Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8WFDRPPY62625CZ51BMAFQ

The third deadbolt stuck. It always stuck. Rory had to lean her shoulder into the door and twist the key at an angle that would have made a locksmith weep, and by the time the mechanism finally gave with its rusted clunk, whatever composure she'd arranged on the walk from the peephole had dissolved into the simple irritation of living in a flat that fought back. She pulled the door open. Lucien Moreau stood on the landing with rain darkening the shoulders of his charcoal suit and his ivory-handled cane hooked over one forearm like he'd come to appraise the building rather than stand in the narrow corridor above a curry house at half eleven on a Tuesday. The smell of cardamom and frying onions rose from the shop below. A bead of water tracked down his temple, past the amber eye, and he didn't wipe it away. "No." She moved to close the door. His cane caught the frame — not shoved, just placed, the handle resting against the wood with a kind of surgical precision that made her teeth ache. "Thirty seconds." "You burned through your thirty seconds about six weeks ago, Lucien." "I'm aware of the timeline." "Then you're also aware that I don't want to talk to you." His black eye — the one that unsettled people who didn't know what they were looking at, and terrified people who did — shifted past her into the flat. She watched him catalogue the chaos: Eva's towers of occult research, the scrolls pinned to the kitchen cabinets with magnets shaped like fruit, Ptolemy sprawled across an open copy of the Lesser Key of Solomon like a furry paperweight. "You've been staying here," he said. Not a question. "Eva's in Thessaloniki. Someone has to feed the cat." "You left the flat above Silas's bar." "The boiler broke." "The boiler's been broken since March. You left because of the wards I put on your windows." Rory's grip tightened on the door handle. The crescent scar on her left wrist caught the hallway's jaundiced light. "You don't get to ward my windows, Lucien. You don't get to ward anything of mine. We covered this." "We shouted about it. That's different from covering it." She hated the way he said things like that. Calm. Measured. Four languages at his disposal and he wielded English like a scalpel — no wasted syllables, no heat, every word placed exactly where it would land hardest. She'd watched him do it to arms dealers and demon-blood traders in backrooms across the East End, watched their faces go slack when they realized they'd agreed to something they hadn't intended. She recognized the technique. She was not immune to it. "You're soaking wet," she said. "It's raining." "There are cabs." "I walked from Shoreditch." "That's a stupid thing to do in a suit that costs more than my rent." The corner of his mouth moved. Not a smile. The suggestion of one, offered and then retracted before it could be held against him. "Are you going to let me in, or shall I negotiate with the door?" Ptolemy chose that moment to abandon the grimoire and thread between Rory's ankles, purring at a volume that bordered on mechanical failure. The cat had always liked Lucien. Rory suspected demonic pheromones but had never been able to prove it. She stepped back. He entered the way he entered every room — an inventory first, threats second, exits third. She'd asked him about it once, early on, when they were still in that stage where personal questions felt like gifts exchanged. Born habit, he'd told her. My father's people don't sit with their backs to doors. She'd filed it away alongside every other fragment he'd offered, small and deliberate as mosaic tiles, and only later understood that the picture they assembled was not one he'd chosen to show her. "Tea?" The word came out before she could stop it. Hospitality as reflex. Her mother's daughter. "If you're offering." "I'm filling a kettle. You can draw your own conclusions." She moved into the kitchen, which was less a room than a theory — a strip of counter, a two-burner hob, and a kettle whose cord she had to drape over a stack of Eva's Sumerian translation notes. Behind her, she heard the creak of the one chair that could take weight and the soft click of his cane being leaned against the table. The rain hammered the window above the sink. She watched it run in sheets down glass that hadn't been cleaned since Eva left, turning the streetlights below into smears of sodium orange. Her reflection stared back — black hair flat against her neck, blue eyes bruised underneath from the kind of sleep that technically counted but offered nothing. "I found the Harker manuscript." Her hand stopped on the kettle's switch. "Don't do that," she said. "Do what?" "Lead with business. You didn't walk from Shoreditch in the rain to tell me about a manuscript." Silence. She heard Ptolemy jump onto the table, heard Lucien's hand move across fur. When she turned around, he was watching her with both eyes and for