Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8X8S7RNNQ47P8VA11NYRP0

The first deadbolt turned with a sound like a knuckle cracking. Then the second. By the time Rory reached the third, Ptolemy had already bolted from the kitchen counter and disappeared beneath a stack of Eva's Sumerian lexicons, which told her everything she needed to know about who was standing on the other side. She opened the door anyway. Lucien Moreau leaned against the doorframe like he'd been sculpted there — one shoulder pressed to the wood, the ivory handle of his cane tucked under his palm, his charcoal suit so precisely tailored it made the narrow hallway of the Brick Lane walk-up look like a stage set designed around him. The smell of cumin and frying oil drifted up from the curry house below, and it was absurd, the contrast: the spice-tinged stairwell, the water-stained ceiling, and Lucien standing in the middle of it all like he'd taken a wrong turn out of a Parisian cocktail bar. His mismatched eyes found hers. The amber one caught the light from the bare bulb overhead. The black one swallowed it. "No," Rory said. "I haven't said anything yet." "You're here. That's enough." She kept her hand on the door. Her grip was steady, which she considered a victory. "How did you even know I was at Eva's?" "You weren't at your flat. You weren't at the restaurant." He said it simply, as though tracking her movements across East London were a perfectly reasonable Tuesday evening activity. "Yu-Fei told me you'd finished your deliveries early." "Remind me to have a word with Yu-Fei about her information-sharing policies." Something flickered at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. Lucien's smiles were rare, deliberate things — offered like concessions. This was more like muscle memory, a reflex he caught and killed before it could fully form. "May I come in?" "No." "Rory." The way he said her name — that slight roll on the R, the vowel opened wider than any English speaker would shape it — landed in her chest like a stone dropped into still water. She hated that. She hated that after three weeks of silence, after the way things had ended at the Harrow Street meeting, after he'd looked at her across that back room and chosen to say nothing while Marchetti's people closed ranks around him, her stupid treacherous body still responded to the sound of her own name in his mouth. She stepped aside. He entered the flat the way he entered every room: cataloguing it. His gaze swept the cluttered surfaces — Eva's research notes pinned to a corkboard above the radiator, the scrolls unfurled across the kitchen table, the towers of paperbacks on every horizontal surface. A coffee mug sat on a stack of Ottoman trade records. Ptolemy's food bowl was wedged between a dog-eared copy of Frazer's *Golden Bough* and what appeared to be a fourteenth-century grimoire sealed in a plastic bag. "Your friend has eclectic taste," he said. "Eva's in Edinburgh. Research trip." Rory shut the door but didn't replace the deadbolts. She wanted the option of a quick exit. A petty gesture, maybe, and one that wouldn't mean much to a man who was half-demon and carried a blade in his cane, but it was the principle of the thing. "So whatever you're here for, you can say it to me and leave." Lucien turned. In the cramped front room, the distance between them shrank to almost nothing — three feet, maybe four. She could see the faint shadow of stubble along his jaw, which was unusual. Lucien was meticulous about his appearance. The platinum blond hair was still slicked back, the suit still immaculate, but there was something underneath the polish that looked frayed. Like a painting with hairline cracks running through the varnish. "You haven't answered my messages," he said. "You sent one message. One. And it said 'We should talk.' That's not a message, Lucien, that's a hostage negotiation opener." "And yet you're still holding the hostage." "What hostage?" "Whatever it is you're not saying to me." The silence that followed was the kind that had weight. Rory felt it settle across her shoulders. She crossed her arms, then uncrossed them because she knew he'd read it as defensive, and she refused to give him the satisfaction. Instead she moved to the kitchen — two steps, that's all it took in Eva's flat — and filled the kettle. Doing something with her hands helped. It always had. Back in Cardiff, during the worst of it with Evan, she'd scrubbed the kitchen until her knuckles bled and her mother had found her at two in the morning with steel wool and a vacant expression. That was a different life. A different kind of silence. She set the kettle on the burner and turned around. Lucien had not followed her. He stood where she'd left him, his weight shifted slightly onto the cane, watching her with an expression she couldn't decode. That was the thing about his eyes — the mismatched pair made it impossible to get a clean read. You'd think you'd caught something in the amber one, something warm and almost human, and then the black one would pull your focus like a gravity well and you'd lose the thread entirely. "Three weeks," she said. "You let three weeks go by." "You asked me for space." "I asked you not to lie to me. There's a difference." He was quiet for a moment. Then: "I didn't lie." "You stood there and said nothing while Marchetti told me the Harrow Street job was clean. You knew it wasn't. You knew what was in those crates, and you looked me right in the face and said nothing, and that — " She stopped. Swallowed. The kettle began its low, preliminary hiss. "That's the same thing, Lucien. In every way that matters, that is the same thing." He moved then. One step forward. The cane tapped once against the floorboards, a precise sound, almost musical. "If