Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8TP6EXC93HPMS53MVJTRCV

The third deadbolt stuck the way it always did, and Rory had to throw her shoulder against the door to wrench it open. She expected the Deliveroo driver she'd caved and ordered from twenty minutes ago. Pad thai. Extra lime. A Friday night concession to the fact that she'd been alone in Eva's flat for six days now with nothing but Ptolemy and a growing stack of translated Avarosian trade manifests for company. What she got was Lucien Moreau, standing on the narrow landing with rain darkening the shoulders of his charcoal suit, his ivory-handled cane hooked over one forearm, and a expression on his face she'd never seen before. Something close to uncertainty. It looked wrong on him, like a crack in porcelain. "No," Rory said, and pushed the door. His hand caught it. Not hard. Just enough. The amber eye caught the hallway light while the black one swallowed it whole, and the contrast made her stomach do something she refused to name. "Five minutes." "I gave you five minutes three weeks ago and you used them to lie to my face." "I used them to keep you breathing." He paused. Rain dripped from the edge of his jaw onto his collar. He didn't seem to notice. "There is a distinction." "Not one I recognize." They stood like that — her gripping the edge of the door, him holding it open with one palm flat against the wood — and somewhere below them the curry house exhaled its permanent cloud of cumin and fenugreek into the wet October air. Ptolemy threaded between her ankles, rumbling. Lucien looked down at the cat. Something in his jaw softened a fraction. "Your hands are shaking," he said, quiet. Rory curled her fingers into fists and stepped back from the door. Not an invitation. A retreat. He read it correctly and didn't move. "Eva's in Lisbon," she said. "Whatever you need from her—" "I know where Eva is. I arranged her transport." Of course he did. Lucien arranged everything. Lucien knew everything. Lucien operated in the spaces between what people said and what they meant, and he'd been doing it so long he'd forgotten how to just stand in front of someone and be honest. "Then why are you here?" He looked past her into the flat, taking in the familiar chaos — books stacked on books stacked on scrolls, Eva's conspiracy-wall of pinned notes and red string above the radiator, the single lamp burning by the window where Rory had been sitting cross-legged with a highlighter between her teeth an hour ago. His gaze settled on the crumpled blanket on the sofa. The pillow. He understood immediately that she'd been sleeping there instead of in the bedroom, and she hated him for understanding. "I am here," he said, "because I owe you something I cannot broker, trade, or delegate." "Try me." "An apology." The word sat between them like a grenade with the pin still in. Rory leaned against the doorframe, folded her arms, and felt the small crescent scar on her left wrist press against the inside of her elbow. A grounding point. A reminder of older pain, simpler pain, the kind that healed clean. "You don't apologize, Lucien. You recalibrate." His mouth twitched. Not a smile. The ghost of one that died before it reached his eyes. "Perhaps I am recalibrating now." She should have shut the door. Every rational cell in her body — and Rory had built her entire identity on those cells, on being the calm one, the quick-thinking one, the one who didn't crack — told her to shut the door, slide all three deadbolts back into place, and go eat her pad thai on the sofa with the cat. She'd survived Evan. She'd survived fleeing Cardiff with one bag and no plan. She could survive Lucien Moreau standing in a hallway looking at her like she was the only fixed point in a city full of shifting ground. Instead she said, "You're getting the landing wet." He stepped inside. He moved the way he always moved, deliberate, each motion considered, like a man who'd learned early that carelessness had consequences. He set his cane against the wall by the door — the one with the blade inside, the one he never let out of arm's reach — and that single gesture said more than anything he'd managed so far. Rory shut the door. Slid the first deadbolt. Left the other two. The flat shrank with him in it. It was already small — one bedroom, a galley kitchen barely wide enough for two people to pass, a bathroom with a shower that screamed when you turned it past lukewarm — but Lucien occupied space differently than other people. Not because of his height, though five-eleven was enough to make the low ceiling feel personal. Because of the weight he carried. The demon-blood weight, the Marseille weight, the weight of every secret he'd collected and filed away in that meticulous mind. He stood in the center of the room and looked at her, and for once he didn't fill the silence. Rory picked up Ptolemy before the cat could start winding around Lucien's ankles. The tabby protested, paddling the air with one indignant paw. "Talk, then. You said five minutes." "I told Hargrove where to find the Machen text. I told him you had already translated half of it. I told him—" He stopped. Swallowed. She watched the muscles in his throat work and felt a vicious, unwanted spike of tenderness. "I told him you were nobody. Inconsequential. A delivery girl with no ties to the underground." "I know all this. You told me all