Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8W9Q2F4MKBNM82NDNA1XA6

The third deadbolt stuck the way it always did. Rory had to lean her shoulder into the door, jiggle the key, and swear under her breath before it finally gave. She pulled the door open expecting the Deliveroo driver she'd tipped extra to bring Thai from two streets over. Lucien Moreau stood on the landing instead, one hand resting on the ivory head of his cane, rainwater darkening the shoulders of a charcoal suit that cost more than three months of her delivery wages. He looked exactly the same. That was the worst part. Six weeks of silence and the man hadn't even had the decency to develop a flaw. His platinum hair was slicked back from a face that belonged on a cathedral wall — half-saint, half-gargoyle — and those mismatched eyes, one amber, one black, found hers with an expression she couldn't name. "No," she said, and pushed the door. His cane caught the frame. Not hard. Just enough. "Five minutes." "You used up five minutes six weeks ago, Lucien. You used up a whole bloody hour, actually, and then you walked out of Silas' bar without a word." She kept her hand flat on the door. The wood vibrated between them, a stalemate. Ptolemy threaded between her ankles, curious about the visitor, the traitor. "Move the cane." "I will. After five minutes." "I could break it." "It's ivory. Nineteenth century. You could, but you'd feel terrible about it later." He was right, and they both knew it. She hated that he was right. She hated the way rain clung to the sharp line of his jaw and how the curry-and-cardamom smell rising from the restaurant below mixed with whatever expensive, woody thing he wore on his skin. She hated that her pulse had decided six weeks wasn't long enough to forget. Rory let go of the door and walked back into the flat. Not an invitation. A retreat. She heard him enter behind her, the soft tap of his cane on the hardwood, the click of the door closing. He didn't touch the deadbolts. Eva's flat looked like a paper hurricane had swept through and settled. Books in stacks along every wall. Scrolls pinned open with coffee mugs. Research notes in Eva's cramped handwriting taped to the kitchen cabinets. Rory had been staying here since Eva left for a dig in Jordan two weeks ago — feeding Ptolemy, watering the one surviving basil plant, pretending the clutter wasn't slowly driving her insane. She turned and leaned against the counter, arms folded. Lucien surveyed the chaos with the expression of a man asked to sit in a puddle. He didn't sit. He stood near the door, both hands layered on his cane, and looked at her the way he always looked at her — like she was a locked room and he was deciding which pick to use. "You changed your number," he said. "I changed my number because of the Harrow situation, not because of you. Don't flatter yourself." "I went to the Golden Empress. Yu-Fei said you hadn't worked a shift in ten days." "Yu-Fei talks too much." "Yu-Fei threw a dumpling at my head and told me I was a — and I'm translating loosely from the Cantonese — a hollow-hearted dog who didn't deserve to breathe the same air as you." A flicker of warmth. She crushed it. "Yu-Fei's a good judge of character." Lucien's jaw tightened. The amber eye caught the overhead light and burned gold for a half-second, something restless moving under the surface he kept so carefully polished. He looked down at the floor, then back at her. When he spoke, the practiced smoothness in his voice had frayed at the edges. "I handled things badly." "You didn't handle things at all. That was the problem." "Yes." The single word hung in the cluttered air. No deflection, no charm. She hadn't expected that. She'd imagined this conversation a hundred times during the first two weeks — in the shower, during deliveries, staring at the water stain above her bed at her own flat. She'd scripted devastating lines. She'd pictured herself cold and untouchable and perfectly composed. In every version, he made excuses and she dismantled them. He wasn't making excuses. She didn't know what to do with that. Ptolemy had padded over to investigate. The cat circled Lucien's ankles, sniffed his shoe, and promptly sat on his foot. Lucien glanced down at the tabby with something close to alarm. "That's Ptolemy. He likes you. Bad taste runs in this household." "Rory." The way he said her name. The French vowels softening it, bending it into something more tender than the sharp little word she'd grown up with. She tightened her arms across her chest. "Say what you came to say." He shifted his weight. The cane creaked. For the first time in the year she'd known Lucien Moreau — fixer, information broker, man who could talk a demon into a discount and a saint into a card game — he seemed to struggle for language. "That night at Silas' bar," he began. "When you told me—" "I know what I told you. I was there." "When you told me about Evan." His voice dropped on the name. Not with anger. With something more controlled and more dangerous than anger. "I didn't leave because of what you said. I need you to understand that." "Then why?" The word came out smaller than she wanted. She felt the scar on her left wrist pulse with phantom heat, that crescent-moon reminder of a childhood fall she still flinched from. She pressed her thumb over it. Old habit. Lucien's gaze tracked the movement. His knuckles whitened on the cane. "Because I wanted to find him. And what I wanted to do when I found him is not something I should describe to you in detail, but it would have involved very little of my human half." His black eye seemed to deepen, the pupil swallowing whatever light reached it. "So I left. Before I said something that frightened you. Before I became one more man who made your pain about his own rage." The kitchen faucet dripped. Ptolemy purred against Lucien's ankle. The rain intensified outside, drumming against the window that overlooked Brick Lane. Rory's arms unknotted. Dropped to her sides. "You could have told me that." "I know." "A text would have done. One sentence. 