Run: 2026-03-15-01KKS2N7TYNSAV4EPBKRVK1RVK

The first deadbolt slid back with a heavy clunk. Then the second. By the time the third turned, Rory had already decided she was going to pretend she hadn't looked through the peephole, hadn't stood there for five full seconds with her hand on the chain, hadn't felt her stomach drop through the floorboards. She pulled the door open. Lucien Moreau stood in the narrow hallway, backlit by the stuttering fluorescent tube the landlord still hadn't fixed. His charcoal suit was immaculate, as always, the cut sharp enough to draw blood. The ivory handle of his cane caught the light. One amber eye, one black, and both of them fixed on her face with the kind of attention that made her feel like she'd been stripped down to bone. "You moved," he said. "I didn't move. I'm staying at a friend's." "For three weeks." Ptolemy wound between her ankles, sniffing at the threshold with territorial suspicion. The smell of curry drifted up through the floorboards, warm and heavy with cumin. Somewhere on Brick Lane, a bass line thumped from a passing car. "Did you come all the way here to track my address, or is there an actual reason you're standing in my friend's hallway at—" She checked the clock on her phone. "Eleven forty-two at night." Lucien tilted his head. That slight movement, that almost imperceptible shift of weight. She'd spent too much time learning to read the small language of him. The way his gloved hand tightened on the cane meant he was choosing his words. The way his jaw sat, relaxed but set, meant he'd already chosen them and wasn't happy with what he'd found. "I came to apologize." That stopped her. Rory leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, and waited. She'd learned that too—the silence that made him fill it. He didn't fill it. Not right away. His gaze moved past her into the flat, taking in the towers of books, the scrolls pinned to the walls, the research notes layered like sediment across every available surface. Eva's life, chaotic and earnest and worn at the edges. "May I come in?" "No." Something flickered across his face. Not hurt—Lucien Moreau didn't do hurt, not visibly—but a shift in the architecture behind his eyes. The demon part, maybe. The half of him that came from Avaros and felt things in frequencies she couldn't access. "Then I'll say it here." He set the cane against the wall with deliberate care. When he straightened, he was closer than she'd expected, close enough that she could smell him—sandalwood and something darker, something that didn't have a name in English. "I was wrong." Rory held her ground. Her left wrist throbbed, the old crescent scar aching the way it always did when her pulse kicked up. Childhood accident, her mother called it. She'd stopped believing that years ago, stopped believing a lot of things she used to take for granted, but the scar still behaved like a barometer for trouble. "Which part? The part where you used me to get to the Cambion, or the part where you let me think—" She stopped herself. Bit down on the sentence and swallowed it whole. "Let you think what?" His voice was quiet. Too quiet. "Doesn't matter." "It matters to me." There it was. The thing she couldn't outrun, couldn't reason away, couldn't file under bad decisions and move past. The way he said things like that, like she mattered, like the opinion of a twenty-five-year-old delivery driver who'd fled Cardiff with a duffel bag and twelve pounds in her bank account could possibly matter to a creature who'd walked through both worlds since before she was born. Ptolemy butted his head against Lucien's ankle. Lucien looked down at the cat with an expression that might have been surprise. The cat looked back with an expression that was definitely challenge. "You're kidding," Rory said. "Your friend's cat appears to be claiming me." "Ptolemy claims everyone. It doesn't mean anything." "Unlike some claims." He met her eyes again. "Unlike mine." She should close the door. She should tell him to go back to whatever supernatural fixer hole he'd crawled out of and leave her alone. She should remember the way it felt to find out she'd been a means to an end, a convenient entry point into a world she hadn't known existed six months ago. Instead she said, "Why now?" Lucien picked up his cane. Turned it slowly in his gloved hand, the ivory catching light like old bone. "Because you've been avoiding me. Because Silas told me you moved out of the flat above his bar and wouldn't say where you'd gone. Because I've been standing outside this building for forty minutes trying to find the right words and I'm apparently not going to find them, so I'm going to have to use the wrong ones and hope you're patient enough to wait for the right ones to follow." "That's a lot of because." "I've had forty minutes to think of them." The fluorescent tube flickered again. Downstairs, someone laughed in the curry house, the sound muffled and warm and belonging to a world that had nothing to do with the one pressed against her doorframe. Rory looked at him—really looked, the way she hadn't let herself since the night everything fell apart. The sharp lines of his face. The platinum hair he kept slicked back like armor. The mismatched eyes that saw too much and revealed too little. He was tired. She could see it now, in the set of his shoulders, in the faint shadows beneath both eyes. Lucien Moreau, who controlled information the way other people controlled air, who moved through London's supernatural underworld like a shark through still water, looked like he hadn't slept in days. "Eva's not here," she said. "She's at some conference in Edinburgh. I'm just watching the cat." "I know where Eva is. I came to find you." The words landed somewhere between her ribs and stayed there, warm and sharp. She hated that. Hated the way he could still do that, could still reach past every defense she'd built and press against the soft parts she couldn't seem to harden. "Rory." He said her name like it cost him something. "I didn't use you. I should have told you what I suspected about the Cambion from the start. I should have explained why I needed someone who could think the way you think—laterally, unpredictably, in ways that things from other realms don't anticipate. But I didn't use you. I chose you. There's a difference, and I was too arrogant to think I needed to explain it." She stared at him. Ptolemy purred against Lucien's leg, a traitor to the cause. "You're really bad at this," she said. "At what?" "At whatever this is. Apologizing. Explaining. Being a person instead of a—" She gestured at him generally. "Whatever you are when you're not standing outside someone's flat at midnight looking like you haven't eaten in two days." His mouth twitched. Almost a smile. "I had a sandwich." "Convincing." "I'm out of practice." He stepped closer, and this time she didn't move back. The doorframe was behind her and he was in front of her and the hallway was narrow and she could feel the warmth of him through the careful distance he was maintaining. "I don't usually need to explain myself. People take what I give them and don't ask for more. You're the only person who's ever—" He stopped. His jaw worked. "Ever what?" "Made me want to give more." The curry smell curled up around them. Brick Lane hummed with its late-night energy, taxis and shouting and the distant pulse of music from a pub three doors down. Rory's wrist ached. Her heart ached worse. "If you're lying to me again," she said, "I'll find a way to make you regret it. I don't care what realm you're from." "I know." He said it simply, without bravado. Like he believed it. Like the possibility of her retaliation was something he carried with him willingly. "I'm not lying." She reached past him and pulled the door open wider. Stood aside. "If Eva's books get damaged, she'll kill us both. She's got wards on half of them." Lucien picked up his cane and stepped over the threshold, and Ptolemy wound between his legs like a small furry herald, and Rory closed the three deadbolts behind them with a sound like resolution.