Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8TZYPK4CT501J5KGZRW66G

The third deadbolt was always the stubborn one. Rory had been wrestling with it for a full thirty seconds before it finally surrendered with a clunk, and by then whoever was on the other side of Eva's door had knocked twice more — patient knocks, measured, like someone who had all the time in the world and knew it. She yanked the door open with more force than was strictly necessary. Lucien Moreau stood in the narrow hallway, one hand resting on his ivory-handled cane, the other holding a paper bag that smelled unmistakably of Lebanese takeaway. He wore a charcoal suit without a single crease in it despite the November cold, and his platinum hair was slicked back with habitual precision, not one strand out of place. His eyes — one amber, one a depth of black that swallowed light — moved from her face to the deadbolts behind her and back again, cataloguing, as they always did, everything at once. "You," she said. "Me," Lucien agreed pleasantly. Rory didn't move from the doorway. Behind her she could hear Ptolemy chirping somewhere in the kitchen, and the low murmur of the takeaway place below — the smell of garlic and fenugreek seeping up through the floorboards as it always did at this hour. Normal things. Grounding things. She focused on them because Lucien's amber eye was catching the hallway light in a way that made something tighten in her chest, and she needed that not to happen. "Eva's not here," she said. "She's at the archive until Thursday." "Yes, I know. I actually came to see you." She looked at the bag. "With food." "I wasn't sure if you'd let me in without a peace offering." His mouth curved, but it was a careful curve, restrained at the edges. Not the easy, devastating smile he used when he wanted something and knew he'd get it. This was something different. "I find people are more receptive to difficult conversations when they're not hungry." Rory leaned her shoulder against the door frame and crossed her arms. She was wearing an oversized Cardiff University jumper — faded red, paint-stained at the cuff — and she was acutely, irritatingly aware of it. Of herself, standing in it, looking nothing like someone who had any kind of upper hand in this situation. "Who says I want a difficult conversation?" "You've been avoiding me for six weeks." "I've been busy." "You crossed the street in Spitalfields to avoid me." She had, in fact, crossed the street in Spitalfields to avoid him. She had done it with great deliberateness and no small amount of dignity, and she had assumed he hadn't seen her. Apparently, she had assumed wrong. She pushed off the door frame and stepped back. It wasn't an invitation exactly. It was more of an inevitability, which was what Lucien generally was — something that pressed quietly against the edges of whatever space she was in until resistance became performative. He came inside, and she bolted all three locks behind him by habit, and then immediately felt strange about the intimacy of that — the familiar routine of it — and turned back to find him already navigating around Eva's catastrophic archaeology of books and scrolls and half-translated manuscripts. He moved through the clutter with the ease of someone who had been here before, which he had, because this city's supernatural underworld was small and Eva sat at the centre of it like a very well-read spider. In Eva's kitchen, under the flickering strip light that needed replacing and never got replaced, Lucien set the bag on the only clear foot of counter space and began unpacking containers. He did it without asking. He knew where the plates were. Rory sat on the edge of the kitchen table and watched him and said nothing for a moment, turning her left wrist over in her lap, running her thumb absently across the small crescent scar there the way she did whenever she was thinking too hard and didn't want to show it. "You want to explain," she said finally, "what happened at the Vauclaire job." He set a container of kibbeh down with deliberate care. "That's why I'm here, yes." "You told Cassius Drene that I could be leveraged." She kept her voice level. She'd practised keeping it level on this particular sentence for six weeks, saying it to herself on narrow London streets, over delivery routes, lying awake above Silas's bar listening to the music come up through the floor. She'd wanted to say it without her voice doing anything she'd regret. "That I was manageable. Those were the words they used when they tried to use me as collateral, Lucien. Manageable and leverageable. That's not vocabulary Drene conjured on his own." Lucien had gone very still. He was facing the counter, not her, and she could see the line of his jaw in profile, the way it tightened. "No," he said. "It isn't." The admission landed in the small kitchen and stayed there. Rory had expected deflection — Lucien was extraordinarily good at deflection, at the kind of elegant conversational sidestepping that left you feeling you'd been heard when you'd actually been redirected. The directness of it caught her somewhere under the sternum. "Then explain it to me," she said. "Because the version I've been carrying for six weeks is that you handed me to him." He turned then, and his mismatched eyes found hers across the cluttered kitchen — over the stacks of Eva's notebooks and Ptolemy's empty food bowl and a mug that had been sitting on the edge of the draining board since before Rory had arrived three days ago. He looked, she thought, like he was choosing something. Not words, exactly. Something heavier than words. "I told Drene you were capable," he said. "That you were resourceful and adaptable and that if he needed someone on the ground who could improvise under pressure, you were the person he ought to consider." Something shifted in his expression — not quite frustration, not quite pain. "I recommended you. I didn't — I didn't know what he intended to do with that." Rory was quiet. Outside, a bus rumbled past, and the curry house below shifted into a louder register, a burst of voices and laughter that rose and fell. "You didn't know," she said. "No." "Or you didn't ask." A beat. "Or I didn't ask." He set his hands flat on the counter behind him, and for once he looked slightly less than perfectly composed — there was something that lived just beneath the polished surface of him trying to get out, and it hadn't quite managed it yet. "When I found out what he'd done, I was the one who pulled you out. You know that." "I know." "I was the one who—" "I know, Lucien." She said it quietly, not unkindly. She did know. She remembered the car arriving, and his voice through the door, and the particular quality of the silence in the back seat afterward — not comfortable silence, but the kind that holds too much weight to break easily. "That's the part I keep getting stuck on. You came for me. And you also—" she stopped, searched for it— "you also weren't careful with me. In the first place. And I don't know how to hold both of those things." He looked at her for a long moment. Ptolemy padded into the kitchen, made a single decisive sound of greeting at Lucien's ankle, and then jumped onto the windowsill and sat with his back to both of them, which was a fairly accurate assessment of the room's energy. "I don't have a clean answer for you," Lucien said. "I could construct one. I'm quite good at that. But you'd know." He said it simply, without vanity — it was more like an acknowledgment of limitation than anything else. "You'd know immediately." "Yes," she said. "I would." She reached over and pulled the container of kibbeh toward her, found a fork in the drawer without looking, and ate a bite that she didn't particularly taste. It was something to do with her hands. The scar on her wrist caught the strip light for a moment as she moved. "I'm not — " she started, and stopped, and tried again. "I'm not angry about the same thing I was angry about six weeks ago. I thought I was. But I've had time to sort it and I think—" she pressed the fork against the side of the container — "I think I was mostly frightened, and frightened is harder to say out loud than angry. So I said angry." The silence that followed was a different kind than before. Softer at the edges. Lucien moved away from the counter, not quickly, not with any of the abrupt energy she associated with men making dramatic gestures. Just — closer. He stopped near the table, near enough that she could see the fine detail of him: the faint asymmetry of his features that she'd memorised without meaning to, the amber eye and the black eye both steady on her face. "If I had known what he intended," Lucien said, and his voice had dropped into something that had no performance in it at all, "I would not have said your name in that room." She looked up at him. The strip light buzzed faintly overhead. "I believe you," she said. He exhaled — barely perceptibly, just a small release of something held — and she felt the pull of it like a current in the air of Eva's miserably narrow kitchen, between the stacks of books and the indifferent cat and the smell of someone else's takeaway going slightly cold. She didn't close the distance. Neither did he. But for the first time in six weeks, standing in the wreckage of things left unsaid, it felt like they were both, at least, in the same room. "Eat," she said, and pushed the container toward the space beside her on the table. "You can explain the rest while we eat." He looked at the table, and then at her, and then he sat down.