Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8WYJ0H2ERAK4WB27S2ZFZ7

The third deadbolt stuck the way it always did—you had to lift the door by the handle and twist at the same time—and in the half-second it took Rory to wrestle it open, she'd already catalogued every reason the knock couldn't be who she thought it was. Eva had keys. Yu-Fei always called ahead. The curry house downstairs closed at eleven, and the owner never climbed the stairs for anything short of a gas leak. The door swung inward, and every one of her reasons turned to ash. Lucien Moreau stood on the cramped landing, one hand resting on the ivory handle of his cane, the other holding a bottle of wine by its neck like a peace offering he hadn't yet decided to extend. His charcoal suit was immaculate—because of course it was, even at half-past midnight in the rain—though a fine mist of droplets clung to the platinum blond hair slicked back from his temples. His mismatched eyes found hers immediately: the amber one warm, almost apologetic; the black one unreadable as a well. Neither of them spoke for three full seconds. Rory counted them. She'd gotten very good at measuring silences where Lucien was concerned. "No," she said, and moved to close the door. His cane caught the edge. Not aggressively—he didn't shove, didn't push. He simply placed it there, that thin line of polished wood between the frame and the latch, and waited. He'd always been good at waiting. It was one of the things she hated about him. "Five minutes," he said. His accent did what it always did to the vowels, softened them, rolled them like river stones. French by birth, English by long practice, and something else underneath that she'd only ever heard once, late at night, when he'd let his guard drop far enough for her to glimpse the thing that lived behind the charm. "You don't get five minutes. You don't get five seconds." She kept her hand on the door, knuckles whitening. "You know whose flat this is." "Eva is in Prague. She left yesterday. I checked." "Of course you checked. You check everything." She heard the bitterness in her own voice and hated it—hated how easily he could drag her back to the version of herself that gave a damn about his comings and goings. She'd done real work burying that version. Weeks of it. "That doesn't mean you're welcome here." "I am aware of that." He lowered his gaze—a rare concession from a man who weaponized eye contact. "Rory, I would not be here if it were not important." Her name in his mouth. The way he said it, like the two syllables were something fragile he was trying not to break. She'd asked him once to stop calling her that—to use Carter, or nothing at all—and he'd obliged for exactly one conversation before slipping back. Lucien Moreau did not take orders well. He simply made you forget you'd given them. Ptolemy chose that moment to thread between her ankles, purring like a diesel engine, and headbutt the edge of the open door. The tabby regarded Lucien with the serene indifference that only cats and certain breeds of aristocrat could manage, then padded onto the landing and began investigating his shoes. Rory exhaled through her nose. She looked at the bottle in his hand—good burgundy, she could tell from the label, because he never brought anything that wasn't—and then at the rain beading on the shoulders of his suit, and then at Ptolemy, who was now rubbing his jaw against Lucien's ankle with the enthusiasm of a long-lost friend. "Traitor," she muttered at the cat. She stepped back from the door. Lucien entered the way he did everything: with an economy of motion that made the space feel like it had been designed for him, even though Eva's flat was designed for no one. He picked his way between stacked towers of books and a precarious scroll that had unfurled across the hallway like a runner carpet, his cane clicking softly against the worn wood floor. He set the wine on the kitchen counter—the only surface not buried under research notes—and stood with his back to the window, streetlight from Brick Lane painting him in sodium orange. Rory closed the door. Refastened the deadbolts. All three. She took her time with each one, using the ritual to slow her pulse, which had done something inconvenient the moment she'd seen him and showed no signs of stopping. "Talk," she said, turning to face him across the narrow kitchen. She crossed her arms over the old university hoodie she'd been sleeping in. The flat smelled of cumin from below and old paper from everywhere else, and underneath it—faint, infuriating—the cedar and black tea scent he always carried. Lucien studied her. She could feel him doing it even when she stared fixedly at the wine bottle: that careful, clinical attention he gave to everything, cataloguing details, filing them away in whatever meticulous archive he kept behind those mismatched eyes. She wondered what he saw. Tired, probably. She'd been working doubles at the Golden Empress all week, and the shadows under her eyes had shadows of their own. "You look well," he said. "I look like hell and we both know it. Don't waste your five minutes." The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile. The ghost of one, haunting the place where a real smile might have lived if he'd been a different kind of man. "Very well. There is a contract. Your name appeared on it three days ago." The words landed with the soft, surgical precision he was known for. Rory felt them arrive in her chest before her brain had finished processing them—a cold, dense weight, like swallowing a