Run: 2026-04-24-01KPZTTDKS1DHXZ6RQNNYP88Y4

The third deadbolt slid back with a reluctant scrape, and Rory opened the door halfway — just enough to see who had the gall to ring Eva's buzzer at eleven at night — and the rest of her sentence died somewhere behind her teeth. Lucien stood on the landing with one gloved hand resting on the ivory handle of his cane, as if he'd been there the whole time and she'd simply been slow to notice. The stairwell light, all jaundice and dust, caught the platinum of his hair and turned it almost silver. His charcoal suit was immaculate, the shoulders dry, though she could hear the rain still hissing against the window at the end of the hall. "You're on my doorstep," she said. "Technically," he said, "I'm on Eva's doorstep. You simply happen to be behind it." "Same difference." "A barrister's daughter should know better than to conflate the two." She almost laughed. She hated that she almost laughed. Ptolemy, who fancied himself the flat's doorman, wound between her ankles and stared up at Lucien with slitted yellow approval. Traitor, she thought. She bent, scooped him up, tucked him against her shoulder like armour. "Eva's in Edinburgh until Thursday," she said. "I know." "Then what do you want, Luc?" He looked at her properly for the first time, and she felt the careful double-pull of his mismatched eyes — the amber one warm, the black one unreadable, both of them entirely too attentive. There was a tightness at the corner of his mouth that hadn't been there six weeks ago, when he'd last walked out of her life with the same unhurried step he'd walked in. "Ten minutes," he said. "I'd prefer not to discuss it in a corridor that smells of vindaloo." "I like the way it smells." "I'm aware. You smell faintly of it yourself." "Charming." "Always." She held the door for three more seconds than she meant to, then stepped back. "Ten minutes, Moreau. And you can leave the cane by the door." "The cane stays with me." "The cane has a sword in it." "Then you understand why." He stepped inside. Somehow the flat, which had been claustrophobic since the day Eva moved in, grew a size smaller around him. He didn't touch anything. He never did. He simply observed — the leaning towers of books, the half-drunk mug of tea on the windowsill, the notebook splayed open on the coffee table with Rory's looping, left-handed scrawl across it. His gaze paused there a fraction longer than elsewhere, and she felt it like a fingertip dragged over the inside of her wrist. She set Ptolemy down. She crossed her arms. The crescent scar on her left wrist caught the lamplight; she turned it inward without thinking. "Sit or don't," she said. "Talk." He didn't sit. He leaned his weight on the cane, very slightly, and that told her more than anything he might say — Lucien never leaned unless something hurt, and Lucien never admitted what hurt. "Someone is asking after you," he said. "By your old name. By the Cardiff one." The floor didn't tilt, but it felt as if it considered tilting. She kept her face still. It was a trick she had learned from him, actually, which was one of the smaller ironies of her life. "Evan." "I don't know yet. Possibly. Possibly someone he's paid. The inquiry came through a broker in Camden who wouldn't take my money to stop it, which is, as you can imagine, unusual." "So you came to warn me." "I came to tell you what I know. Warnings imply I think you need them." "Luc." She said it too quietly, and hated that too. "If you came here to be clever at me —" "I came here because I would rather you hear it from my mouth than find it on your own in a way that hurt you." He exhaled. It was the closest thing to an unpolished sound she had ever got out of him. "That is all, Aurora." Aurora. Not Rory, not Laila, not any of the names he liked to roll around his tongue in that maddening accent. Aurora, like a small confession. She turned away from him because looking at him was becoming a problem. The window gave her back a blurred reflection of the room — her, narrow and dark-haired and braced; him, elegant and unreadable, watching her watch him. "You said ten minutes," she said to the glass. "I did." "It's been three." "Then I have seven left to say the rest." "There's a rest?" A pause. In the pause, the rain, and Ptolemy's purr, and somewhere below them a burst of laughter from the curry house kitchen. She listened to Lucien not answer for long enough that she had to turn around. He had not moved. But something in his face had shifted, the way a lock shifts before it opens. "I shouldn't have left the way I did," he said. "No," she agreed. "You shouldn't have." "I thought distance would be kinder. To you. It was, in fact, the cowardice of a man who is not used to wanting things he cannot price." "Luc —" "I am not asking for anything, Rory." Her name, the real one, the friend one, spoken in his mouth like something fragile he had finally decided to risk. "I only wanted you to know I was aware of the size of the mistake." She stepped closer before she could stop herself. Close enough to see the faint shadow under his amber eye, the place where his jaw had been too recently clenched. Close enough that the rain-smell clinging to his coat mixed with the turmeric of the flat and became, absurdly, the specific perfume of the worst and best six weeks of her life. "You're bleeding," she said, because his left glove had a dark stain along the seam that she had only just registered. "A little." "For God's sake." She caught his wrist — the gloved one, gentle — and he let her. That was the thing that undid her, quietly: that he let her. "Sit down. I mean it. Sit down, Lucien." He sat. On Eva's terrible sagging sofa, a half-demon fixer in a thousand-pound suit, with her hand still holding his wrist as if she'd forgotten to let go. She didn't let go. "Ten minutes isn't going to be enough," she said. "No," he said. "I suspected as much."