Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8TX7MNEWESEFARC6JMJNZ1

The first deadbolt turned with a sound like a knuckle cracking. Then the second. Then the third. Rory pulled the door open expecting the Deliveroo driver Eva had mentioned before leaving for the British Library — some apologetic kid with a bag of pad thai and an excuse about the rain. What she got instead was Lucien Moreau, standing on the narrow landing above the curry house with his platinum hair slicked back so perfectly it looked painted on, his charcoal suit darkened at the shoulders by the wet, and one hand resting on the ivory handle of that ridiculous cane as though he'd been posing there for a portrait. His mismatched eyes — amber and black, a detail she'd tried very hard to forget and failed at spectacularly — found hers, and something brief moved across his face. Surprise, maybe. Or something worse, like recognition, the kind that went deeper than just seeing someone you knew. "Hello, Rory," he said. His accent did what it always did: turned her name into something more elegant than it had any right to be. She gripped the edge of the door. Ptolemy threaded between her ankles, the tabby's purring the only warm thing in the hallway. "No," she said. "I haven't asked you anything yet." "No to whatever you're about to ask. No to the suit. No to the standing there looking like — no." She started to push the door shut. His cane moved, just slightly, the tip of it catching the gap between the door and the frame with a soft, precise click. "Five minutes," he said. "You don't get five minutes. You don't get thirty seconds. You get the memory of this door closing in your face, which is more than you gave me." That landed. She watched it land. The amber eye flinched — just a fraction, just enough — and his jaw tightened beneath the sharp, clean line of his stubble. Good. She wanted it to sting. She'd spent three months wanting exactly that. But he didn't move the cane. "I know," he said quietly. "I know I don't deserve it. But I'm not here for myself." The rain picked up outside the narrow stairwell window, drumming against the glass like impatient fingers. Somewhere below, the curry house kitchen sent up its usual cloud of cumin and garlic, and a motorcycle shot past on Brick Lane, its engine dopplering away into the wet dark. Rory looked at him — really looked — and saw what she'd been trying not to see. The suit was immaculate, yes, but it hung on him differently than it used to. He was thinner. There were shadows beneath both eyes, though they showed more starkly under the amber one, where the skin was paler. A faint bruise sat high on his left cheekbone, half-hidden by the angle of the hallway's single overhead bulb. "Five minutes," she said, and hated herself for the way something unclenched in her chest when he exhaled. She stepped aside. He entered the flat like he always entered rooms — cane first, then the measured stride that made you think of old money and older secrets. Ptolemy leapt onto a stack of Eva's books and watched him with the serene judgment only a cat could manage. Lucien paused just inside, taking in the chaos of the flat: the scrolls unfurled across the kitchen table, the research notes pinned to the walls with coloured tacks, the towers of books on every available surface including the radiator and, improbably, the top of the microwave. "Eva's been busy," he observed. "Eva's always busy. Clock's ticking, Lucien." He turned to face her. In the flat's cramped kitchen-slash-hallway-slash-living room, there was maybe three feet between them — an impossible distance and no distance at all. She could smell his cologne, that same bergamot-and-smoke scent that used to cling to her clothes after late nights in the back room of places she shouldn't have been. She folded her arms. He rested both hands on the cane's ivory handle and seemed to choose his words the way he chose everything: carefully, as though there were consequences to each one. Which, knowing what she knew about him now, there probably were. "There's a contract on someone," he said. "Someone in this building." The words took a moment to settle. When they did, the blood left her face so fast she felt the room tilt. "Eva?" "No." He paused. "You." The rain. The curry spice. Ptolemy's motor-engine purr. The world kept grinding on around the sudden, ugly silence between them, the way it always did when things turned sharp and dangerous. "Since when?" she asked, because the practical question was easier than the terrified one. "Since approximately forty-eight hours ago. I intercepted the posting on the Obsidian Ledger last night." "And you came here." "I came here." She searched his face for the lie, or the angle, or the transactional calculation she'd learned to expect from a man who made his living trading information the way other people traded stocks. Lucien Moreau did not do things for free. Lucien Moreau did not show up at your door in the rain because he was worried about you. Lucien Moreau had made that abundantly clear three months ago when he'd walked out of her life with a sentence about professional distance and the particular cruelty of a closed door. And yet. "Why?" she asked. The question hung between them like smoke. She watched his grip shift on the cane — a tell, one she'd catalogued months ago in a different context, when his hands had been occupied with other things, when she'd learned his body the way she learned