Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8VSSF8512CK7DH1N5131FS

The third deadbolt gave its usual grudging click, and Rory pulled the door open with her shoulder the way she'd learned to after a week of Eva's particular architecture. Lucien stood in the hallway. He hadn't changed. That was the first thing she noticed, stupidly, as though she'd half-expected time to have done something to him. The charcoal suit was immaculate. The platinum hair was swept back in that deliberate way that probably took no effort at all. He held the ivory cane loosely in one hand, not leaning on it, just carrying it the way other men carried umbrellas on clear days — as a statement. His mismatched eyes moved over her face. The amber one caught the light from the stairwell. The black one swallowed it. "You have curry in your hair," he said. Rory touched the side of her head. Found nothing. Dropped her hand. "What are you doing here, Lucien." Not a question. She'd stopped making them questions with him months ago, when she'd realised he answered the ones she didn't ask more honestly than the ones she did. "May I come in?" "I asked you something first." "And I am asking you something now." A pause. One corner of his mouth moved. "Rory." The way he said her name had always been the problem. Not Rory the way Eva said it, quick and careless and full of affection. He said it like he was identifying something rare. Like he wanted to be precise about it. She stepped back from the door. He moved past her into the flat and stopped in the middle of the narrow front room, taking in the stacked books, the scrolls weighted open at their corners with mugs and door keys and once, inexplicably, a tin of sardines. Ptolemy materialised from behind a pile of research notes on the sofa, regarded Lucien with the flat suspicion of an elderly statesman, then turned and sat with his back to both of them. "Cat doesn't like me," Lucien observed. "Cat has good instincts." "Mm." He set the cane against the bookshelf, a deliberate gesture, both hands now free. "Is Eva here?" "No." "Good." Rory folded her arms. "Why good?" "Because what I came to say is for you." He turned from the bookshelf and looked at her properly, the full weight of it, and she felt the familiar and inconvenient thing happen in her chest. "I heard you were back in the city. I heard about what happened in Whitechapel." "You heard. Right." She moved past him to the kitchen, needing the width of the flat between them. The kettle was still warm from an hour ago. She switched it on anyway. "Who told you?" "Does it matter?" "It matters to me." "Silas mentioned—" "Silas." She laughed, short and without warmth. "Of course." "He was concerned." "He told you where I was." "He told me you were here, yes." Lucien's voice came from closer now. She hadn't heard him move. He was standing in the kitchen doorway, shoulder against the frame, watching her with that particular quality of attention he had — unhurried, total — that had undone her the first time and every time after. "I would have found you regardless." "That's not reassuring." "It wasn't meant to be reassuring. It was meant to be honest." The kettle began its low climb toward boiling. Rory kept her eyes on it. "You left," she said. Flat. Even. She'd practised letting it be flat and even. "Three months ago. You left without—" She stopped. Started again. "You left a note, Lucien. Four words." "I know what the note said." "Then you know four words isn't—" She turned around. He was closer than she'd thought, just the other side of the narrow counter, and she made herself hold his gaze. "It wasn't enough. It wasn't close to enough." Something moved across his face. It wasn't guilt exactly. It was something more considered than guilt, which in its own way was worse. "No," he said. "It wasn't." She'd expected the deflection. The elegant reframe. The four languages deployed as distance. His plain agreement knocked the breath out of her. "Then why?" Her voice dropped without her permission. "Why did you go like that?" Lucien was quiet for a moment. Outside, two floors below on Brick Lane, someone was arguing with a delivery driver. The smell of cumin drifted up through the floorboards. Ptolemy yowled once from the other room and went silent. "Because I was going to do something foolish," he said. "And I had enough self-awareness to know it. I thought leaving was the more—" He stopped. His jaw tightened. "The more considerate option." "Considerate." She tasted the word. "You thought disappearing was kind." "I thought it was better than staying and making things complicated." "Things were already complicated, Luc." He flinched at the nickname. Just barely. She caught it. "Yes," he said. "They were." The kettle reached its boil and clicked off into silence. Neither of them moved toward it. "I'm not the same as the people you broker information for," Rory said. "You don't get to manage me like a transaction. You don't get to decide what I can handle and then make an exit when the calculus stops working for you." "I know that." "Do you?" "Rory." He said it again. That careful precision. He came around the counter and she didn't step back, which was either courage or stupidity and she'd long since stopped distinguishing between the two when he was involved. He was close enough that she could see the faint asymmetry of his features — the way his left eye, the amber one, sat fractionally higher than the black. Up close his face was never quite as composed as it looked from a distance. "I came here because I don't want to do it again." "Do what." "Leave." His hand came up and she tracked it — watched it hover for half a second, uncertain, which was extraordinary on him — before it settled against her jaw. His thumb traced just below her cheekbone. "I'm asking you not to make me." She held very still under his hand. "You don't get to show up here and say that," she said quietly, "and expect it to fix anything." "I know." His thumb stilled. "I'm not here because I think it fixes anything. I came here because the alternative was another note and four words clearly doesn't cover it." A sound escaped her that wasn't quite a laugh. His expression shifted — something unguarded in it, something she'd only ever seen in unguarded moments that he'd probably not intended to give her. She reached up and took his wrist. Not to pull his hand away. Just held it. "You're going to have to actually talk to me," she said. "About all of it." "I know." "That's two things you've admitted to knowing in the last five minutes. That might be a record." His mouth curved, slow and genuine. "Don't get used to it."