Run: 2026-02-19-01KHV72HMWHVFE0CGYEEG32AH9

The knock came at half past ten, three sharp raps that cut through the low murmur of the curry house below and the scratch of Ptolemy's claws on the floorboards. Rory was halfway through the third paragraph of a scroll Eva had left her with strict instructions not to crumple, a glass of red balanced on her knee, when the sound reached her. She waited. Sometimes the neighbours knocked on the wrong door. The building had terrible acoustics and worse lighting on the stairwell. Three more raps. Deliberate. She set the scroll down on the coffee table — carefully, because she had once crumpled a corner and Eva had not let it go for a fortnight — and crossed the flat. Ptolemy watched from his perch on the arm of the sofa with the detached interest of a creature who had never once experienced surprise. She checked the peephole. Then she took a step back and looked at the ceiling and breathed out slowly through her nose. Lucien Moreau stood on the other side of the door in his charcoal suit, cane in hand, head angled slightly downward as though he were reading the grain of the wood between them. Rory opened the door. She left the chain on. "Eva's not here." One amber eye, one black — both trained on her through the gap. He looked exactly the same as he had three months ago, which felt deeply unfair. The platinum hair was swept back in its customary fashion, every strand obedient. There was a small cut along his jaw, fresh enough that the skin around it was still slightly swollen. "I know." "Then you also know this isn't my flat." "I know that as well." She looked at the cut. He noticed her looking. "It's nothing." "I didn't ask." "You were about to." She unhooked the chain because arguing through a gap in a door was not something she was willing to do twice in one lifetime, and she stepped back. He came in, and she was immediately reminded of how much space he occupied without trying, some quality of attention he carried that made the room reorganise itself around him. He noticed the scroll on the coffee table and the wine glass beside it and the particular arrangement of Eva's chaos that Rory had learned to navigate without disturbing. He didn't sit. He stood near the window with his cane planted between his shoes and looked at her in that way he had, patient and precise, as though she were a text he was translating. "You need to stop doing that," she said. "What?" "Looking at me like I'm a problem you're working out." "Old habit." He set the cane against the windowsill and turned away from her to look out at Brick Lane below, where two men were arguing over a parking spot and the curry house was still doing brisk business judging by the smell that drifted up through Eva's floorboards on a nightly basis regardless of the season. Rory crossed her arms. The flat felt smaller than usual. "What happened to your face?" "A disagreement." "With who?" "A gentleman who had strong opinions about a document I was in possession of." He turned back from the window. "It's resolved." "That's not an answer." "It's the answer you're getting." She picked up the wine glass because she needed something to do with her hands, and she leaned against the bookshelf that Eva had wedged between the sofa and the kitchenette. Ptolemy dropped from the sofa arm and wound around Lucien's ankles, which was a betrayal Rory filed away to examine later. "Why are you here, Lucien?" He looked at the cat and then back at her. Something shifted in his expression, not by much — Lucien Moreau did not deal in much — but enough. "I had information I needed to pass on." "You have a phone." "You stopped answering it." That landed in the room between them. She had stopped answering it. She had stopped answering it after the night in Southwark when he had said something to her in the dark that she had not known what to do with, and she had handled it badly, and then he had handled it badly in return, and then there had been three months of silence that she had told herself was fine and manageable and absolutely not something she thought about at odd hours. "The information," she said. "It can wait." "Then why are you here?" He picked up his cane from the windowsill, not because he needed it to walk, she had worked that much out — he used it when he was thinking. He turned it slowly in his hand. "I came to see if you were all right." "I'm fine." "You're working through Eva's research alone at half ten on a Thursday, which suggests otherwise." "I like research." "Rory." The way he said her name — her real name, not Laila, not Carter — with that slight softening that she doubted he was even aware of, was the thing that had undone her in Southwark and was threatening to do it again now. She set the wine glass down. "You don't get to show up here with a split jaw and concern and expect me to just—" She stopped. Tried again. "We left things in a bad place." "Yes." "And you just—" She gestured at the door, at the general concept of him arriving uninvited at ten-thirty. "Knocked." "I knocked," he agreed, as though this were a perfectly ordinary thing to do. "I don't know what you want from me." He was quiet for a moment. The argument from the street below had resolved itself, and the building had settled into its usual nighttime creaks. Ptolemy sat between them and cleaned his ear. "I think," Lucien said carefully, "that you do know. I think that's the difficulty."