Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8V1ZEWE2KB7T0JG05TTV6S

The third deadbolt always stuck. Rory dragged her thumbnail along the edge of it, feeling the familiar bite of metal, and shoved her shoulder into the door the way Eva had shown her. It gave with a groan, and she stepped inside, shrugging out of her jacket and dropping her bag on the nearest stack of books — which was to say, the floor — and freezing. Ptolemy sat in the centre of the room looking smug in the way that only tabby cats managed, his tail wrapped neatly around his paws. He was staring at the couch. Lucien Moreau was sitting on it. He had his cane propped against the armrest, the ivory handle catching the lamplight, and he was reading one of Eva's scrolls with the casual ease of a man in a library he owned. His platinum hair was slicked back as immaculately as ever. His charcoal suit had not a wrinkle in it. When she came in, he looked up, and she caught the flash of it — one amber eye, one eye like a hole punched in the night — before he composed his expression into something politely neutral. "Carter," he said. "How did you get in here?" Her voice was steadier than she felt. "Eva lent me her key." "Eva is in Edinburgh." "Yes, I know." He rolled the scroll closed with practiced care and set it on the cushion beside him. "She asked me to check on some of her research materials. I wasn't aware you'd be here." "It's her flat, Lucien." "It is." He didn't move. "You could leave." "So could you." Neither of them moved. Ptolemy yawned, an operatic, pink-tongued yawn, and jumped onto the windowsill to ignore both of them with pointed dignity. Rory set her jacket on the hook behind the door — the only free hook, Eva had six of them loaded with scarves and coats and things that appeared to be ritual sashes — and walked to the kitchen because she needed something to do with her hands. The galley kitchen was barely large enough for one person. She filled the kettle at the tap and set it going and stood with her back to the doorway. She heard him get up. The soft sound of the cane on the floorboards. "You don't have to pretend I'm not here," he said, from somewhere just behind her. "I'm making tea." "You're hiding." "I'm making tea," she said again, and she heard the breath of what might have been a laugh, though with Lucien it was always difficult to tell. She pulled two mugs from the cabinet. It was involuntary; she'd done it before she'd thought about it, the bone-deep habit of him, and she stood there looking at the two mugs and felt the back of her neck flush. "You don't have to—" he started. "I've already got it out." She kept her eyes on the counter. "Milk, no sugar." Silence. Then: "You remembered." "It's not a complicated order." When the kettle finished she poured and added milk to his and carried both mugs past him into the main room, settling herself on the floor with her back against the bookshelf because the couch was where he'd been and she wasn't ready for that yet. He came to stand in the doorway of the kitchen watching her, his mug held in one long-fingered hand. "You've been avoiding me," he said. "That implies you've been trying to reach me." "Three messages." "My phone's been complicated." "Your phone," he said, "works perfectly well. I know because you sent Eva a voice note two days ago criticising her filing system." The corner of his mouth moved. "She played it for me." Rory looked down at her mug. The tea was too hot to drink and she drank it anyway, burning the roof of her mouth. "What do you want, Lucien?" He came to sit in the armchair across from her, lowering himself into it with that particular economy of movement he had, and set the cane across his knees. He didn't drink. He looked at her instead, the way he always looked at her — too long, too level, like he was reading something written in small print. "You walked out," he said. "In the middle of a sentence." "You were talking about Cairo." "I was explaining Cairo." "You were justifying it." She looked up. "There's a difference." Something crossed his face that she couldn't name, which was unusual — she was good at faces, good at reading people, it was the thing that had kept her useful and alive in the year since London had cracked open and shown her what lived in its underside. But Lucien had always been the exception to that rule. His face did what he permitted it to do and no more. "I made a choice," he said carefully, "that you didn't like. I don't apologise for the choice. But I—" He stopped. His thumb moved along the ivory handle of the cane in a slow arc. "I should have told you. Before." "Yes," she said. "You should have." "I'm not accustomed to explaining myself." "I know." "And you are not—" He paused again, and she watched him search for the word with something like surprise; Lucien, who spoke four languages, who rarely faltered. "You are not someone I thought would care." "Right." "I mean that as a compliment." "It doesn't land as one." She set her mug down on a stack of Eva's research notes — something about ley line degradation in the Thames basin, she didn't look at it — and pulled her knees up, wrapping her arms around them. The crescent scar on her left wrist caught the light. She was aware of him noticing it, the way he always noticed small things. "I care," she said, because apparently they were doing this now. "That's the problem. You keep acting like that should be irrelevant, like I should just be—" She gestured with one hand, a loose, helpless motion. "Grateful for the information and indifferent to the source. And I'm not. I'm not indifferent to you." The room went quiet. Ptolemy stalked back in from the windowsill, sniffed Lucien's ankle, and departed again toward the bedroom with the air of someone who had seen enough. Lucien looked down at his hands. Both of them, the one holding the mug and the one resting on the cane, very still in the lamp-warm air. "No," he said. "I know." "Then stop acting like I am." He looked up at that. The amber eye caught the light; the dark one absorbed it. "What do you want me to do with this, Rory?" It was the first time he'd used her name, really used it, and she felt it the same way she always did — a small, embarrassing jolt, like a step she hadn't seen coming. He knew her as Carter. That was the professional courtesy, the arm's length version. Rory was what slipped out when he was less careful. She uncurled herself from the floor and crossed to the couch and sat down. Not beside him. He was in the armchair. But closer, with nothing between them except the low table stacked with Eva's books and a cold cup of someone's abandoned herbal tea. "I want you to stop pretending you're not bothered," she said. "When you are." The corner of his mouth moved again, and this time she saw it for what it was — rueful, genuine, slightly pained. "That would require a significant recalibration of habits built over three decades." "I know. I'm asking anyway." He set his mug down on the table with a soft click and leaned forward, elbows on his knees, bringing himself to her level. This close, she could see the faint asymmetry in his face that his composure usually ironed out — the way his brow pulled slightly, the set of his jaw. He was doing it. The recalibration. She could see the effort of it, which was something she suspected very few people had ever seen. "I don't know how to do this," he said quietly. "Whatever this is." "Neither do I." "That's meant to be reassuring?" "Yes," she said. "Actually." He was quiet for a moment, studying her face. She let him. Outside, Brick Lane went about its evening — voices, a motorbike, the warm-spice smell of the curry house drifting up through the floorboards the way it always did this time of night. "I didn't tell you about Cairo," he said, "because I didn't want to watch you decide that I wasn't worth the trouble." She held his gaze. "And if you had told me?" "You might have." "Or I might not have." He considered that. Lucien Moreau, who operated in certainties and contingencies and carefully managed odds, sat in Eva's cramped armchair and considered the open-ended thing she had just offered him. "Yes," he said at last. "Or you might not have." She reached over and picked up his mug and handed it to him. He took it, their fingers not quite touching, and then just barely touching, and she didn't move her hand away. "Drink your tea," she said. "It's going cold." He didn't drink it. But he didn't look away either, and after a moment, very deliberately, he turned his hand under hers.