once they carried the same expression, which was worse than when they didn't. "No," he said. "I didn't." The kettle began to hiss. She folded her arms and leaned against the counter's edge, ignoring the scroll that crinkled beneath her elbow. "Then say what you came to say." He was quiet for a long moment. Ptolemy purred. Rain drilled the glass. From below, someone in the curry house laughed — a big, rolling belly laugh that felt obscene in the taut air of the flat. "I handled it wrong," Lucien said. "The wards. The information I kept from you about the Avaros contacts. The way I made decisions about your safety without consulting you." "You made decisions about my life." "Yes." "Because you decided I couldn't handle knowing what was coming." "Because I decided I couldn't handle what would happen to you if you did." He said it without flinching, without breaking eye contact, and she felt something shift in her chest like a bone resetting. "That's not the same thing, and it's not better. But it's the truth." Rory pressed her thumbnail into the scar on her wrist. An old habit. A reset button for moments when her pulse outran her thinking. "I've had someone make my choices for me before, Lucien. I moved four hundred miles to get away from it." Something changed in his face. Subtle. The jaw tightened a fraction. She'd told him about Evan — not everything, but enough — during a late night in the back office of the Golden Empress while Yu-Fei pretended not to listen from behind the bead curtain. She saw him absorb the comparison, saw it land somewhere deep and do damage. "I know," he said. "Do you? Because from where I stood, it looked exactly the same. Someone who thought they knew better. Someone who locked the windows." He closed his eyes. When he opened them, the amber one caught the overhead bulb and flared for a half-second, molten, before settling. "It is not the same. But I understand why it felt that way. And I should have understood it then." The kettle screamed. She turned and poured, grateful for the excuse to look away, to focus on the mechanical acts of mug and bag and water. Her hands were steady. She was proud of that. "You disappeared for six weeks," she said to the steam. "No messages. No word through Silas. You just — vanished." "You told me to leave." "I told you to stop. There's a difference." She heard the chair creak as he shifted. "You're right. There is." Rory brought two mugs to the table. She set his down on a treatise about ley line convergence and sat across from him, displacing Ptolemy, who dropped to the floor with the theatrical thud of a creature deeply wronged. Their knees almost touched beneath the table. The flat was that small. Everything in it conspired toward closeness. He wrapped his fingers around the mug. Long fingers, pale at the knuckle, a thin white scar across the back of his right hand from something he'd never explained. She watched the steam curl between his mismatched eyes and hated how familiar the geometry of his face still was — the sharp line of his nose, the way his platinum hair was already drying in pieces that fell across his forehead, abandoning the careful slick-back. "I found the Harker manuscript," he said again, quieter. "Lucien." "It pertains to you. To what's been following you since October. I could have sent it through channels, left it with Silas, kept the distance you asked for." He paused. "I didn't want to." The honesty of it sat between them like a living thing. She stared at the surface of her tea. "What do you want?" she asked. "To do it differently. With you informed. With you choosing." "And if I choose to handle it alone?" "Then I'll leave the manuscript and go." She looked up. He met her gaze without performance, without the smooth broker's mask she'd watched him wear in every other room with every other person. Just the raw, strange face of a man who was half of something he'd never asked to be, asking for something he knew he hadn't earned. Rory turned her mug in her hands. The rain slowed. Ptolemy wound around the table legs in a figure eight, indifferent to the weight of anything that wasn't his next meal. "Show me the manuscript," she said. Lucien reached into the interior pocket of his wet jacket and placed a folded sheaf of pages on the table beside the ley line treatise. His fingers lingered on it for a moment, then withdrew. "Stay," she said. The word surprised her. She didn't take it back. "Stay and walk me through it. And then — we'll see." The suggestion of a smile returned. This time he let it stay a beat longer before his expression settled into something more careful, more honest than a smile. "I can do that." She pulled the manuscript toward her and opened it. Their hands didn't touch. They didn't need to. The space between them had changed — still charged, still fraught, but the walls she'd built had a door in them now and she'd left it unlocked. Three deadbolts on the front door, and she'd opened every one.