Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTYP7RET5CSAXQT84WEV1QT

The knock came just as Aurora finished scrubbing curry sauce off her delivery jacket. Three sharp raps, precise and measured. She froze, hands still damp, recognizing the rhythm. Only one person knocked like that—like punctuation at the end of a perfectly constructed sentence. She dried her hands on her jeans and crossed to the door, pulse quickening. Through the peephole, platinum hair gleamed under the corridor's fluorescent light. Lucien. Of course he'd found her new address. Information was his currency, after all. Aurora undid the locks—all three of them—and pulled the door open just enough to block the entrance with her body. "No." Lucien's heterochromatic gaze swept over her, cataloguing the changes since they'd last met. Six months. Six months since she'd walked out of his Mayfair office and sworn she was done with the supernatural world. Done with him. "Bonsoir to you too, ma chérie." His accent wrapped around the words like smoke. He wore his usual charcoal suit, not a thread out of place despite the East London drizzle beading on his shoulders. The ivory handle of his cane caught the light as he shifted his weight. "May I come in?" "I said no." "You said many things that night." His amber eye—the human one—held something that might have been regret. The black demon eye remained unreadable. "Not all of them were true." "They were true enough." Aurora's fingers tightened on the doorframe. The crescent scar on her wrist ached, the way it always did when she was stressed. "What do you want, Lucien?" "To talk." "We talked. It didn't end well." "As I recall, it ended with you throwing a rather expensive bottle of Château Margaux at my head." "You ducked." "Self-preservation is hardly a character flaw." He paused, and for the first time, she noticed the tension in his shoulders, the way his fingers drummed against his cane. Lucien Moreau, always in control, was nervous. "Rory, please. Five minutes." She wanted to slam the door. Every self-protective instinct screamed at her to shut him out before he could slide past her defenses again. But something in his voice—a rawness she'd rarely heard—made her step back. "Five minutes." He entered her flat with the same fluid grace that had first caught her attention two years ago, when she'd stumbled into a demon bar by accident and he'd kept her from becoming someone's midnight snack. His gaze swept the cramped space, taking in the stacks of newspapers she'd been using to job hunt, the half-eaten takeaway from Golden Empress, the conspicuous absence of anything magical. "You're living like a mundane." "I am a mundane." She closed the door but didn't lock it. Let him know he wasn't staying. "That's what I kept trying to tell you." "Non. You are many things, Aurora Carter, but mundane is not among them." He turned to face her, and the small space suddenly felt smaller. "A mundane would not have survived what you survived. Would not have—" "Don't." The word came out sharper than intended. "Don't romanticize it. I got lucky, that's all. Lucky that Eva knew who to call. Lucky that you were bored enough to help. Lucky that I didn't end up as collateral damage in your world's politics." "Luck." He tested the word like wine on his tongue. "Is that what you tell yourself?" "It's the truth." "The truth is that you saved the Keeper of the Seven Seals from assassination. The truth is that you decoded the Morrighan Cipher when scholars had failed for centuries. The truth is—" "The truth is that I'm tired, Lucien." She sank onto her secondhand sofa, suddenly exhausted. "I'm tired of looking over my shoulder. Tired of wondering if the person serving my coffee is human. Tired of pretending that any of this is normal." He moved closer, cane clicking against the floor. "And you think hiding here, delivering Chinese food, pretending to be someone you're not—this is better?" "It's safer." "For whom?" The question hung between them. She remembered the last job they'd worked—the one that went sideways. The one where she'd nearly died because he'd withheld information, because he'd thought he was protecting her by keeping her in the dark about the true danger. "You lied to me." "I omitted certain details." "You let me walk into a trap." "I miscalculated." For the first time, his composure cracked. "I thought I could control the situation. I thought..." He stopped, jaw tightening. "I was wrong." Aurora looked up at him, startled. Lucien Moreau didn't admit fault. It wasn't in his nature—demon or human. "Say that again." His lips quirked, almost a smile. "Don't press your fortune." "Why are you here, Lucien? Really. Because if this is about another job—" "It's not about a job." "Then what?" He was quiet for a long moment, studying her with those mismatched eyes. When he spoke, his voice was low, careful. "Do you know what the worst part of being half-demon is?" The change of subject threw her. "I—what?" "It's not the politics or the constant testing of loyalties. It's not even