Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8VCANQVCYN87449H6J2SAM

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 she'd called twenty minutes ago, or possibly Eva back early from her research trip to the Bodleian, fumbling with her keys the way she always did after three days without sleep. She had a tenner folded in her hand and a half-formed apology on her lips for taking so long to answer. What she got was Lucien Moreau, standing on Eva's landing in a charcoal suit that had no business looking that sharp at eleven o'clock on a Tuesday night, his ivory-handled cane resting against the doorframe like it had been invited even if he hadn't. The tenner crumpled in her fist. "No," she said. "Bonsoir to you as well, Aurora." He looked exactly the same. That was the worst part. The platinum hair slicked back from his angular face, one amber eye catching the sickly fluorescent light from the stairwell, the other so dark it swallowed it. His mouth held that particular shape it always held — not quite a smile, not quite anything — as though amusement and something sadder lived in the same expression and had learned to share the space. Rory gripped the edge of the door. Below them, the curry house exhaled its permanent cloud of cumin and hot oil through the building's bones, and from somewhere on Brick Lane a bus hissed to a stop. The world kept turning. Fine. She didn't have to turn with it. "I said no." "You haven't heard what I've come to say." "Don't need to." She started to push the door closed, but Lucien didn't move. He didn't brace against it, didn't put his hand out — he simply stood there, and the door stopped an inch from the frame as if the air between him and it had thickened to glass. Rory stared at the gap. She could feel the draft from the stairwell threading through it, cool against her bare forearm, finding the crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist the way the cold always did. "That's a cheap trick," she said quietly. "It's not a trick. You stopped the door yourself." He paused. "You always did." She hated him for being right. She pulled the door open again because slamming it on a half-demon was pointless when the real thing holding it open was her own stupid curiosity, her own inability to walk away from a question she hadn't finished answering. Lucien stood on the threshold and waited. He had that particular talent — patience like a held breath, never quite natural, always deliberate. She remembered it from before. Three months ago. The rooftop in Shoreditch where he'd told her things about the supernatural underworld that she hadn't been ready to hear. The way he'd stood exactly like this, one hand resting on the cane's ivory handle, giving her all the time in the world to decide whether she wanted to step forward or back. She'd stepped forward that night. She'd also stepped forward three weeks later in the back room of Silas' bar, two whiskeys deep, when Lucien had leaned close enough for her to see the thin ring of gold in his black eye and asked if she was sure. And she had been sure. For about forty-eight hours. Then he'd vanished. Not metaphorically — actually gone, as though the city had swallowed him, no word, no message, nothing but a sealed envelope left with Silas containing a name she'd needed for a job and absolutely zero explanation for the rest of it. For the way his thumb had traced the scar on her wrist in the dark of her flat like he was memorizing the shape. For the way he'd said her name — her real name, Aurora, the one nobody used — like it meant something in a language she didn't speak. She'd spent a week furious, then a week worried, then settled into a low chronic irritation that she wore like a coat. Now here he was, immaculate, unhurried, smelling faintly of bergamot and something darker underneath, and Rory wanted to hit him so badly her knuckles ached. "Five minutes," she said. "Then you leave." She stepped back. He crossed the threshold. Eva's flat received him the way it received everything — grudgingly, and with barely enough room to breathe. Books colonized every surface: stacked on the kitchen counter beside a cold mug of tea, fanned across the sofa cushions, propped open on the windowsill where Ptolemy liked to sleep. The tabby was there now, amber eyes slitting open at the sound of a stranger's footsteps, then closing again with feline indifference. Lucien took in the chaos with one sweep of those mismatched eyes and said nothing, which was its own kind of judgment. She watched him notice the three deadbolts from the inside. Watched his gaze track across the scroll pinned to the far wall with map tacks, the protective wards Eva had drawn in silver marker on the kitchen cabinets, the iron horseshoe nailed above the bedroom door. "Your friend takes precautions," he said. "My friend is smart." Rory folded her arms and stayed by the door. "Clock's ticking, Lucien." He turned to face her. In the flat's warmer light — the single floor lamp Eva hadn't buried under monographs — his features lost some of their sharp elegance and gained something more human. Tiredness around the eyes. A tension in his jaw she'd never seen before. He was holding the cane a little too tightly, she realized. Not leaning on it. Gripping it. "I need your help," he said. She laughed. It came out harder than she meant it to. "That's rich." "I understand you're angry." "Do you? Because angry is what I was in November. Right now I'm standing in my best friend's flat at eleven at night with a man who slept with me and then disappeared for three months, so right now what I am is tired, Lucien. I am very, very tired." Something moved behind his expression. A flinch, maybe, buried so deep she almost missed it. He looked down at the cane in his hands, turning the ivory handle a quarter rotation, and when he looked up again, the urbane mask had slipped just enough to show the thing underneath. "I did not leave because I wanted to." "Then why?" Silence. Rory shook her head. "That's what I thought." She moved toward the kitchen, not because she wanted tea but because she needed to put distance between them before the proximity did what it always did — before the specific wavelength of his presence started interfering with her ability to think. She filled Eva's kettle. Set it on the burner. Ptolemy leapt down from the windowsill and wound between her ankles, purring his low mechanical purr, and she was grateful for the small warm realness of him. "There are people I answer to," Lucien said behind her. "People on my father's side. They learned that I'd involved a human in underworld business, and they were... displeased. Leaving was the only way to ensure they focused their attention on me and not on you." Rory's hand stilled on the kettle's handle. She turned around slowly. He was standing in the middle of Eva's cluttered living room, a man in a bespoke suit surrounded by secondhand paperbacks and cat hair, and he looked — for the first