everything: methodically, hungrily, with the kind of focused attention that ruined you for anything that came after. "Because the alternative was unacceptable," he said. "That's not an answer." "It's the only honest one I have." She let out a breath that was almost a laugh, except nothing about this was funny. She turned away from him, pressing both hands flat against the cluttered kitchen counter because she needed something solid, something that wasn't him. A stack of Eva's notes on Sumerian binding rites slid sideways under her palm. Ptolemy chirped from his perch. "Three months," she said to the window, to the rain-streaked glass, to the blurred lights of Brick Lane below. "Three months, Lucien. Not a word. Not a text. Not even one of your cryptic little notes slipped under the door. And now you show up because someone wants me dead and you — what? Felt obligated?" "I felt terrified." The word didn't suit him. That was what made her turn around. Lucien Moreau did not say words like terrified. He said words like regrettable and complicated and, once, in a moment she'd replayed so many times it was wearing thin like old film, necessary. As in: This distance is necessary, Aurora. As in: I am leaving because I have to, not because I want to. She hadn't believed him then. She wasn't sure what she believed now. He'd moved closer. Not deliberately — the flat didn't allow for deliberate movement, not with the books and the scrolls and the cat and the whole compressed geometry of Eva's life taking up every available inch. But he was closer, close enough that she could see the thin scar at his temple she'd once traced with her thumb, close enough that the amber eye and the black eye were two separate, impossible worlds looking at her with the same expression. "I should have called," he said. "Yes." "I should have explained." "Yes." "The reasons I left — they haven't changed." "Then why are you here?" His hand left the cane. She watched it happen in something like slow motion — the fingers releasing the ivory handle, the arm moving, the hesitation when his hand reached the space between them — and then his palm was against her jaw, warm and careful and shaking slightly, which was the thing that undid her, the tremor in his fingers, because Lucien Moreau's hands did not shake, not when he was pulling a blade from that cane, not when he was cutting deals with things that had too many teeth, not ever, except apparently now, apparently when he was touching her. "Because the alternative," he said again, slower this time, "was unacceptable." Her hand came up and caught his wrist. She could feel his pulse hammering against her fingertips, quick and hard and completely at odds with the composed portrait he was trying to paint. "You left me," she said, and the words came out stripped of anger, which was worse, because underneath the anger there was only the hurt, wide and deep and honest. "You left and I had to piece together why from the gaps you left behind. You know what fills gaps, Lucien? The worst possible version of the truth. That's what I've been living with." His thumb moved against her cheekbone. One small stroke. She didn't pull away. "The contract is from Avaros," he said. "From my father's people. They want you because of me — because of what you are to me. That is why I left. That is why the distance was — " "Necessary," she finished. "Yes." "And coming here? To this door? In the rain, with your bruise and your cane and your five minutes?" The corner of his mouth twitched — not quite a smile, but the ghost of one, the kind that lived in the space between grief and hope, the kind she'd fallen for the first time she'd seen it across the back room of a Soho bar that didn't technically exist. "Selfish," he admitted. "Entirely selfish." She was still holding his wrist. He was still touching her face. Ptolemy had gone quiet on his stack of books, watching them with the grave attention of a creature who understood that some silences were not meant to be broken by purring. "The pad thai's going to be here any minute," Rory said. "I'll stay," he said. It was not a question but it was not quite a statement either. It sat between them like an offering, open-palmed and precarious. She tightened her grip on his wrist, felt his pulse jump, and pulled his hand away from her face — but didn't let go. "You'll stay," she said. "And you'll explain. All of it. Everything you should have said three months ago." "And after that?" She looked at him — at the mismatched eyes, the bruise, the careful mask with all its cracks showing — and felt the full, absurd, terrifying weight of wanting someone who came packaged with a demonic inheritance and a price on her head. "After that, we figure out who's trying to kill me," she said. "And then we fight about the rest." Something eased in his shoulders. Not relief, exactly — Lucien didn't do relief any more than he did terrified, except apparently he did both now, apparently she'd broken him open in all the ways he'd tried so hard to prevent. He picked up his cane. She let go of his wrist. And they stood there in Eva's cluttered flat above the curry house on Brick Lane, the rain hammering the windows, a tabby cat judging them from the collected works of someone who studied binding rites, and between them, in the charged and tender wreckage of the evening, something that was not forgiveness but might one day become it. Rory turned and locked all three deadbolts.