Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8W3EJM3GFPSA0DMDJNX0DF

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 Eva had promised to send up before she'd left for the British Library — pad thai, extra chili, cold Singha — and found Lucien Moreau standing on the landing instead, one hand resting on the ivory head of his cane, the other holding a paper bag dark with grease stains. For three full seconds, neither of them spoke. He looked exactly the same. That was the worst part. The platinum hair slicked back from his temples with almost surgical precision. The charcoal suit cut close to his lean frame, not a wrinkle in it despite the fact that the stairwell above the curry house was approximately nine hundred degrees and smelled like cumin and old carpet. His mismatched eyes — amber and black, the mark of what he was on his father's side — studied her with that particular quality of attention she'd spent the last two months trying to forget. As though she were a document in a language he hadn't quite mastered, and he found the challenge more interesting than frustrating. "Before you close the door," he said, his accent curling around the consonants the way it always did, soft Marseille French bleeding into practised London English, "I should tell you that I intercepted your dinner order. The driver was very understanding." Rory gripped the door frame. Ptolemy wound between her ankles, rumbling his broken-engine purr, completely oblivious to the fact that this was a crisis. "You bribed my Deliveroo driver." "I tipped him generously for the inconvenience." "That's the same thing." "It is not remotely the same thing." Lucien lifted the paper bag a fraction of an inch. "I also brought you food. From Golden Empress. Yu-Fei says hello and that you missed your Thursday shift." The mention of Yu-Fei sent a needle of guilt through her ribs. She had missed her shift. She'd been holed up in Eva's flat for three days, combing through scrolls and research notes with curtains drawn, sleeping on the sofa with a tabby cat on her chest, telling herself it had nothing to do with avoidance and everything to do with work. She'd almost believed it. "How did you know I was here?" she asked. Something shifted behind his eyes. The amber one caught the hallway's bare bulb and threw it back like a coin turning in water. "Rory. I'm an information broker. Knowing where people are is quite literally what I do." "Right." She crossed her arms over the oversized Cardiff University hoodie she'd been wearing for two days straight. Her hair was unwashed. She wasn't wearing shoes. There was a smudge of ink on her left hand from where she'd fallen asleep holding one of Eva's fountain pens. She was, in short, a disaster, and he was standing there looking like he'd stepped out of a fitting room at Savile Row, and the fundamental injustice of it made her want to slam the door and lock all three deadbolts and pretend this wasn't happening. Instead she said, "Eva's not here." "I know. I'm not here for Eva." The words landed in the narrow space between them like a dropped glass. Rory felt the impact somewhere behind her sternum, in the place where she kept all the things she'd decided not to feel. Ptolemy, tired of being ignored, meowed once, loudly, and trotted back into the flat. Lucien's gaze followed the cat, then returned to her. Patient. Unbearably patient. He had always been patient with her, even when she hadn't deserved it, even when she'd been sharp-tongued and defensive and halfway out the door. It was the thing she resented most about him — that steadiness, that refusal to match her when she was looking for a fight. Evan had always matched her. Evan had always escalated. She'd learned to read the weather of a man's temper the way sailors read the sky, and Lucien's calm unsettled her more than any storm. "You can't just show up," she said, but the edge in her voice was already dulling. She hated that too. "And yet." He didn't smile. That was the other thing about Lucien — he never smiled when he was being serious, and he was almost always being serious with her. With other people, with clients and contacts and the various creatures that moved through London's underworld, he wore charm like another layer of tailoring. With her, he stripped it away, and what was left underneath was something rawer and more difficult. "You stopped answering your phone." "I was busy." "You were hiding." "I was researching." "Those are not mutually exclusive." She opened her mouth to argue and found she had nothing. He was right. He was usually right, and it was infuriating. She pressed her thumbnail into the crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist — an old habit, grounding, the small smooth ridge of tissue a touchstone — and exhaled. "Fine," she said, and stepped back from the door. "But only because you've got my dinner hostage." He didn't gloat. He simply inclined his head and crossed the threshold, navigating the obstacle course of Eva's flat with the ease of a man accustomed to moving through cluttered spaces without disturbing them. Books rose in precarious towers from every horizontal surface — the kitchen counter, the coffee table, the arms of the sofa where Ptolemy had already reclaimed his spot. Scrolls unfurled across the floor like shed snakeskins. Research notes in Eva's cramped handwriting papered the walls, connected by lengths of red string that made the whole flat look like the inside of a conspiracy theorist's mind. Lucien set the paper bag on the one clear corner of the kitchen counter. His cane he leaned against the wall beside the door, within arm's reach — always within arm's reach, the thin blade hidden inside it a secret Rory was one of very few people to know. He unbuttoned his suit jacket with one hand. His fingers were long, precise, unhurried. "You look tired," he said, not looking at