I had told you in that room, in front of Marchetti's people, what was in those crates, you would be dead. Not figuratively. Not eventually. You would have been killed before you made it to the street." "So you made the choice for me." "Yes." "You don't get to do that." "I know." The kettle screamed. Rory pulled it off the burner with a hand that was no longer quite as steady as she wanted it to be. She poured water over a teabag in a chipped mug — one of Eva's, printed with the words *ARCHAEOLOGISTS DO IT IN THE DIRT* — and stared at the dark bloom of tannins spreading through the water. "My ex used to make choices for me," she said quietly. "What I wore. Where I went. Who I talked to. He'd frame it as protection too. He was very convincing." The silence that followed was different from the others. Heavier. When she raised her eyes, Lucien's expression had shifted into something she had never seen on him before. It wasn't pity — he was too sharp for pity — but it was something close to pain. The amber eye burned. The black one was very, very still. "I am not him," he said. His voice was low, stripped of its usual careful modulation. The accent thickened, as it did in the rare moments when he let something slip past the control. "I will never be him. And if you tell me his full name, I will make certain he never —" "Stop." She held up a hand. The crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist caught the kitchen light, a pale sliver against her skin. "That's not why I told you." "Then why?" "Because I need you to understand what it costs me. Trusting someone who decides what I can and can't handle." She wrapped both hands around the mug. The heat was almost scalding. She didn't let go. "I left Cardiff to get away from someone who treated me like I was breakable. I will not do that again. Not for anyone. Not even for someone I —" She stopped. The word hung there, half-formed, obvious as a gunshot in the cramped and cluttered flat. Lucien took another step. He was close enough now that she could smell his cologne — something warm, woody, underlaid with a faint metallic note that she'd never been able to identify, something that might have been the Avaros half of him bleeding through the human surface. His cane rested against the edge of the kitchen table. He reached out and, very slowly, very deliberately, placed his hand over both of hers where they gripped the mug. His skin was warmer than it should have been. It always was. "Say it," he said. "No." "Rory." "You first." She looked up at him. Her bright blue eyes met his mismatched pair without flinching. "You're the one who showed up at my door. You're the one who tracked me across London on a Tuesday night. You first, Lucien. For once in your life, you go first." He exhaled. She watched something behind his expression come apart — not dramatically, not like a wall crumbling, but like a lock turning. The third deadbolt. The one that takes the longest. "I have not slept in eleven days," he said. "I have brokered three deals I did not care about. I sat in a meeting with a Marchetti lieutenant this morning and realized I had not heard a single word he said because I was thinking about the way you looked at me in that back room. The way you looked at me like I had become every terrible thing you'd ever trusted." He paused. His thumb moved against her knuckle, a motion so small it could have been involuntary. "I am not a good man. I have done unconscionable things for money, for survival, for reasons I cannot even remember. But I have never —" He stopped. Started again. "Losing you is the first thing in a very long time that has frightened me." The mug was shaking. Or her hands were. She couldn't tell the difference anymore. "That's not the word I was looking for," she said. But her voice had gone thin, and the corner of her mouth was doing something traitorous. "I know what word you were looking for." His hand tightened over hers. "And I am terrified of it. And I am here anyway." Rory set the mug down. She didn't step back. She didn't step forward. She stood in the tiny kitchen of her best friend's flat on Brick Lane, with the smell of curry drifting up through the floorboards and a tabby cat hiding behind a stack of dead languages, and she made a choice that was entirely, stubbornly, irreversibly her own. She reached up and laid her hand against his jaw. The stubble was rough under her palm. His breath caught — a small, involuntary sound that unraveled something in her chest she'd spent three weeks trying to keep knotted. "If you ever make a choice like that for me again," she said, "I will walk, and you will not find me. Not with your contacts. Not with your languages. Not with whatever demon-blooded trick you haven't told me about yet. Are we clear?" "Crystal," he said. "Good." She kissed him. It was not gentle. It was three weeks of silence and the memory of Harrow Street and the fear that she was making the worst mistake of her life and the absolute certainty that not kissing him would be worse. His free hand came up to the back of her neck, fingers threading into her black hair, and he kissed her back with a kind of desperate precision that was so thoroughly, so infuriatingly Lucien — controlled and uncontrolled at the same time, calculated and reckless in the same breath — that she almost laughed against his mouth. When they broke apart, his forehead rested against hers. His breathing was uneven. The amber eye was close enough to fill her vision, warm and bright and terrifyingly human. "For the record," he murmured, "I was going to say it." "I know." She traced the line of his jaw with her thumb. "You were just taking the scenic route." From beneath the stack of lexicons, Ptolemy let out a low, judgmental meow. Neither of them moved.