this. Three weeks ago, during your five minutes." "What I did not tell you is why." "You said it was to protect me." "That was true. But it was not complete." He pressed two fingers against his temple — an old gesture, one she'd seen him make dozens of times during late-night sessions in this very flat, bent over texts with Eva while Rory brought them tea and pretended she wasn't watching the lamplight play across his cheekbones. "Hargrove asked me to name the person I would least like him to harm. That was the question. Not 'who translated the text.' Not 'who is helping Eva Ellis.' He asked me to name the person and I—" He stopped again, and something fractured behind his mismatched eyes, and Rory put the cat down. "You said my name." "I said your name. And he heard everything in it." The rain intensified against the window. Below them, someone in the curry house dropped a pan, and the clatter rang up through the floorboards like a gunshot. Neither of them flinched. Rory's hand found the back of the kitchen chair. She gripped it. The wood was cool and solid and real, and she needed real right now because the rest of this — him, here, the raw thing in his voice — felt like the edge of a cliff she'd been backing away from for months. "So the lie," she said, slow, "the 'she's nobody, she's inconsequential' — that was damage control. After you'd already given him leverage." "Yes." "Because you couldn't keep my name out of your mouth." "Because when a man like Hargrove asks that question, the answer bypasses every defense I have ever built." He looked at her with both eyes, the amber and the black, and she felt it in her sternum. "I have spent my life being fluent. Four languages. Thousands of negotiations. I have talked my way out of rooms that were designed to be coffins. But he asked me for a name and I could not lie. Not about that. Not about you." Rory released the chair. Took a step forward. Then another. They were close enough now that she could smell rain and cedar and something faintly sulfuric underneath — the Avarosian trace, the demon-blood warmth that always ran hotter than human. She'd noticed it the first time they met, in Silas' bar, when Lucien had taken her hand to examine the crescent scar and his fingers had been almost feverish against her pulse. "You should have told me." "I know." "Three weeks ago. You should have told me all of it. Instead of the version that made you look strategic instead of—" "Instead of compromised." His voice dropped. "Instead of the man who handed your enemy a weapon because he could not say anyone else's name." Her eyes burned. She blinked it back. She was not going to cry in front of Lucien Moreau in Eva's cluttered flat at nine o'clock on a Friday while her pad thai got cold on someone's moped. "I thought you'd done the math," she said. "I thought you'd weighed me against whatever Hargrove was offering and decided I was the cheaper loss." Something moved across his face — not a flinch, deeper than that, tectonic — and he reached for her hand, then stopped. His fingers hung in the air between them, waiting. Asking. "That is what I came to correct," he said. "There is no math. There has not been math since the night you brought tea to this flat and argued with Eva about Sumerian verb declensions for forty minutes and I realized I had not looked away from you once." Rory stared at his hand. Long fingers, a thin silver ring on the index, the faintest tremor visible if she looked hard enough. Lucien Moreau, who bartered in secrets and never showed his cards, was shaking. She closed the distance. Not his hand — she bypassed it entirely, stepped into his space, grabbed the wet lapel of his jacket, and pulled him down to her. The kiss was graceless and fierce. His mouth tasted like espresso and rain. One of his hands found the back of her neck and the other settled at her waist with a care that bordered on reverence, and she felt the heat of him through every layer, the demon-blood furnace that made his skin burn while the rest of London shivered in October. She broke away first. Kept her fist in his lapel. Kept him close, his forehead almost touching hers, his breath ragged against her mouth. "That's not forgiveness," she said. "I know." "That's me telling you I'm angry and I want you here anyway, and if you lie to me again — even to protect me, even to recalibrate — I will lock all three deadbolts and you will never stand on that landing again." His thumb traced a line along her jaw. Slow. Deliberate. The amber eye was molten this close, flecked with gold she'd never noticed before. "Understood." "And you're going to tell me everything about Hargrove. Every piece of it. Tonight." "Yes." "And you're going to stay." It wasn't a question. She watched him hear it, watched the crack in the porcelain widen into something that looked, impossibly, like relief. "If you'll have me." Ptolemy jumped onto the kitchen table and knocked a stack of Avarosian manifests onto the floor. Neither of them moved. Rory's grip on his lapel tightened, the wet wool bunching under her fingers, and she pulled him down again — slower this time, her mouth finding his with a precision that surprised them both. The rain hammered against the window. The curry house hummed below. Somewhere out in the wet tangle of Brick Lane, her pad thai was getting delivered to an empty doorstep. She couldn't bring herself to care.