Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8V967Y1C0Z2ECWWD00ESCM

The third deadbolt stuck the way it always did, and Rory had to jiggle the key twice before it gave. She pulled the door open with her hip, a bag of takeaway containers from the Golden Empress balanced in the crook of her arm, and went completely still. Lucien Moreau stood on the landing. One hand rested on the ivory handle of his cane. The other held a slim leather portfolio against his chest like a shield, though he'd never admit to needing one. His charcoal suit was immaculate — not a wrinkle, not a thread loose — which meant he hadn't come from a fight. He'd come from somewhere deliberate. He'd chosen to be here. That was worse. "No," Rory said. His mismatched eyes — one amber, one black as a well's bottom — tracked from her face to the takeaway bag and back again. "You haven't heard what I—" "Don't need to." She stepped backward into the flat and swung the door. His cane caught it. Not forceful, just precise, the ivory handle slotting into the gap between door and frame with the ease of someone who'd been stopped from entering places his entire life and had long since stopped finding it interesting. "Five minutes, Aurora." "Nobody calls me that." "I do." The smell of cumin drifted up from the curry house below. Behind her, Ptolemy leapt from a stack of Eva's books and landed on the kitchen counter with a soft, judgmental thud. Rory exhaled through her nose and looked at the ceiling — water-stained, peeling at the edges, no help at all. She left the door open and walked into the kitchen. Lucien followed. He moved through the narrow hall the way he moved through everything: unhurried, deliberate, aware of the space he occupied down to the centimeter. His cane tapped once against the hardwood, then he seemed to think better of it and tucked it under his arm. The flat was too small for the sound. Too intimate. Rory set the bag on the counter and started unpacking containers. Kung pao chicken. Yu-Fei's garlic noodles. Two spring rolls she'd nicked from the kitchen because Yu-Fei owed her for the Hackney delivery that had gone sideways. She arranged each one with enormous concentration, as though the containers were chess pieces and this was a game she could win by not looking at him. "You look well," he said from the doorway. "You look like you want something." A pause. She could feel it — that particular quality of silence he produced, denser than other people's. Like the air around him had a different pressure. "Both can be true." Ptolemy wound between his ankles. Traitor. Lucien bent at the waist — not crouching, because crouching would crease the suit — and scratched behind the cat's ear with two fingers. The cat purred like a diesel engine. Rory ripped open a packet of soy sauce with her teeth. "Eva's not here. She's in Oxford until Thursday. Some library thing with restricted manuscripts." "I know." The soy sauce packet tore unevenly and dark liquid ran over her thumb. She sucked it clean and caught him watching her mouth. His gaze shifted to the window, but not fast enough. "So you came when you knew she'd be gone." "I came because I knew you'd be alone." "That's not the reassurance you think it is, Lucien." He set the leather portfolio on the kitchen table — or what passed for one, a card table buried under Eva's notes about Sumerian binding rites and takeaway menus. He moved a scroll aside with the respect of someone who understood what it was. Then he straightened and looked at her, and she hated how still he could be when he wanted. How his face offered nothing unless he chose to let something through. "Three weeks," he said. "You haven't returned any of my messages." "Didn't realize I was obligated." "You're not. That's rather the problem." Rory stabbed a pair of chopsticks into the noodles and leaned against the counter with her arms folded. The kitchen was barely six feet across. He filled the doorway. If she wanted to leave, she'd have to push past him, and pushing past Lucien meant being close to Lucien, and being close to Lucien was what had caused the whole goddamn mess in the first place. "You lied to me," she said. Flat. Not angry, not anymore. She'd burned through the anger the first week, sitting in this kitchen at three in the morning with Ptolemy in her lap and Eva's hand in her hair, untangling what had happened. Something shifted behind his eyes. "I withheld information. There's a distinction." "Not to me there isn't." He absorbed this. She watched his jaw tighten — just once, a brief flex of muscle under clean-shaven skin — before it smoothed again. "The situation with the Carrow Street exchange was volatile. If I had told you the full scope of what Marchetti was moving through that warehouse, you would have gone in regardless. Probably alone. Probably armed with nothing but that smart mouth and a box cutter from Yu-Fei's stockroom." "You don't get to decide what I can handle." "I wasn't deciding what you could handle. I was deciding what I could." The words landed in the small space between them. Rory's chopsticks hovered midair. She set them down. "Don't do that." "Do what?" "That thing where you say something that sounds vulnerable but is actually a way to control the conversation. I'm not — I've had enough of that to last me a lifetime." His chin dropped slightly. The amber eye caught the overhead light, warm as a candle flame. The