Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8W0YE2K8ABTTESM3GS9FY9

The third deadbolt was always the stubborn one. Rory had to lean into it with her shoulder, the metal groaning in protest before finally surrendering, and by the time she swung the door open she had already rehearsed the excuse she'd give Eva for being late — the message had only said urgent, flat, now, which in Eva's vocabulary could mean anything from a crumbling ward to a broken nail. It was not Eva standing in the hallway. Lucien Moreau stood with one hand resting on the ivory handle of his cane and the other tucked into the pocket of his charcoal jacket, as though he had simply materialized there and found the position comfortable. His platinum hair was slicked back in that careful, deliberate way that had always suggested he'd spent considerable time before a mirror and would absolutely deny it. The amber eye caught the weak overhead light of the corridor. The black one gave nothing back at all. "Bonsoir," he said. Rory did not move from the doorframe. "Eva's not here," she said. "I know. I didn't come for Eva." The smell of curry drifted up from the restaurant below, turmeric and something darker underneath it, and the hallway felt suddenly very small. Ptolemy appeared from somewhere behind her ankles, wound once around her calf, and then padded directly toward Lucien with the specific, treacherous affection that cats reserve for people who don't want them. Lucien looked down at the tabby. Something shifted at the corner of his mouth. "Don't," Rory said. "I wasn't going to say anything." "You were going to use the cat." He looked up. "I don't know what you mean." "You were going to pet him and make yourself seem approachable and then pivot to whatever it is you actually want." She crossed her arms. "It's a technique. I've seen you do it in three different languages." The almost-smile became a real one, brief and contained, before he put it away again. He nudged Ptolemy gently aside with one foot — not unkindly — and met her eyes. "May I come in?" "Can you be not annoying while you do it?" "Almost certainly not." She stepped back anyway. He moved through the flat the way he always moved through spaces that were not his — with a careful, observant stillness, as though cataloguing the room before committing to it. His gaze traveled over Eva's stacked research notes, the scrolls pinned to the walls with drawing pins and stubborn hope, the pillar of paperbacks that had been threatening structural collapse for at least three months. He didn't touch anything. He never touched anything he hadn't been invited to touch, which had once struck Rory as courtesy and now struck her as something she couldn't quite name. She leaned against the kitchen counter and waited. "You've been avoiding me," he said. "I've been busy." "You work part-time delivering food, Rory. You have ample time." "I have a very active inner life." She reached past him to put the kettle on, more for something to do with her hands than because she wanted tea. He didn't move out of her way and she had to pass close enough that she caught the faint cedar-and-smoke scent of him, which was unfair and she resented it. "What do you want, Lucien?" He was quiet for a moment. She heard the kettle begin to tick. "I want to know if we're all right." The question was so plainly stated that it wrong-footed her. She'd expected something oblique, an information request dressed in pleasantries, the particular brand of sideways communication he'd perfected over however many years of brokering secrets for people who couldn't afford to be direct. Not this. She turned around. He was watching her with an expression she didn't have a name for, the amber eye warmer than usual and the black one still inscrutable, his weight shifted slightly onto the cane in a way that she'd learned meant he was actually tired rather than performing it. "That depends," she said carefully, "on what you think not all right means." "I think it means you haven't returned a single message in six weeks." "I've been processing." "Processing," he repeated. Not mocking. Just turning the word over. "You told me something that changed the way I understood—" She stopped. Reset. "You kept something from me for months that directly affected what I was walking into, and then when it mattered you handed it over like it was nothing. Like it was just information. Like I was just a client." The flat was very quiet. Somewhere below them a kitchen was producing something spiced and fragrant and the ceiling gave a small, familiar creak. "You weren't a client," he said. "I know that. That's why it hurt more." She hadn't meant to say it that cleanly. She watched him absorb it, the line of his jaw tightening and then releasing, and she thought about the night in the alley behind Silas' bar when he'd stepped between her and something with too many teeth and too many opinions about her continued existence, and how afterward he'd still handed her the information she needed in that same cool, measured voice, as though the blood on his jacket sleeve was an administrative inconvenience. "I didn't tell you because I thought it would frighten you off," he said. "And I needed you not to be frightened." "That's not your decision to make." "No." He said it without argument. "It isn't." Ptolemy jumped onto the counter between them and sat there like a small, smug mediator. Rory looked at the cat. She looked at Lucien. She thought about six weeks of not answering messages and the particular exhaustion of maintaining a grudge against someone you respected, and how the two things had begun to feel related. "I'm angry with you," she said. "I know." "I'm still angry with you." "Also noted." "And you still should have told me." "Yes," he said simply. "I should have." She reached past Ptolemy and turned off the kettle before it could boil over, and when she straightened up she was closer to him than she'd planned, close enough to see the faint tiredness around his eyes that the careful posture was designed to conceal. He hadn't slept properly. She recognized it because she knew his face, which was its own kind of problem. "Stay for tea," she said. "Actual tea, not whatever negotiation you came here prepared to run." Something eased in him. Small, but visible. "Only if you let me make it," he said. "Yours is always terrible." "My tea is fine." "Your tea is an act of aggression." She moved aside and let him at the kettle, and Ptolemy dropped from the counter to follow him with revolting loyalty, and Rory stood in the middle of Eva's cramped, scroll-covered flat with her arms still crossed and the ghost of a warm feeling she hadn't quite decided what to do with yet. Outside, Brick Lane carried on being itself — loud and lit and indifferent to anyone's complicated history. Inside, the only sound was Lucien moving around her borrowed kitchen with quiet, careful competence, as though this too was something he'd been invited to do. She sat down at the table and waited to see what came next.