What are you saying?" "I'm saying you can come in." She stepped aside, pulling the door wider. "But only for tea. And only because I have questions about that address you just gave me." "Of course." He was already moving past her, already cataloguing the flat with that sharp, predatory gaze. But he paused on the threshold, close enough that she could feel the heat radiating from him. Close enough that if she turned her head, her lips would brush his jaw. "Aurora." "What?" "Thank you." She didn't respond. Couldn't. Ptolemy wound between them, purring like a small orange engine, and Lucien bent to scratch behind his ears. When he straightened, his gaze met hers. Three months of silence. Three months of fury. And still, watching him standing there in Eva's cramped flat, she felt the pull like gravity. She'd let him in. That was already more than she'd meant to give. Ptolemy leaped onto the nearest stack of books, watching them both with the inscrutable patience of a creature who'd seen far stranger things than two people who couldn't decide whether to kiss or kill each other.