Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8VJNMDBMAXSHP64CVMH8D6

The third deadbolt stuck, the way it always did, and Rory had to shoulder the door to get it open. She expected takeaway. She'd ordered pad thai twenty minutes ago and stood in the doorway in Eva's oversized cardigan, chopsticks already in hand, before her brain caught up with what her eyes were seeing. Lucien Moreau stood on the landing. He looked precisely as he always did — charcoal suit without a crease in it, platinum hair slicked back from that angular face, ivory-handled cane hooked over one forearm like an accessory rather than a necessity. The amber eye caught the light from the hallway. The black one didn't. Neither did he say anything. He just looked at her, and the silence between them filled up fast with everything that had been sitting unsaid since March. "You're not pad thai." "No." A pause. "Though I appreciate you dressed for the occasion." She pulled the cardigan tighter. It hit mid-thigh. Below that, bare legs, socks with a hole in the toe she hadn't noticed until this exact moment. She didn't move from the doorway. "Eva's not here." "I know." His jaw shifted slightly. "I came for you." The smell of curry drifted up from the restaurant below. Ptolemy materialised from somewhere in the flat and wound himself between her ankles with a chirp, tail raised, apparently delighted by the company. Traitor. "That's not—" She stopped. Started again. "You don't get to do that. Show up here. Unannounced." "I sent word." "You sent a coded note via a demon courier at half past midnight, Lucien. That's not the same thing." Something moved behind his expression. Not quite guilt. Closer to the acknowledgement that he was capable of guilt, which for him was practically the same thing. "May I come in?" She should have said no. The thought was clear and sensible and she stayed with it for a full three seconds before she stepped back and let him through. He ducked slightly under the doorframe — the flat had been built for smaller centuries — and she closed the deadbolts behind him out of habit, all three, and when she turned around he was standing in the middle of Eva's living room looking at the stacked scrolls and the books piled spine-out on every surface, the research notes pinned to the wall with coloured tacks, the cold mug of tea on the coffee table that was hers. His cane tapped once against the floorboards. "She's been busy." "She's always busy." Rory set the chopsticks down on the kitchen counter. "What do you want?" He turned to face her. Full on. That was always the unsettling thing about Lucien — he didn't hedge. He committed to looking at you in a way that made most people want to look somewhere else. She didn't look somewhere else. "There's a name going around," he said. "Someone's been asking after you specifically. Not after Eva, not after the others. You." "Who." "That's what I'm working to find out. But they have enough of a description that I don't think it's casual." He set the cane against the bookshelf, a deliberate thing, like he was putting down armour. "I thought you should know." "You could have sent that information through Eva." "I could have." The flat felt smaller than usual. Ptolemy leapt onto the sofa and regarded them both with immense satisfaction. "So why didn't you." It came out flat. Not quite a question. Lucien crossed his arms over his chest, which on anyone else might have looked defensive. On him it just looked like a decision being made. "Because the last time I communicated through an intermediary, you thought I was washing my hands of you. I'm told that was a misunderstanding." A beat. "I'd prefer not to repeat it." The March memory arrived uninvited — a rain-soaked street in Bermondsey, Lucien's back to her as he spoke to someone she didn't know in a language she didn't speak, the long car idling at the kerb, and the way he'd glanced back at her once, just once, with an expression she hadn't been able to read. She'd walked away. He hadn't come after her. For six weeks she'd built a story around that and lived in it. "You left." "The car was—" "You left without a word. Not a word to me." He was quiet for a moment. Behind him, through the window, the street sounds of Brick Lane rose and fell — a burst of music from somewhere down the road, a motorbike, voices in the curry house below. "I know." His voice had dropped. "I handled it badly." "That's a very tidy way to put it." "Rory." Her name in his mouth still did something inconvenient. French-shaped around a Welsh nickname, and the combination had always sounded like a contradiction she couldn't resolve. "You were gone for six weeks," she said. "I didn't know if you were—" She cut herself off. Restarted. "There are things you don't get to just arrive and paper over with information about a threat I may or may not need to worry about." He crossed the small distance between them and her breath caught. Not because she was afraid. The opposite of afraid, which was in some ways worse. "No," he said. "There aren't. You're right." That was the thing she'd never found a defence against — the moments when he simply agreed with her. No deflection, no Gallic elegance employed as a distraction. Just the words, level and direct, delivered at close range. She could see the fine lines at the corners of his eyes. The small scar along his jaw she'd once asked him about and he'd laughed and told her it was boring. She'd never found out. "Why does someone want me," she said, because it was safer. His eyes moved across her face — amber, then black, then amber again, that slight involuntary flicker she'd catalogued without ever meaning to. "I don't know yet. But I intend to find out."