stone. "A contract," she repeated. "From the Auction Quarter. Someone wants you found. The listing was discreet—I nearly missed it. I would not have seen it at all if I had not been looking." "And why were you looking?" He held her gaze. The amber eye, the black eye. Two different kinds of seeing. "You know why." The silence that followed was not the kind you could measure in seconds. It had weight, texture, history. It contained within it the memory of his hand on the small of her back in a Soho alleyway, guiding her through a crowd of things that wore human faces. It contained the argument afterward—her voice raw, his terrifyingly calm—and the door she'd closed between them with a finality she'd meant to be permanent. It contained six weeks of nothing: no calls, no messages, no elegant notes slipped under her door in that precise, angular handwriting. Six weeks during which she had convinced herself, methodically and with great determination, that she did not miss him. She uncrossed her arms because she realized she was gripping her own elbows hard enough to leave marks. Her left wrist turned, exposing the small crescent-shaped scar there—childhood clumsiness, a broken teacup, nothing supernatural—and she caught Lucien's gaze drop to it and rise again. He'd kissed that scar once. She had not given him permission to remember that, but she supposed memory didn't work on a permission basis. "Who posted the contract?" she asked. "I do not know yet. That is part of why I am here. I need access to Eva's records—she tracks certain brokers I cannot reach. And I need—" He paused. Lucien did not pause. He spoke in fluid, considered sentences that sounded rehearsed even when they weren't. The hesitation cracked something open in the room, let the temperature change. "I need you to allow me to help you." "Last time you helped me, you lied to my face for two weeks." "I withheld information to protect—" "Don't." The word came out harder than she intended, and Ptolemy, who had resettled on a stack of occult journals by the radiator, lifted his head. "Don't do the thing where you reframe it. You lied. You made decisions about my safety without telling me. You treated me like a—like a civilian." "You are a civilian." "I am a person who deserved the truth, and you gave me half of it dressed up in a nice suit and a good accent." He flinched. It was slight—a tightening around his jaw, a fractional shift in his weight onto the cane—but she saw it, and the satisfaction she felt was immediately poisoned by something softer, something that lived in the part of her she'd been trying to wall off for six weeks. "You are right," he said quietly. "I will not insult you by arguing the point." She hadn't expected that. She'd expected the parry, the redirect, the elegant sidestep. Lucien without his rhetorical armor was a thing she had seen exactly once before, and it had ended with her back against a bookshelf in a shop in Covent Garden, his mouth on hers, the cane clattering to the floor between their feet. The memory arrived uninvited and fully formed, and she banished it with the same ferocity she'd use on an actual intrusion. "Sit down," she said, because she needed him to stop standing there looking like that—rain-damp and contrite and unfairly beautiful in the sodium light. "I'll get glasses." She turned to the cabinet above the sink, reaching for the mismatched wine glasses Eva kept between a mortar and pestle and a jar of something dried and unidentifiable. Her hands were steady. She was proud of that. Her hands had always been steady, even when the rest of her was shaking apart—it was the one thing she'd inherited from her father besides his stubbornness and his blue eyes. Behind her, she heard Lucien settle into the kitchen chair, the soft click of his cane leaning against the table edge. Heard the creak of old wood and the whisper of expensive fabric. When she turned back with two glasses, he had removed his jacket and draped it over the chair back, and was rolling his shirtsleeves to the elbow with the kind of deliberate precision that made the gesture feel more intimate than it had any right to be. She set a glass in front of him. Sat across the narrow table. Between them lay a scatter of Eva's notes—photocopied pages from what looked like a medieval bestiary, marginalia in Eva's cramped hand—and the bottle of burgundy, which Lucien opened with a folding knife from his pocket in one clean, practiced motion. He poured. She watched his hands—long-fingered, steady, a thin scar across the right knuckles she'd never asked about—and said nothing until both glasses were full and the bottle was set aside. "The contract," she said. "Tell me everything. And Lucien—" She waited until he looked up. "Everything. I won't do this with you again any other way." He met her eyes across the table. The amber, the black. Two different kinds of seeing, and both of them, right now, focused entirely on her with an intensity that made the cramped, cluttered kitchen feel like the smallest room in the world. "Everything," he agreed. He lifted his glass. His fingers paused around the stem, and then—softly, as though testing whether the word would bear his weight—he added, "I have missed you, Rory." She did not say it back. She wrapped both hands around her glass and breathed in the scent of good burgundy and cumin and cedar and rain, and she thought about walls, and how the most dangerous ones were the kind you built yourself, because you always knew exactly where the doors were. "Start talking," she said. But she didn't look away.