Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8WNQNMDBC2C31PFKDF4EJC

The third deadbolt gave its usual reluctant click, and Rory pulled the door open already half-turned back toward the kitchen, expecting Eva with her arms full of groceries and a complaint about the Tesco queue. It was not Eva. Lucien Moreau stood in the narrow stairwell with rain darkening his shoulders and his ivory-handled cane tucked under one arm, and for a full three seconds Rory did nothing but grip the doorframe and stare at him like she'd opened the door to find the wall on the other side had simply ceased to exist. "Carter." His voice was exactly as she remembered it — that low, unhurried baritone carrying the ghost of Marseille underneath the London polish. His mismatched eyes moved over her face with an efficiency she'd once found infuriating and now, to her profound annoyance, still did. "You have a phone," she said. "I do." "You know my number." "I do." A pause. A small, controlled smile that died before it reached either eye. "May I come in?" She should have said no. That was the correct answer, the one the version of herself who had not spent the last four months occasionally waking up furious about things he'd said and things he hadn't would have delivered without hesitation. Instead she stepped back from the door and let the width of Eva's flat swallow the silence between them. He came in carefully, the way he always moved in unfamiliar spaces — cataloguing exits, she'd learned, old habit from years of operating in rooms where the wrong person might recognise him. He took in the towers of books tilting off every surface, the scrolls Eva had weighted open with mugs and a battered paperweight shaped like a sphinx, and said nothing. The tabby materialised from behind a stack of research notes and wound itself around his ankle. "Ptolemy," Rory said, because she needed something to look at that wasn't him. "Don't." The cat sat down and regarded Lucien with the sovereign indifference of a creature that had decided this visitor was acceptable and therefore the tension in the room was a human failing. Lucien reached down without breaking stride and scratched behind its ears with a practised economy of motion that somehow made everything worse. "Eva's out," Rory said. She crossed to the kitchen and switched the kettle on, because it was something to do with her hands. "She'll be back in an hour. If this is about the Aldgate situation, you can brief her directly." "It isn't about the Aldgate situation." She turned around. He'd stayed near the door — she noticed that, the care he'd taken not to advance — and he looked, for the first time she could remember, slightly damp. Not dramatically so. Just enough for it to register that he'd been standing in the rain before she opened the door, long enough that it had worked into the fine wool of his jacket. "Then what," she said, "is it about?" He set the cane against the wall and considered her for a long moment with that particular stillness he used when he was choosing words, and when he finally spoke he did not, to his credit, dress it up. "You left before I could explain." "You didn't try very hard to stop me." "No," he said. "I didn't." The kettle began its low preliminary hiss. Rory kept her back against the counter and her arms folded and told herself she was not grateful for the four feet of cluttered flat between them. Outside, the rain picked up against the window overlooking Brick Lane, and somewhere below the curry house exhaust fans were running, breathing out cardamom and warm fat into the wet evening air. "Rory." He said it quietly, the word worn smooth at the edges. He never called her that unless it was the only thing left. "What I said that night was—" "I know what you said." "I said it badly." "You said it clearly. That was rather the problem." She heard the edge in her own voice and hated it, hated how available it was even now, how quickly she could locate the specific shape of it. She'd spent four months building something calmer and here she was, sixty seconds into the same room as him, with all of it exactly where she'd left it. He came three steps closer and stopped. She watched him do it — the deliberate pace of it, the way he angled slightly so she had a clear line to the door, and she thought, not for the first time, that the most maddening thing about Lucien Moreau was not his silences or his careful distances but the fact that his silences and careful distances were always a form of fluency. "I told you," he said, "that you were reckless. That you would get yourself killed because you didn't understand what you were walking into." He paused. "What I did not tell you — what I should have told you — was that the prospect terrified me." The kettle reached its boil and switched off and neither of them moved. "You were furious with me," she said. "Yes." "You threw me out of that car." "I asked you to get out of the car. Respectfully." "In the middle of—" "You were safe. I made sure you were safe." And there it was — just beneath the careful syntax — something raw and unguarded that she was fairly certain Lucien Moreau had not intended to let out. His jaw tightened. He looked away, briefly, toward the rain-dark window. "I was not—" He stopped. Started again. "I have worked in this city for eleven years and I have not once made a decision based on what I could not afford to lose. Until that night. It made me—" "Terrible," she supplied. The corner of his mouth moved. "Inexact. But acceptable." She pushed off the counter. The flat was small enough that two steps put her within arm's reach of him, and she stopped there, close enough to see the rain on his collar, the controlled tension in the line of his shoulder, the way his mismatched eyes held on her with the focus of someone waiting for a verdict they have already accepted as final. "You could have called," she said. "I called four times." She had known that, actually. The calls had come in the first week, gone unlistened to, and she had told herself she would deal with them when she was less angry. The anger had subsided at roughly the six-week mark and been replaced by something considerably harder to manage. "I know," she said. He reached over and pushed a stack of scrolls aside with the backs of his fingers and sat on the edge of Eva's overstuffed reading chair, elbows on his knees, and looked up at her. Without the cane. Without the vantage he usually arranged for himself. The small crescent scar on her left wrist caught the lamplight as she crossed her arms again and something shifted almost imperceptibly in his expression. "I came," he said, "because I had no intention of waiting for an eighth month to find out whether this was salvageable." "What is this?" "You know what this is." She did, of course. She had known what it was since an October evening eleven months ago when he'd appeared at Silas' bar downstairs with a proposition and a dry wit and those absurd eyes, and she'd thought, with the particular resignation of someone who'd promised themselves better sense, well, that's going to be a problem. She'd been right about that, if nothing else. She crossed the last foot of distance and stood in front of him, and he looked up at her without moving, and she thought about Cardiff and London and everything she'd left behind and come forward to find, and she thought about the four months of productive, pointed silence, and she thought about how the rain sounded on the window and how the flat smelled of cardamom and old paper and how Ptolemy had settled on the arm of the chair an inch from Lucien's elbow with the confident ownership of a creature who had already made up his mind. "You're still infuriating," she said. "Consistently," he agreed. She reached out and touched his jaw, just once, just her fingertips, and felt him go entirely still beneath her hand the way a very controlled person goes still when they are working very hard not to reach back. "Give me a minute," she said quietly. "Take whatever you need." She took four. She stood in the kitchen doorway and made the tea she hadn't made and listened to the rain, and when she came back she handed him the mug and sat down on the arm of the chair in the three inches of space Ptolemy had not occupied, and Lucien shifted to make room for her without being asked, and neither of them said anything for a while. It was not fixed. She understood that. There were still the unsaid things, still the long careful architecture of a man who found closeness risky and said so only by other means, still her own layered wariness that had been years in the making before she'd ever heard his name. None of that had resolved itself in the time it took for the rain to change pitch against Eva's window. But his shoulder was warm where it pressed against her arm, and he hadn't moved away, and when Ptolemy climbed deliberately into his lap and Lucien set down his mug and rested his chin briefly against the top of her head — just for a moment, barely registering, almost nothing — she thought that it was, at the very least, a start.