Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8WKWBTZQ9719R1J574KABA

The third deadbolt always stuck. Rory had to lift the door slightly on its hinges and twist the knob at the same time, a trick Eva had shown her exactly once and that she still managed to fumble every time. She did it now, cursing under her breath, the knock at the door a second time louder than the first. She pulled it open. Lucien Moreau stood in the dim corridor with his ivory-handled cane hooked over one forearm and his other hand raised to knock again, knuckles inches from her face. He lowered it slowly. For a moment neither of them moved. He looked precisely as she remembered him, which was somehow the most annoying part — the platinum hair slicked back to architectural perfection, the charcoal suit without so much as a crease from whatever journey had brought him here. The amber eye caught the light from the hallway. The black one didn't. "You're not Eva." "Brilliant deduction." Rory kept her hand on the door. "She's not here." "I know." She waited for him to explain. He didn't. Downstairs the curry house pumped its familiar haze up through the floorboards — cardamom, fenugreek, something frying — and Ptolemy materialised from behind her ankles to investigate the newcomer with the unsolicited confidence of a cat who'd never once been wrong about a person. Lucien looked down at him. "Don't." Rory reached for the tabby, but Ptolemy had already wound himself once around the tip of the cane and sat down on Lucien's shoe. "I didn't do anything." "You never do anything. Things just happen around you." Something shifted in his expression. Not quite a smile. He glanced past her into the flat — the towers of books on every surface, Eva's scrolls pinned to the wall above the radiator, the cold mug of tea Rory had abandoned on the coffee table an hour ago. "May I come in?" "You haven't told me why you're here." "I'm aware." She held his gaze for a beat longer than was comfortable, which was a thing she'd learned to do specifically because of him, because in the early days she'd been the first to look away and she'd decided at some point that she was done being the first to do anything. She stepped back from the door. He moved past her, close enough that she caught the faint trace of something — cedar, maybe, or the particular cold of November streets still clinging to the wool of his jacket. She shut the door and worked the deadbolts in reverse, one two three, giving herself those few seconds with her back to him. When she turned around he was standing at Eva's bookshelf, not reading the spines, just standing there with his cane loose in his hand and his shoulders carrying a tension she hadn't noticed in the corridor. "You look tired," she said. "You look well." He said it without turning around. "London suits you better than it did." "You saw me four months ago." "I know when I saw you." She moved to the kitchen, filling the kettle more to occupy her hands than out of any particular desire for tea. The small flat made distance between them impossible — fifteen feet, maybe, between the kitchen counter and where he stood. "Four months and you show up at eleven at night without ringing ahead." "Would you have answered if I'd rung?" She set the kettle on its base and pressed the switch. The element ticked on. He'd turned now. The amber eye tracked her across the kitchen. "Probably not," she admitted. "Then we've saved some time." "We haven't saved anything, Lucien. You're standing in my friend's flat and you still haven't said why." She crossed her arms, not in hostility but because she needed something to do with them. "So." He set the cane against the bookshelf and it leaned there obediently. He moved to the armchair across from the sofa — Eva's reading chair, the one that sagged on the right side — and he didn't sit in it so much as lower himself into it with the careful deliberateness of someone who hadn't slept. "There's a job. Something's come up that requires — " He stopped. Pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose. "That requires someone who thinks laterally. Someone the usual circles don't know." "You have an entire network of people." "I have people who are known. The situation calls for clean." "And you thought of me." "I always think of you." The kettle reached its boil and clicked off. The silence it left behind had weight. Rory didn't move from the kitchen. She studied him — the line of his jaw, the slight looseness around his eyes that wasn't tiredness exactly but something more like the aftermath of it, as though he'd been awake very deliberately for days rather than simply unable to sleep. "That's not fair," she said. "No." He didn't pretend not to understand her. "It isn't." She pulled two mugs down from the cabinet and dropped a teabag in each one without being asked whether he wanted any. There was something almost muscle-memory about it, the way she knew without thinking that he'd take it with one sugar and no milk, and the recognition of that knowledge was its own small grief. "The last time I helped you with a job," she said, pouring the water, "you told me the risk was minimal." "The risk was minimal." "I got stabbed, Lucien." "Superficially." She turned around and looked at him. "Superficially," he said again, with considerably less conviction. "It needed four stitches." "Which I arranged." "In a car. You arranged stitches for me in the back of a moving car." Ptolemy had followed him into the flat and was now installed across his knee with total commitment, and Lucien sat with one hand resting on the cat's back in a way that suggested he hadn't entirely noticed he was doing it. "I was scared," he said. Quiet. Matter-of-fact, the way he delivered anything that cost him. "When you were hurt. I want you to know that before whatever conversation we're about to have." Rory set his mug on the coffee table and took her own to the sofa, tucking her feet up beneath her. She wrapped both hands around the warmth and looked at him across the small distance that was all the room allowed.