Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8WY3FWD64M4QHHD27GWJYK

The third deadbolt was always the stubborn one. Rory had to lean her shoulder into the door frame and torque the key at a precise angle before the mechanism gave, and when it finally did, the door swung inward with a groan that Ptolemy answered from somewhere inside with a chirp of indifference. She had been expecting the Thai takeaway she'd ordered forty minutes ago. Lucien Moreau stood in the corridor instead, one hand braced against the wall, his charcoal jacket still immaculate despite the rain beading on his shoulders. The single amber eye caught the light from the bare bulb overhead. The black one didn't. "No." Rory moved to shut the door. His cane was faster, the ivory handle wedging into the gap before she could throw the bolt. Not aggressive. Just there, the way Lucien was always just there, patient in the manner of something that had learned long ago that waiting cost nothing. "Five minutes." "You had five minutes. You had about four hundred of them, actually, over the course of two months. I haven't heard from you since March." "I know." "That's it? You know?" "I know, and I'm here now, and I need to come inside." She looked at him. The slicked-back hair had loosened slightly at the temple, a single pale strand falling across his forehead — the kind of small disorder that on anyone else would've meant nothing. On Lucien it meant he'd been moving fast, possibly for hours. His jaw carried two days of growth he wouldn't have allowed otherwise. Something had gone sideways. She stepped back from the door. He moved past her into the flat, and the familiar scent of sandalwood and something colder, mineral, like stone after rain, came with him. Ptolemy dropped from the top of the bookshelf, wound once around Lucien's ankle, and departed. The cat had always liked him. Rory had spent considerable energy resenting that. "Eva's not here," she said, shutting the door and throwing two of the three bolts. "I know. I came for you." She crossed to the kitchen counter, putting its narrow geography between them and filling the kettle more for occupying her hands than any genuine desire for tea. Books and scrolls covered every surface, Eva's research notes spilling from the table onto the floor, a half-eaten biscuit balanced on top of a leather-bound text about pre-Carolingian demonology. Normal. The kettle clicked on. "What happened?" Lucien lowered himself into the armchair by the window, the one that sagged on the left side and that Eva had propped up with a paperback of Middlemarch. He set the cane across his knees. He did not take his eyes off Rory. "Cresswell's people found something," he said. "Something they shouldn't have. Something connected to your name." The kettle became irrelevant. She turned from the counter. "My name." "Your full name. The other one." Malphora. She'd heard it twice in her life and both times the word had landed in her chest like swallowed glass. "How?" "I'm still working that out. Which is why I'm here and not elsewhere being more useful." He paused. "I needed to see you weren't dead first." The flat felt smaller than it usually did, which was already quite small. The rain against the window filled the silence Lucien left behind, and Rory stayed where she was by the counter, watching him sit in the broken armchair as though he'd been built for exactly this kind of room, this kind of low, careful tension. "You could have called," she said. "You blocked my number." "You could have had someone else call." "I could have." He turned the cane once in his hands, a slow rotation. "I didn't want to." The thing about Lucien was that he lied continuously and casually about small things — his whereabouts, his intentions, the contents of envelopes and the nature of favours — but he almost never lied about the things underneath. She'd learned to hear the difference. The slight flattening of his cadence when he was constructing something, the way his mismatched eyes settled on a point just past her when he was managing the truth rather than telling it. He wasn't doing either now. He was looking directly at her, the amber eye steady, even the black one carrying something that didn't quite resolve into anything she could name. That was the part that had kept her awake in March. Not the argument. Not the specific, precise words she'd said or the ones he'd said back. But the face he'd made when she'd walked out of that hotel bar — like something had gone quiet in him, the way a room goes quiet when a door at the far end of it is shut. She moved out from behind the counter. "Tell me what they found." "In a moment." He didn't stand, but something in how he held himself changed when she came closer, a shift in the quality of his stillness. "Are you all right?" "I'm fine." "You've got takeaway soy sauce on your jacket." She looked down. He wasn't wrong. She'd been on a delivery run three hours ago and had apparently carried the evidence of it home. She felt a laugh threaten the back of her throat against her better judgement, and she locked it there, but some fraction of it must have reached her face because one corner of his mouth moved. "I've been working," she said. "I know. Yu-Fei told me." "You went to the restaurant." "You weren't at your flat." "You went to my flat." "Rory." He said her name the way he always had, with the stress landing slightly differently than it would in English, the French still living in his vowels even after years in London. It did the same thing to her now that it always had done, and she disliked herself for that quite actively. She sat on the arm of the sofa across from him, forearms on her knees, close enough now that she could see the rain still drying on his collar. "Talk," she said. "Tell me what Cresswell has." He did. But for just a moment before he began, his eyes moved across her face in the careful way of someone checking something against memory, measuring the distance between what they'd been carrying for two months and what was actually in the room with them now. Whatever verdict he reached, he kept it behind his expression, and Rory kept hers behind hers, and the rain continued its work against the glass, and Ptolemy resettled himself on the demonology text, and neither of them mentioned March again. Not yet.