time since she'd known him — as if the composure he wore like armor had developed a crack he couldn't smooth over. "You left to protect me," she said flatly. "Yes." "Without telling me." "If I had told you, you would have insisted on helping. You would have put yourself in danger. I know you, Aurora. You don't step back." "You don't get to decide that for me." Her voice was low and even. She was proud of that. Inside, something was rearranging itself — anger shifting to make room for a different emotion she wasn't ready to name. "You don't get to make that choice and then show up three months later acting like it was noble." "I'm not acting like it was noble. I'm telling you it was necessary." "And I'm telling you there's a difference between protecting someone and abandoning them." The word landed. She watched it hit. Lucien's grip on the cane tightened, and for a heartbeat the shadows in the corners of the flat seemed to deepen, to lean inward — a flicker of something not quite human in the air around him, quickly suppressed. "You're right," he said quietly. She hadn't expected that. She'd expected the deflection, the elegant sidestep, the four-language charm offensive. Not this — this raw, simple concession. The kettle clicked off. Neither of them moved toward it. "I should have told you," he said. "I should have trusted you to handle the truth. I have spent my life calculating risks, and I calculated this one wrong." He paused. "I calculated you wrong." "You didn't calculate me at all," Rory said. "That's the problem. You decided what I could handle and then you left. That's not calculation. That's cowardice dressed up in a nice suit." The faintest ghost of a smile. "It is a very nice suit." "Lucien." "I know." The smile died. He took a step toward her, then stopped, as if he'd hit a boundary he refused to cross without permission. The cane clicked softly against the floorboards. "I know, Rory." Her name — the short version, the nickname, the one her friends used — sounded different in his accent. Softer. More careful. As though he understood the intimacy of it, the permission it implied, and was holding it gently. She pressed her back against the kitchen counter. The crescent scar on her wrist throbbed the way it did when she was feeling too much — an old signal, a body remembering what the mind tried to forget. She'd had enough of men who made choices for her. Evan had made choices for her in Cardiff. Where she went, who she spoke to, what she wore. Lucien's choice had been different in kind but not in structure, and that was the thorn she couldn't pull free. "I'm not her," she said. "I'm not someone you need to shield from the dark. I already live in it. I deliver takeaway for a woman who reads fortunes in dumpling steam, and my best friend wards her kitchen cabinets, and I live above a bar where things with too many teeth come to drink. I'm already in it, Lucien. You just didn't want to see that." He was quiet for a long moment. The flat settled around them — the distant bass of Brick Lane on a weeknight, Ptolemy's purring, the hiss of the pilot light on the stove. "I saw it," he said at last. "That's what frightened me." She felt the words land in her chest. She didn't want them to. She wanted to be armored against him, wanted the three months of silence to have calcified into something impervious, but the truth was sharper than that. The truth was that she'd spent those three months not just angry but afraid — afraid that he was dead in some demon-realm gutter, afraid that the one person in the supernatural world who'd looked at her like she belonged in it had been scraped out of existence. "You said you need my help," she said, because if she didn't change the subject she was going to do something catastrophic like cross the room. "I do. But it can wait." "It can't, or you wouldn't be here." He acknowledged this with a tilt of his head. "There's a situation developing. Something my father's people want, and something that several factions in London also want. I need someone who thinks sideways. Someone human. Someone they won't see coming." His mismatched eyes held hers. "I need you. But I won't ask until you've decided whether you can stand to be in the same room with me." "I'm in the same room with you right now." "You're in the kitchen. There's a counter between us. You've positioned yourself beside three possible exits." The corner of his mouth twitched. "I told you. I know you." He was right, and she hated it, and something in the hating felt dangerously close to its opposite. Rory pushed off the counter. She crossed the kitchen. She stopped two feet from him, close enough to see the thin scar along his collar that his shirt didn't quite hide — that was new — and the faint violet shadows under his eyes that his composure couldn't mask. "You look terrible," she said. "I assure you, I look considerably better than I did last week." "That's not the reassurance you think it is." "No," he agreed softly. They stood there. Two feet of charged air between them. Ptolemy had stopped purring, watching from the windowsill with the alert stillness of a cat who sensed weather changing. Rory reached out and straightened his lapel. It didn't need straightening. They both knew that. Her fingers rested against the charcoal fabric, and she felt his breathing change underneath it — a small catch, like something coming undone. "You owe me more than an explanation," she said. "I know." "You owe me the truth. All of it. Starting now and not stopping when it gets inconvenient." "Yes." "And if you ever disappear on me again, I will find you, and I will make you regret it in ways your father's people haven't imagined." His hand came up and covered hers where it rested on his chest. His fingers were cool against her knuckles. She felt the calluses on his palm — the sword-cane grip she'd never thought about before. "I believe you," he said, and the way he said it was not surrender but something more rare: recognition. She didn't kiss him. Not yet. That would come later, if it came at all, when the ground between them was steadier and the things left unsaid had been dragged into the light and examined. But she didn't pull her hand away, and he didn't release it, and in the cluttered warmth of Eva's flat on Brick Lane — surrounded by books and wards and the quiet judgment of a tabby cat named Ptolemy — something that had been broken three months ago began the slow, cautious work of mending. "Put the kettle on again," she said. "This is going to be a long night." Lucien's mismatched eyes softened. He released her hand, shrugged off his jacket, and reached for the kettle with the careful precision of a man who understood that this small domestic act was, in its own way, a promise. She watched him move through Eva's kitchen as if he'd always been there, and thought: *This is either the smartest thing you've ever done or the most ruinous.* Both, probably. With Lucien Moreau, it was always both.