her. "You look like you want to get punched." Now he did look at her —a flicker of something at the corner of his mouth that wasn't quite amusement. "You'd have to reach my face first." "I'm five-six. I could reach your face." "In theory." "In practice. I have excellent aim." The almost-smile faded. He turned to face her fully, and in the yellow kitchen light of Eva's flat, with the muffled thump of music from the curry house below them and the distant wail of a siren filtering in through the window she'd cracked for air, Rory saw what the careful composure was costing him. The set of his jaw was fractionally too tight. The tendons in his neck stood out like cables. His black eye — the demon eye, the one he couldn't disguise without effort — was darker than she remembered, the pupil indistinguishable from the iris, a well with no bottom. He was nervous. In the months she'd known him — the late-night phone calls in French and English and sometimes a demon tongue she couldn't name, the favours exchanged like currency, the slow gravitational pull that had drawn them closer and closer until the night everything had fractured — she had never once seen Lucien Moreau nervous. "I didn't come here to argue with you," he said. "Then why did you come?" "Because you left." Three words. Simple, declarative, devastating. He said them the way he said everything — like language was a blade and he knew exactly where to place the cut. Rory leaned against the kitchen counter and gripped the edge with both hands. The laminate was cold and slightly sticky. "You know why I left." "I know what you told me. I do not think it is the same thing." "Lucien—" "You told me it was too complicated." He took one step closer, just one, and stopped. Careful. Always so careful with her, maintaining that distance she'd demanded, respecting the perimeter she'd drawn even as he pressed against its edge. "You told me that what I am makes it impossible. But you were shaking when you said it, and you would not look at me, and I have spent two months trying to reconcile those two things, and I cannot." Her throat ached. She pressed harder against the counter's edge, the laminate biting into her palms. Ptolemy had climbed onto the back of the sofa and was watching them both with the calm, judgmental gaze of a creature that had never once been uncertain about anything. "It's not about what you are," she said quietly. "Then what?" She looked at the crescent scar on her wrist. She thought about Evan — not the specifics, not the memories she'd boxed and shelved and refused to inventory, but the shape of it, the lesson she'd taken from it: that wanting someone was a kind of vulnerability, and vulnerability was a door you could never fully close once it was open. "I don't know how to do this without it wrecking me," she said. The words came out smaller than she'd intended. Thinner. She'd meant to sound pragmatic and instead she sounded like exactly what she was — a twenty-five-year-old woman standing barefoot in her best friend's flat, terrified of the precise thing she wanted most. Lucien was quiet for a long moment. She could hear him breathing. She could hear the curry house music, bass-heavy and muffled, and the rattle of the old pipes in the wall, and London doing what London always did outside the window — living, churning, indifferent. Then he closed the distance between them. Not all of it. He stopped close enough that she could smell his cologne — something warm and resinous that she'd tried and failed to forget — and see the fine grain of the stubble along his jaw. His mismatched eyes searched her face with an intensity that made something turn over low in her belly. "I don't know how either," he said. His voice had dropped, lost its polish, gone rough at the seams. "I have never done this. Not with the truth. Not with someone who knows what I am and stayed anyway." "I didn't stay. I ran." "And I followed. Perhaps that tells us something." She laughed — a short, wet sound that startled them both. "It tells me you're stubborn." "I am half-demon. Stubbornness is in the blood." She looked up at him. This close, the amber eye was extraordinary — not just gold but layered, honey over copper over something that moved like light through deep water. The black eye beside it should have been frightening. She knew what lived in it, what lineage it signified, what realm had spawned the father he never spoke of. But it wasn't frightening. It was just Lucien. "I'm scared," she said. Not a confession. A fact. "I know." He raised one hand, slowly, giving her time to pull away. His fingertips brushed the line of her jaw. His touch was warm, warmer than a human's — the demon blood running hotter beneath the surface. "I know you are." She didn't pull away. His thumb traced the hinge of her jaw, feather-light, and came to rest just below her ear. She felt her pulse kick against his touch, felt the sharp sweetness of it — being held gently by someone strong enough to be gentle, the deliberateness of it, the choice. "Stay for dinner," she whispered. His mouth curved. A real smile, rare and unguarded and so beautiful it ached. "I brought dinner. It would be rude to leave." "Extremely rude." "I was raised better than that." "Were you?" "My mother was. Close enough." She reached up and curled her fingers into the lapel of his perfect charcoal suit and felt the fabric crease under her grip. He let her ruin it. He let her anchor herself there. His hand slid from her jaw into her hair, fingers threading through the unwashed black strands, and his forehead came to rest against hers. They stood like that in the cluttered kitchen while the food went cold and Ptolemy lost interest and London rumbled on around them, and Rory thought: this is the door opening. This is what it feels like when you stop running and let someone stand in the threshold with you. She didn't lock it.