Run: 2026-02-19-01KHV72HMP507CJDWWRF5TZNQY

The second knock came harder than the first, rattling the deadbolts Eva had installed on a Tuesday afternoon three years ago when something with too many eyes had tried to follow her home from the British Library. Rory had been sitting cross-legged on the floor with Ptolemy's warm weight pressed against her thigh, eating cold noodles from the takeaway box she'd brought over from the Golden Empress, pretending to read a scroll that hadn't made sense to her in forty minutes. She set the box down, nudged the cat aside, and went to the door. She opened it on the third knock. Lucien Moreau stood in the narrow stairwell with rain on his shoulders and a look on his face that could have meant anything or nothing at all. His charcoal suit was immaculate despite the weather, which had been vicious all evening — the kind of London rain that came in sideways and picked pockets. A single dark streak of wet ran down the side of his jaw where his collar hadn't quite protected him. "You're supposed to check before you open it." His eyes moved past her into the flat. "I'd have recognised your knock anywhere." She didn't move from the doorway. "What do you want, Lucien?" He looked at her then — properly looked, the amber eye and the black one both doing the thing they did where she couldn't quite decide where to direct her attention. He shifted his weight onto the ivory-handled cane and the gesture might have read as casual if she hadn't learned, at some cost, to notice when he was buying himself a second to think. "May I come in?" "Eva's not here." "I'm aware. I'm not here for Eva." The rain intensified behind him. Ptolemy appeared at her ankle, sniffed the air in Lucien's direction, and walked away with the indifference only cats and royalty managed convincingly. Rory stepped back. Not an invitation exactly, more a withdrawal, and he seemed to understand the difference because he wiped his feet very carefully on the mat before crossing the threshold. She shut three deadbolts behind him. The flat looked worse with him in it, or perhaps just smaller. He occupied space in a way that had nothing to do with his height — five-eleven wasn't towering — and everything to do with how completely he seemed to fill whatever room he entered. Books teetered in their stacks. Eva's research notes lay across every flat surface in a taxonomy only Eva could follow. The single lamp she'd been using cast the place in amber light, which did nothing for her composure because amber was the colour of one of his eyes and she'd spent six weeks not thinking about that. "Sit down." She gestured at the sofa without looking at him. "Don't move anything." She went to the kitchen and put the kettle on not because she wanted tea but because it gave her something to do with her back to him, and she needed thirty seconds where he couldn't see her face. "You could have called," she said, loud enough to carry through. "You didn't pick up." "I didn't pick up because I didn't want to talk to you." "And yet." She came back into the room with two mugs and set his down on the cleared corner of the coffee table with enough precision that it landed without a sound. A small act of control. She sat in the armchair opposite the sofa with her own mug cupped in both hands and the crescent scar on her left wrist turned toward her. He hadn't touched the tea. "Whatever you have to say," she said, "say it and go." "I handled it badly." He said it without preamble, without the armour of his usual phrasing. His accent thickened the vowels just slightly when he wasn't performing ease. "In March. I handled it badly and I knew it at the time and I went away anyway." Rory studied the surface of her tea. "Badly." She let the word sit between them. "You disappeared for six weeks, Lucien. You left a note. A note." She looked up. "Three lines." "I know." "You do? Because the note rather suggested you didn't." His jaw moved. He picked up the mug finally, cradled it, didn't drink. The rain worked at the window behind him and she could hear the street below — a motorbike, someone's laughter cutting off sharply, the ordinary noise of East London doing what it always did. "I was not—" He stopped. Tried again. "There are things I'm not built for. I have been told this. I believe it, usually." A muscle worked in his cheek. "You make it difficult to believe." Rory set her mug down. "Don't do that." "Do what?" "Make it sound like something I did to you." Her voice didn't waver. She'd practiced steadiness under worse conditions than this, under conditions that had left her on a night bus to London with one bag and Eva's address on her phone. "You made a choice. You chose to leave. Whatever it was you were afraid of, you ran from it and you dressed it up in three lines of very elegant handwriting." He flinched. It was small, barely visible, but she'd learned to watch for the small things. "Yes." He set the mug down and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, cane propped against the sofa cushion. Like that he looked almost like anyone, stripped of the performance of his composure. "Yes. That is — that is exactly what I did." The flat contracted around them. Ptolemy reappeared from wherever he'd been and leapt onto the arm of the sofa nearest Lucien, circling twice before settling, the traitor. Rory watched him reach out and scratch behind the cat's ear with two fingers, automatic, distracted. "So why are you here," she said. "Not what you did. Why you're here now. Tonight." He raised his eyes to hers.