Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTYD3DG5P7K1TXAJNPXSBYQ

The door swung open and the smell of cardamom drifted up from the curry house below, warm and thick, mixing with the November cold that clung to the figure standing on the landing. Lucien Moreau looked like he'd walked out of a magazine editorial and directly into the wrong postcode. Charcoal suit pressed to razor lines, platinum hair slicked back without a strand loose, his ivory-handled cane resting against the cracked tile floor of the corridor. He belonged in Mayfair. In members-only clubs with leather chairs and whisky served in crystal. Not here, not on Brick Lane, not outside a flat that smelled of old paper and cat. Rory held the door half-open, her body filling the gap. She wore an oversized Cardiff University hoodie and joggers, and her black hair was twisted up with a ballpoint pen jammed through it to hold it in place. She didn't speak. Didn't step aside. She stood there with one hand on the doorframe and the other curled around a mug of tea that had gone cold twenty minutes ago. "Before you shut the door," Lucien said. "Bold of you to assume I opened it for you." His mismatched eyes flicked past her shoulder into the flat — the stacked books, the scattered scrolls, the chaos of Eva's research notes spread across every horizontal surface like academic shrapnel. His jaw tightened, almost imperceptibly. The amber eye caught the light from the hallway's single fluorescent tube. The black one absorbed it. "Eva is not here," Rory said. "She's in Prague. If this is business—" "It is not business." The words sat between them. Rory's fingers whitened around the mug. From somewhere inside the flat, Ptolemy let out a low, unhurried meow, the kind of sound a cat makes when it has already decided it does not care about anything happening near the front door. "You can't just show up." "And yet." He spread one hand, palm up, as if presenting the obvious fact of his presence as evidence of some universal truth. The gesture was so characteristically him — theatrical, precise, infuriating — that Rory felt something clench behind her ribs. She stepped back. Not an invitation. A retreat. But he took it as one anyway, crossing the threshold with a slight incline of his head, the way someone enters a church. The cane clicked against the hardwood floor — one, two — and then he stopped in the narrow hallway, his shoulders almost brushing the walls on either side. She pushed the door shut. The three deadbolts stared at her. She locked the bottom one only. "Tea?" she asked, already walking toward the kitchen. "If it is no trouble." "Everything with you is trouble, Lucien." She filled the kettle, her back to him, and listened to the soft percussion of his cane as he moved into the sitting room. She heard him shift a stack of books — carefully, knowing him — to sit down. The sofa springs creaked. Six weeks. Six weeks since she'd last seen him, standing in the amber light outside Silas' bar, his collar turned up against the rain, telling her that what he'd done had been necessary. That the information he'd traded — her name, her connection to Eva, the nature of Eva's research — had bought them time. That the people hunting the Avaros grimoire would have found them anyway, and this way, at least, he'd controlled the terms. She'd said nothing. She'd walked up the stairs to her flat and locked the door and sat on the kitchen floor with her back against the cabinets and pressed the heels of her hands into her eye sockets until she saw colors. The kettle boiled. She poured two cups, dropped a teabag in each, and carried them out. He sat on the sofa with Ptolemy already installed on his lap, the tabby purring with the deep rumble of a diesel engine. Lucien's long fingers scratched behind the cat's ears. Traitor, Rory thought. She set his tea on the cluttered side table, pushing aside a paperback copy of something in Aramaic, and dropped into the armchair across from him. "You look tired," he said. "You look like you rehearsed something on the way here and you're stalling." His mouth twitched. Not quite a smile. The ghost of one. "I did rehearse. Three different versions. On the Tube." "You took the Tube?" "I am trying to be less conspicuous." Rory glanced at the ivory-handled cane, the tailored suit, the platinum hair, the heterochromatic eyes. "How's that working out?" "A woman on the Central line told me I looked like a vampire." "Close enough." He exhaled through his nose — almost a laugh. Then the trace of warmth left his face and something rawer surfaced. He looked down at Ptolemy, who had gone limp with contentment across his thighs. "I came to tell you something, and I need you to hear it before you decide what to do with me." "What to do with you. Like you're a parcel." "Like I am someone who wronged you and knows it." The flat went quiet. Below, muffled, the curry house rattled and hummed with a Friday night rush. Rory wrapped both hands around her mug even though the tea was still too hot to drink. "Go on, then." Lucien raised his gaze. The amber eye held the kind of clarity that could cut, and the black one — the one from his father's side, the demon side — was unreadable as deep water. "When I traded your name, I told myself it was strategy. I told myself I was protecting you, that a controlled leak is better than a discovered secret. I told myself a great many elegant things." He paused. His thumb stilled against Ptolemy's fur. "I have had six weeks to sit with what I did, and I no longer believe any of them." Rory said nothing. "I was afraid," he continued, and the word came out like he'd had to drag it up from somewhere physical, somewhere lodged beneath muscle and bone. "The people behind the grimoire hunt — you have seen what they do, Rory. You saw what was left of Hargrove. I looked at the situation and I panicked, and I used the only currency