the way both worlds look at you with suspicion." He set his cane against the wall and moved closer, close enough that she could smell his cologne—something expensive and smoky. "It's the assumption that because demon blood runs in my veins, I am incapable of certain... human experiences." "Lucien—" "You asked why I'm here." He sat beside her on the sofa, maintaining a careful distance. "I'm here because for six months, I've rehearsed what I would say when I saw you again. Hundreds of clever words, perfect turns of phrase. I'm here because none of them matter." Aurora's heart hammered against her ribs. "What does matter?" "You were right to leave." The admission seemed to cost him. "I made decisions for you, chose which truths to share and which to withhold. I treated you like—" "Like a mundane." "Oui." He laughed, short and bitter. "Ironic, non? You insist you're ordinary while I couldn't see past how extraordinary you are. I wanted to keep you separate from the uglier aspects of my world, not realizing..." "That I was already in it." "That you had the right to choose your own risks." They sat in silence. Outside, rain drummed against the windows. Somewhere below, the curry house's extraction fan hummed. Aurora studied his profile—the sharp cheekbones, the slight tension around his mouth. He looked tired. When had she last seen Lucien Moreau look anything less than perfectly composed? "You hurt me." "I know." "I trusted you." "I know that too." "And if I said I can't do that again? Trust you?" He turned to her then, and she saw something in his expression she'd never seen before. Uncertainty. "Then I would say that trust is earned, not given. And I would ask—not assume—if you might allow me the chance to earn yours again." "That's very human of you." "Perhaps you're a bad influence." Despite everything, she felt her lips twitch. "Eva says the same thing." "How is the terrifying Miss Crawford?" "Still terrifying. Still trying to convince me that normal is overrated." "Wise woman." "Biased woman. She thinks you're good for me." "And what do you think?" Aurora considered the question. Six months ago, she'd have had an answer ready. Now, sitting close enough to feel the warmth of him, to see the rain droplets still clinging to his hair, she found certainty harder to grasp. "I think you're dangerous." "Yes." "I think you're manipulative." "Guilty." "I think you have a hero complex disguised as ruthless pragmatism." His eyebrows rose. "That's... actually quite perceptive." "And I think..." She turned to face him properly, tucking one leg under her. "I think you're here because you're lonely." Something flickered across his face—surprise, perhaps, or recognition. "Takes one to know one?" "Something like that." They watched each other, the space between them charged with unspoken history. Aurora remembered other moments like this—the almost-kiss after the Seven Seals incident, the night they'd hidden from blood witches in a Camden crypt and she'd fallen asleep against his shoulder, the way he'd looked at her when she'd solved the cipher, like she'd hung the moon. "I can't go back to how things were," she said finally. "I won't be kept in the dark again." "I wouldn't ask you to." "And I won't pretend the last six months didn't happen." "Nor would I." "So where does that leave us?" Lucien reached out, hesitated, then gently took her hand. His thumb brushed over the crescent scar on her wrist—the old wound from a childhood accident that had nothing to do with his world and everything to do with who she was. "Perhaps," he said softly, "it leaves us here. In this moment. With a choice to make." "You make it sound simple." "Nothing about this is simple." His grip on her hand tightened fractionally. "But then, you've never been one for simple, have you?" Aurora looked at their joined hands—his pale and elegant, hers still stained with curry sauce under the nails. Such different worlds they came from. But maybe Eva was right. Maybe normal was overrated. "Your five minutes are up." "So they are." But he didn't move to leave. Neither did she move to make him. The rain continued its rhythm against the windows. Somewhere in the building, someone was cooking something with garlic. Her neighbor's television murmured through the thin walls. All perfectly ordinary sounds of a perfectly ordinary evening, except for the half-demon holding her hand like she was something precious and breakable and worth the risk. "Lucien?" "Mm?" "Next time you show up at my door unannounced, bring wine. Good wine." His smile was slow and genuine—not the practiced charm he wore like armor, but something real. "French or Italian?" "Surprise me. But if I throw it at your head again—" "I'll deserve it?" "You'll definitely deserve it." He lifted her hand to his lips, a gesture that should have felt archaic but somehow didn't. "D'accord. Until next time, then." "Until next time." But he still didn't move to leave, and she didn't pull her hand away, and the rain kept falling, and maybe—just maybe—that was enough for now.