Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8VX948J2VTCDQVP6W27XPM

The third deadbolt slid back with a heavy clunk. Rory pulled the door open, her free hand still wrapped around the neck of a half-empty bottle of cider. Lucien Moreau filled the doorway. The dim hall light caught the platinum slick of his hair, the sharp line of his jaw. He leaned on his ivory-handled cane, a charcoal suit tailored to within an inch of its life. He looked like he’d stepped out of a boardroom, not the stale-carpet hallway of a Brick Lane walk-up. Her grip tightened on the bottle. “You’re kidding.” “Aurora.” His voice was a low rumble, the French accent softened by years in London but still there, a ghost at the edges of his words. “It’s Rory.” She didn’t move. The tabby, Ptolemy, wound itself around her ankles, then darted back into the jungle of paper. “May I come in?” “No.” He didn’t flinch. His heterochromatic eyes held hers—one amber, one black as a starless night. They tracked the minute tremor in her hand, the way her shoulders had gone rigid. “It’s important.” “Everything with you is important. World-ending. Crucial.” She took a swig from the bottle, the cider sour on her tongue. “My evening isn’t. I’m busy.” “Reading?” His gaze drifted past her, over the avalanches of books on the sofa, the scrolls unfurled across the floor, Eva’s chaotic research. “Or drinking alone?” “Both. It’s a versatile skill set.” She started to shut the door. The tip of his cane met the wood, not with force, but with a finality that stopped it. “Five minutes.” “You lost your five minutes six months ago, Luc. When you walked out of Silas’s bar and didn’t look back.” The amber eye seemed to glow in the shadows. “You told me to leave.” “And you’re so good at following instructions.” She released the door, turned her back on him, and walked into the flat. Let him follow or not. The decision was his, and she hated that it still felt like hers, too. She heard the quiet click of the latch, the tap of his cane on the floorboards. He closed the door, engaging the top deadbolt with a smooth, practiced motion. “Making yourself at home?” “The locks are for her protection. They should be used.” He remained by the door, a statue in expensive wool. “You look well.” “Liar.” She set the bottle down on a stack of grimoires. “You look the same. Which is the problem.” A faint smile touched his mouth. “You haven’t changed either. Still delivering for Madame Cheung?” “Pays the rent. What do you want?” He moved then, a slow, deliberate path through the clutter. He didn’t touch anything, but his presence seemed to rearrange the air. Ptolemy emerged from behind a bookcase and stared, unblinking. “I need a retrieval,” Lucien said. “A small item. From a private collection in Mayfair.” Rory barked a laugh. “Call a thief.” “I did.” He stopped a few feet from her. The scent of him reached her—sandalwood and cold stone, something utterly inhuman beneath the cologne. “You are the thief I am calling.” “I’m a delivery girl.” “You are a woman who walked away from a law degree, fled an abusive man, and carved a life out of nothing in a city that eats the hopeful for breakfast. You have a mind that solves puzzles in the spaces between breaths. And you have, whether you admit it or not, a particular set of skills honed in Silas’s employ.” She folded her arms, the gesture pulling her shirt tight across her shoulders. The small crescent scar on her left wrist itched. “Silas and I are square. I don’t do that work anymore.” “This is different.” “It’s always different with you. And then it’s exactly the same.” She turned to face the window, the neon sign of the curry house below painting the room in garish red and green. “Why me?” “Because the item is warded. Human magic, but intricate. It requires a touch… a sensibility. Someone who can think around corners.” “And you know all about corners, don’t you?” His silence was heavier than any reply. She glanced back. He was watching her, his face a mask of perfect control. But she saw the slight tension in the hand gripping the cane, the almost imperceptible tightening of his jaw. He needed this. He needed her. The hurt was a cold, hard stone in her chest. Six months of silence. Six months of wondering if she’d imagined the heat of his hand on the small of her back, the way his laughter felt like a secret. Then he shows up, needing a favor. “What’s the item?” “A ledger. Bound in pale leather.” “What’s in it?” “Names. Transactions. The kind that get people killed.” “Demon people?” “All kinds of people.” He took a step closer. The space between them crackled. “The collector is a dilettante. He doesn’t know what he has. The security is electronic, mundane. The ward is on the ledger itself. A simple aversion charm, keyed to the supernatural. It repels anything with a trace of the other realms. Makes their skin crawl, their vision blur. They can’t get near it.” “And you can’t get near it.” “My heritage makes it… disagreeable.” He said it without shame. A fact. “A human could pick it up, but a human wouldn’t understand the ward, wouldn’t know how to dismantle it without triggering God knows what. You are the in-between.” “Half-human, half-mess.” The old bitterness tasted familiar. “Fully capable.” Another step. She could see the individual threads of his silver tie, the dark fan of his lashes. “I will pay you. Triple your usual rate.” “I don’t have a usual rate for breaking into Mayfair mansions.” “Name your price, then.” Her heart hammered against her ribs. It wasn’t about the money. It was about him standing here, in Eva’s cluttered flat, bringing the past back with the chill of the evening on his coat. It was about the way her body remembered his before her mind could protest. “Why did you really leave?” The question was out, raw and unplanned. He went very still. “You told me to.” “I was angry. You said things.” “So did you.” “You said my world was small. That I was playing at something I didn’t understand.” “And you said I was a monster. That the demon in me would always win.” His voice was flat, stripped of emotion. “We were both right, perhaps.” She flinched. “I didn’t mean—” “You did.” He closed the final distance. He didn’t touch her, but she felt the heat of him, the magnetic pull that had always been there, a dangerous, dizzying force. “You saw the truth, Aurora. And it frightened you. It frightens you still.” Her breath hitched. “Don’t.” “Don’t what? Don’t say what we both know?” His amber eye burned. The black one was depthless, swallowing the light. “You look at me and you see the father I never knew. You see the darkness that might seep out. You see a risk.” “And you see a human. Fragile. Temporary.” The words were a whisper. “I see you.” His hand came up, stopping just short of her cheek. “Brilliant. Stubborn. Alive in a way that scorches everything around you. I stayed away because you asked. Because my world is full of things that would snuff that light out without a second thought. And I am one of those things.” She turned her face into the space near his palm. Not a touch, but an acknowledgment. “You didn’t stay away tonight.” “No.” The word was a confession. “I need the ledger. But I also needed to see you. To know if the silence had healed the wound.” “Has it?” “No.” The single syllable hung between them. Ptolemy meowed, a plaintive sound in the quiet. “The job,” she said, her voice unsteady. “If I do it. We do it clean. Professional.” “Of course.” “No history. No… anything else.” His hand fell back to his side. The professional mask slid back into place, but it was cracked now, a hairline fracture she could see. “Agreed.” “I want the details. Floor plans, schedules, everything.” “I have them in the car.” She nodded, wrapping her arms around herself again. The attraction was a live wire, buzzing under her skin. The hurt was a fresh bruise, aching with his proximity. And the unsaid things—they crowded the room, thicker than the dust on Eva’s books. “Wait downstairs,” she said. “I’ll get my coat.” He inclined his head, a gesture that was almost old-world courtesy. He turned, his cane tapping a soft rhythm back toward the door. He paused with his hand on the knob. “The scar on your wrist,” he said, without looking back. “You got it falling out of an apple tree. You were seven. Your father told you to wait for the ladder, but you never waited for anything.” She stared at the pale crescent on her skin. “How did you—” “You told me. The night before I left.” He opened the door. The hall light framed him for a moment, a sharp silhouette against the gloom. “You were laughing. You said it was your first lesson in gravity.”