black one remained impenetrable. She'd never been able to read the black one. "I'm aware of what your ex-partner did to you, Aurora." She flinched. Couldn't help it. Her left hand curled inward, the crescent scar on her wrist pressing into her palm. "Eva told you." "Eva told me nothing. I'm an information broker. It's what I do." "Right. So you dug into my past without asking. And I'm meant to trust you." He finally moved. Not toward her — sideways, into the kitchen, angling himself beside the refrigerator covered in Eva's postcards and pinned receipts. Giving her the doorway. Giving her the exit. It was such a small, deliberate thing that her chest ached with it. "I should not have looked into your history without your consent. That is a genuine apology, not a rhetorical device. I should not have withheld the details about Marchetti. That is another. And I should not have kissed you the night before you found out about both, because it muddied the waters in a way that was unfair to you. That is a third." Rory's pulse hammered in her jaw. She ground her teeth against it. "Three apologies. Very tidy." "I am a tidy person." "I noticed." Silence. Ptolemy jumped onto the card table and sat directly on the leather portfolio. Lucien didn't shoo him off. He just stood there, tucked against the refrigerator in his perfect suit in this imperfect flat, and waited. That was the thing about Lucien that undid her. He waited. Evan had never waited. Evan had pushed and pushed and when pushing didn't work he'd found uglier tools. Lucien just stood in the space he was allowed and let her come to her own conclusions, even when her conclusions were wrong, even when they cost him something. She hated it. She hated how much she didn't hate it. "The kiss wasn't the problem," she said, quieter now. He didn't move. Didn't breathe, as far as she could tell. "The kiss was fine. The kiss was —" She pressed both hands flat on the counter behind her and tipped her head back. "The problem was that I liked it. And then twelve hours later I found out you'd been playing some angle I didn't know about, and I couldn't tell anymore if the kiss was real or if it was part of the angle. And I can't — I won't live in that grey area again, Lucien. I won't wonder which version of someone I'm talking to." When she brought her head level again, his expression had changed. Not by much. A fracture, a hairline crack in that careful composure. The amber eye shone wet. The black one — she could read the black one now, and she wished she couldn't, because what she saw there was grief. "It was real," he said. His accent thickened on the vowels the way it did when he stopped monitoring himself. "The kiss. The whole evening. The walk along the canal where you told me about your mother's garden and I told you about Marseille. All of it. The only part that wasn't real was my belief that I could keep you safe through omission. That was foolish." "Yeah. It was." "I know." "You're an idiot." "In specifically this regard, yes." Rory let out a breath she'd been holding since she opened the front door. Maybe longer. Maybe three weeks' worth of breath. She crossed the six feet of kitchen. He watched her come, and she watched him stop himself from reaching for her, his fingers curling once at his sides before going still. She stopped close enough that she could smell him — cedar and something darker underneath, something not quite human, like woodsmoke from a fire burning in a color she couldn't name. "The next time you decide to protect me by keeping me in the dark, I will break that pretty cane over your knee." "Understood." "And you're going to tell me what's in that portfolio." "I am." "And you're going to eat these noodles with me because I took the Northern Line in rush hour for them and I refuse to waste that suffering." One corner of his mouth lifted. Not a smile. The scaffolding of one. "I can do that." She reached up and straightened his collar, which didn't need straightening. Her fingers grazed the skin above it and she felt him swallow. His hand came up — slow, careful, broadcasting every inch of the movement — and closed over hers. His thumb found the crescent scar on her wrist and rested there, not pressing, just touching, like he was learning the shape of it. "I missed you," he said. No artifice. No angle. Just the raw French vowels and the flicker of both eyes — amber and black — holding hers with a steadiness that terrified her. Rory turned her hand in his grip until their fingers laced together. His palm was warm. Warmer than human, always. She'd wondered about that the first time they'd touched, and now she knew why, and knowing hadn't changed the way the heat traveled up her arm and settled somewhere behind her sternum. "Sit down," she said. "Eat. And then tell me everything." She let go and turned back to the counter to sort the containers, and behind her she heard him pull out a chair, heard the soft creak as he sat, heard Ptolemy chirp and relocate to his lap. The flat was cramped and smelled of cumin and garlic noodles and old paper, and the door still stood open at the end of the hall, all three deadbolts undone. She went to close it. Turned each lock — one, two, three — and stood with her hand on the last one for a moment, forehead against the cool wood. Then she walked back into the kitchen, sat down across from him, and slid the spring rolls to his side of the table.