I have ever been good at spending. Other people's secrets." "My secrets." "Your secrets. Yes." She set the mug down. The crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist caught the light as she folded her arms. "You told people with knives and sigils where to find me. Where to find Eva's research." "I gave them a version. Enough to seem cooperative, not enough to—" "Not enough." The words came out flat as a slap. "They came to the restaurant, Lucien. To Golden Empress. Yu-Fei had to lie through her teeth. They searched the kitchen. They stood next to the ovens and described what they'd do to anyone hiding what they wanted." His face changed. She watched it happen — the careful composure splintering at the edges, hairline cracks spreading through porcelain. "I did not know they went to the restaurant." "Because you didn't ask. You made your elegant trade and you walked away and you didn't look back to see what it cost." He opened his mouth. Closed it. Ptolemy, unbothered by the tension sawing through the room, kneaded his claws into Lucien's thigh. He didn't flinch. "You are right," he said. "I know I'm right." "I did not come here to defend myself." "Then what did you come here for?" He looked at her. Straight on, no performance, no angle. She'd seen him talk his way through negotiations with entities that didn't technically have mouths. She'd seen him bluff a room full of people who could smell lies. But this — this stripped-back, defenseless thing he was doing with his face — she'd never seen. "Because I could not stay away any longer, and lying to myself about why felt worse than whatever you might say to me." Heat crawled up the back of her neck. She dug her thumbnail into the arm of the chair. "That's not fair." "No." "You can't just — you don't get to show up looking like that and say things like that and expect me to—" "I expect nothing. I am not here to collect. I am here because six weeks ago I watched you walk up those stairs and I have not been able to think clearly since." Rory stood. The abruptness of it startled Ptolemy, who sprang off Lucien's lap with an indignant chirp and vanished under the desk. She crossed to the window. Brick Lane glowed orange and wet below, the neon signs of the curry houses bleeding color onto the pavement. A man was singing somewhere. Off-key. Happy. She pressed her forehead to the cold glass. "The last man who said he was afraid," she said quietly, "used it as a reason to keep me small. Fear was always his excuse. For the jealousy. For the control. For—" She stopped. Breathed. "I left Cardiff because of someone else's fear, Lucien. I am not going to rearrange my life around yours." She heard the sofa creak. The cane. One step, then another, and then he was behind her — not touching, not close enough to touch, but close enough that she could feel the warmth of him through the thin hoodie, smell the cedar and old paper scent that clung to his suits. "I am not asking you to." "Then what are you asking?" "Permission to earn back what I broke." She turned. He was right there. Closer than she'd estimated. The heterochromatic eyes were level with hers — amber and black, human and something else, and both of them unbearably open. She could see the faint shadows beneath them. He hadn't been sleeping either. "You sold me out." "I did." "I trusted you. I don't — that's not something I hand out like sweets, Lucien. You know what it took for me to trust anyone after Evan. You knew, and you—" Her voice cracked. She hated it. She pressed her lips together and looked at the hollow of his throat instead of his eyes. His hand rose — slowly, deliberately, giving her every chance to step back. His fingers hovered near her jaw, not quite landing. "Tell me to leave and I will leave. Right now. No argument." She should. She knew she should. Every rational synapse in her brain lined up in neat formation and screamed it. He'd sold her name. He'd put Yu-Fei in danger. He'd put Eva's work at risk. He was half-demon, he was a broker who dealt in secrets, and the gentleness in his hand was the same gentleness he used to manipulate everyone. But his fingers trembled. She could see it. The faintest vibration, like a plucked string. She reached up and closed her hand around his wrist. His pulse kicked against her palm — fast, faster than it should have been for someone who made a living out of composure. "You don't get to do this halfway," she said. "If you're here, you're here. No trades. No angles. No elegant strategies." "No elegant strategies," he repeated, and the corner of his mouth pulled into something fragile and unguarded. She didn't let go of his wrist. His fingertips settled against her jaw, barely there, a question more than a touch. The calluses on his hand — from the hidden blade in that cane, from years of gripping it — were rough against her skin. "I'm still angry," she said. "I know." "This doesn't fix anything." "I know that too." She pulled his wrist down, and his hand fell away from her jaw, but she didn't release him. She held on, her thumb pressed against the tendon on the inside of his wrist, feeling the rabbit-fast pulse, and something unlocked in her chest that she'd spent six weeks bricking over. "Sit down," she said. "Drink your tea before it gets cold. And then you're going to tell me everything you actually traded — not the version you've edited. Everything." He nodded once. She let go. Stepped around him. Sat back down in the armchair and picked up her mug with hands that weren't quite steady. Lucien lowered himself onto the sofa. He picked up the tea. Ptolemy crept out from under the desk, considered the room's emotional landscape with obvious disdain, and jumped back onto his lap. Outside, the man had stopped singing. Rain began to tap against the window, soft and insistent, filling the silence between them with something that almost sounded like patience.