Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8TR73S5M3RK9KTVSSD6G1S

Rory heard three sharp knocks and assumed it was the curry house delivery she hadn't ordered. She padded across the stacks of Eva's books in her socks, nearly catching her toe on a rolled scroll that had migrated from the coffee table to the middle of the floor, and began working through the deadbolts without bothering to check the peephole. Three deadbolts. By the time she'd cleared the second one her irritation at the interruption had already dulled into mild curiosity. By the time she cleared the third, she had half a theory about Eva forgetting her keys again. She opened the door. Lucien Moreau stood in the narrow hallway, one hand lifted as though prepared to knock a fourth time. He wore charcoal, naturally — a suit cut so precisely it had no business existing above a curry house in Brick Lane. His platinum hair was slicked back, not a strand out of place, and his ivory-handled cane was hooked over his forearm with the practiced ease of an accessory rather than a necessity. His mismatched eyes found her immediately: the amber one warm and searching, the black one giving nothing away, as it never had. For a moment neither of them said anything. The smell of cardamom drifted up from downstairs. Somewhere behind her, Ptolemy knocked something off a shelf. "You look terrible," Lucien said, which was a lie, and they both knew it. "You're not supposed to know I'm here," Rory said, which was not a lie at all. "No," he agreed. "And yet." She should have closed the door. That was the rational, self-preserving thing to do — close the door, engage all three deadbolts, go back to the glass of wine she'd poured herself forty minutes ago and had thus far failed to actually drink. She had a plan for this evening. The plan did not include Lucien Moreau. She stepped back and let him in. He moved through the flat with the quiet assurance of a man who had been in worse places and made himself at home in all of them. His gaze tracked the chaos of Eva's research without judgment — the towers of books, the scrolls mapped with symbols Rory still couldn't read, the corkboard above the desk that had evolved in recent weeks into something that looked less like an investigation and more like evidence of a spiraling obsession. Ptolemy materialized from behind the armchair, regarded Lucien with the inscrutability common to all cats and most half-demons, and then wound once around his ankles before departing again. "Traitor," Rory said, to the cat. Lucien glanced at her. The ghost of something moved across his face — not quite a smile, but adjacent to one. "He has excellent taste." "He also eats spiders. I wouldn't flatter yourself." She moved past him toward the kitchen, because she needed something to do with her hands and the wine glass was in there and if she stood still she would have to look at him properly, and looking at him properly was a thing she was not currently equipped to do. She heard the soft tap of his cane on the floorboards as he followed, unhurried. "How did you find me?" she asked. "You told Eva to tell no one." He settled against the kitchen doorframe. "Eva told Silas not to worry. Silas mentioned to his Tuesday regulars that you were fine, just staying with a friend for a bit. One of his Tuesday regulars is a man named Declan who does occasional work for me." "Declan." She poured herself more wine, though her glass was still three-quarters full. "I don't know a Declan." "Most people don't, until they need to." "So you just — what? Looked me up through a chain of mutual acquaintances and decided to come round." "I decided to come round three weeks ago," Lucien said. "I've been deciding against it ever since." He paused. "I reconsidered this afternoon." She turned to look at him properly then, because there was no way to respond to that without facing it. He was watching her with that particular quality of attention he had — the kind that felt less like being observed and more like being understood, which was considerably more alarming. His cane was resting on the counter now, and without it his posture shifted slightly, something in the angle of his shoulders becoming less performance and more person. "Why?" she asked. "Because I dislike unfinished things." "That's not an answer." "It's the honest part of one." He looked at the wine glass she was holding with both hands like a shield. "May I?" She got down a second glass without meaning to. Her hands made the decision before her brain had caught up, which had always been the problem with Lucien Moreau — he had a gift for making her operate on instinct, and she'd spent most of the past year trying to recover her preference for deliberate thought. She poured. He took the glass, and when he did his fingers didn't quite touch hers, but it was a near thing, and the near thing registered in the same place it always had. "You left," she said. "In April. You left without—" She stopped, because the sentence had too many possible endings and she hadn't decided yet which one was true. "Without explaining," he supplied. "Without anything." He was quiet for a moment. The sounds of the street drifted up through the kitchen window — a cab, a group laughing, the eternal low heartbeat of the city that never stopped regardless of what was happening in cramped flats above curry houses. Rory thought about Cardiff, the way silence there had weight and texture, the way London silence was different — thinner, interrupted, somehow both lonelier and less so. "I had information," Lucien said, "that put you in a position of danger. Not theoretical danger. Immediate." She watched his jaw tighten slightly, the only outward sign of something working beneath the surface. "The safest thing I could do was remove myself." "You could have told me." "You would have argued." "Yes," she said. "I would have. That was rather my right." Something shifted in the amber eye — a crack in the careful composure, small but there, unmistakable to anyone paying close enough attention, and she was always paying close enough attention. "Yes," he said quietly. "It was." The admission sat between them. Rory turned her wine glass slowly against her palm, felt the familiar press of the crescent scar against the glass's base, grounding. She'd learned in the past year to use it that way — a small anchor, something real and physical and hers, when everything else was moving too fast. "I thought you'd decided I wasn't worth the trouble," she said, and hated that she'd said it, and meant it anyway. He straightened away from the doorframe. He crossed the small kitchen — it took approximately two steps, Eva's kitchen being what it was — and stopped when he was close enough that she could see both eyes clearly: the amber one that caught the overhead light and the black one that swallowed it. He said nothing immediately. He simply looked at her with an expression she had no adequate word for, something composed of equal parts frustration and care and something older, more settled, that made her chest do something inconvenient. "Quite the opposite," he said. "You were far too much trouble to risk." She held his gaze. Her heartbeat was doing the thing it had always done around him, the thing she'd catalogued and then pointedly refused to analyze. Behind them, somewhere in the flat, Ptolemy knocked another object off another surface with the absolute serenity of a creature who had never once worried about the consequences of anything. "You're going to have to do better than that," she said. But she didn't move away. "I know." He reached up — slowly, telegraphing the motion — and tucked a strand of her black hair back from her face. His touch was brief and careful, the way careful looks when it's learned from having been its opposite. He let his hand fall. "I have a great deal to explain. If you're willing." She thought about the three deadbolts on the door. She'd unlocked them all before she'd even known who was on the other side. "Sit down," she said. "I'll get the bottle."