'Need space, not abandoning you, back soon.' Twelve words, Lucien. You speak four languages. Surely you could have scraped together twelve words in one of them." A ghost of something crossed his face. Not quite a smile. "Eleven. You used a contraction." "Don't." "I'm sorry." "Don't do the thing where you're clever and I stop being angry. I deserve to be angry." "You do." "And you deserve to stand there with a cat on your foot feeling uncomfortable." "I do." She looked at him. The dripping suit, the rigid posture, the way one hand had left the cane and hung at his side now, fingers slightly open, like he was resisting the urge to reach for something. The amber eye and the black eye held her with equal intensity, and she thought about the night at Silas' bar — how she'd sat on a stool and unspooled the worst parts of herself for him, the bruises she'd hidden, the lies she'd told her parents, the morning she'd finally packed a bag while Evan slept. How Lucien had listened without interrupting, without flinching, and she'd thought this one is different, and then he'd stood and left through the back door without a word and she'd thought no, they never are. Six weeks. She'd packed that hope into a box and shoved it somewhere deep and airless and now here he was, prying the lid off. "I looked for you," she said. "The first week. I rang Silas. I went to your flat in Kensington. I left a note under your door." "I found it." "Which is why you're here? Guilt?" "No." He stepped forward. Ptolemy yowled softly and rearranged himself on the warm spot Lucien's shoe had left. One step closer, then another. Close enough now that she could see the threads of platinum stubble on his jaw, the slight unevenness where his nose had once been broken, the rain still caught in his eyelashes. "I'm here because two nights ago I sat in a hotel room in Lyon trying to broker a deal between two very unpleasant entities, and the only thought I could keep was that I wanted to hear your voice telling me I was a hollow-hearted dog." "You are a hollow-hearted dog." "Yes." "Yu-Fei's words, not mine. I would've said something worse." "I know." He was close enough to touch. He didn't touch. His hand hung at his side, fingers open. "Tell me worse." Rory felt the counter pressing into the small of her back. The space between them had its own gravity. She could smell the rain on him now over the cardamom, sharp and green and cold, and underneath it the darker note of whatever ran in his blood that wasn't quite human. Her chest hurt. It had been hurting for six weeks and she'd called it anger because anger was easier. "You made me think I'd made a mistake trusting you." His expression changed. The composure she was so used to seeing cracked — a fracture running through stone — and she saw the thing beneath. Not charm. Not control. Just a man standing in a cluttered flat with a cat staring at him, gutted by one sentence. "That," he said quietly, "is worse." "Good." Silence. The rain. Ptolemy's purr, improbable and loud. "I won't do it again," Lucien said. "Leave without telling you why. I won't." "People say that." "I'm only half a person, technically. The other half is bound by its word in ways humans aren't. Ask me to swear it." She searched his face, the amber eye and the dark one, looking for the seam between performance and truth. She'd gotten good at finding seams. Evan had taught her that — the only useful thing he'd ever taught her. But Lucien's face was open in a way she'd never seen, raw the way a wound is raw before someone covers it. "Don't swear anything tonight," she said. "Just stay." His breath caught. Barely visible — a hitch in his chest, a flicker in his throat. "Stay and have tea," she continued. "The kettle's behind that stack of Mesopotamian land deeds, don't ask. And tomorrow you can explain what you're doing showing up in the rain like some Brontë character while I decide how long I'm going to make you work for this." The fracture in his composure shifted into something else. Not a smile — he didn't earn a smile yet — but the possibility of one. He inclined his head. A small, formal dip that belonged in another century. "Tea. I can do tea." Rory pushed off the counter and moved past him toward the kettle. Her shoulder brushed his chest. The contact lasted half a second. Neither of them flinched away. She reached the counter and began excavating ceramic mugs from under a layer of annotated Sumerian tablets. Behind her, Lucien shed his wet jacket and draped it over the back of the one chair that wasn't occupied by books. He lowered himself into it with the care of someone folding into a space not built for him. Ptolemy leapt into his lap, circled twice, and settled with proprietary confidence. "He sheds," Rory said without turning around. "Noted." "On everything. You'll look like a yeti by the time you leave." "A small price." She filled the kettle and set it on the burner. Blue flame. The familiar click and hiss. She stared at the small crescent scar on her wrist and pressed her thumb to it again — not flinching this time, just touching, the way you touch a compass to remind yourself which way is north. "Lucien." "Yes?" "The note I left under your door. What did it say?" A pause. The deliberate kind, where someone chooses honesty over comfort. "It said, 'I'm not waiting for you but the door's open if you come back.' And then a P.S. that said, 'You still owe me forty quid for the cab.'" She almost smiled. "Do you still owe me forty quid?" "I brought fifty. Adjusted for interest." "Leave it on the table." The kettle began to murmur. Rain slid down the window in crooked lines. Somewhere in the building, a pipe groaned, and from the curry house below came the muffled clatter of the dinner rush beginning. Rory pulled two mugs free and dropped a teabag in each, her hands steady, her pulse less so. She turned and leaned against the counter again, and this time she let herself look at him — really look. Lucien in the chair with the cat on his lap and the books towering around him, out of place and entirely present, watching her with those impossible mismatched eyes like she was the only locked room that mattered. "Milk? Sugar?" "Black." "Of course. Dramatic to the last." His mouth twitched. Still not a smile. But closer. The kettle whistled.