Run: 2026-04-24-01KPZTVT4E42A1GFYX7NTAQF4B

The third deadbolt gave with a dull clunk, and Rory opened the door with Ptolemy coiled around her ankles and a half-eaten piece of toast in her hand. Lucien Moreau stood on the landing like he had every right to be there. Charcoal suit, ivory cane hooked over his wrist, platinum hair catching the yellow light of the stairwell bulb. The amber eye found hers first. The black one took its time. "You've got some fucking nerve." "Good morning to you too, Aurora." She didn't move from the doorway. Ptolemy, traitor that he was, wound around Lucien's polished shoe and began to purr. "Eva's not here." "I didn't come for Eva." "Then you can turn around and walk back down those stairs." He tilted his head, just slightly, the way he did when he was deciding which version of himself to be. She hated that she still catalogued it. She hated more that her pulse had jumped the second she'd heard the knock and known, somehow, before she'd even reached the door. "Five minutes, Rory." "You don't get to call me that." "Lucien, then. Five minutes of your time. I'll stand in the hallway if it makes you more comfortable." It wouldn't. Nothing about him in a hallway was comfortable. He filled doorframes like smoke, all lean shoulders and that cologne — something with bergamot and something darker underneath it, a scent she'd had the stupid habit of associating with safety for about six weeks last spring. She stepped back. "Wipe your feet." He did, with a small, amused twist of his mouth that she refused to acknowledge. She shut the door and locked two of the three bolts out of habit, leaving the third because she didn't want to hear herself trap them in together. The flat looked worse than usual. Eva had left a tide of open books on the coffee table, a mug growing something scientific, three scrolls weighted down by a salt shaker. Rory hadn't washed her hair. She was wearing one of Eva's jumpers, the grey one with the hole at the elbow, and she was suddenly, furiously aware of it. "Say what you came to say." Lucien set his cane against the wall. Slow. Deliberate. He didn't sit. "You haven't answered my calls." "Observant." "Three weeks, Aurora." "Good counting, too." The amber eye narrowed. She met it. The crescent scar on her wrist itched — an old tell, her mother would have said, an old nerve remembering something. "I owe you an explanation," he said. "No. You owed me one in February. Now you just owe me an exit." "If you'll let me —" "Let you what? Stand in my friend's living room and do that thing with your voice where everything sounds like it's been thought about for a long time? I've seen the trick, Luc. I've watched you do it to other people. It doesn't work on me anymore." That landed. She saw it land. A flicker at the jaw, quick as a moth. "It was never a trick with you." "Don't." "It wasn't." "Don't." Her voice cracked on the second one and she hated that too. She turned away, set the toast down on the counter, because her hand was shaking and she refused to give him the satisfaction of watching it. Ptolemy meowed up at her, indignant. "You told me you couldn't. Fine. People can't. People don't. I'm an adult, Lucien, I can handle being told no. What I can't handle is being told no and then finding out three weeks later you'd been telling my business to Silas over a bottle of whatever it is the two of you drink when you're ruining women's lives." "That's not what happened." "Then tell me what happened. With sentences. In a row." He was quiet. He had a good silence, Lucien — patient, unembarrassed. She used to think it was depth. Now she suspected it was just practice. "I told Silas you were in danger," he said. "I didn't tell him why. I didn't tell him about us." "There was no us." "Aurora." "There wasn't." She folded her arms. The jumper slipped off her shoulder and she yanked it back. "There was you at my door at two in the morning once. There was a weekend in Brighton. There was you saying, word for word, 'I'm not built for this.' And then there was nothing, for a month, until Eva told me you'd been asking Yu-Fei whether I'd been eating." He closed his eyes. Just for a moment. When he opened them again both were on her, mismatched and too bright. "I was worried about you." "You weren't allowed to be." "I know." "You don't get to hand something back and then keep the receipt." That got a small sound out of him — not quite a laugh. "That's very good. Did you write that down?" "Get out." "Aurora." "Get. Out." He didn't move. He did something worse. He crossed the small flat in two steps, not touching her, not even close, but near enough that she could feel the cold he'd brought in off the landing still clinging to his jacket. Near enough to catch the bergamot. "I was scared," he said, quietly, the kind of quiet he didn't do in public. "Of what I was about to drag you into. Of what I am. I told you I wasn't built for this because I thought you'd be safer thinking I was a coward than knowing I was a risk. I was wrong. I've been wrong about it every day since. I'm not asking you to forgive me. I'm asking you to let me say it out loud, once, so I don't have to carry it around pretending I said it." She looked at his collar because she couldn't look higher. There was a speck of something on the lapel — salt, maybe, or ash. "You've said it," she said. "I have." "Then go." He didn't argue. He went back to the wall, picked up the cane, rested his hand on the ivory like he needed the steadiness of something carved. At the door he paused, not turning. "You're not eating enough," he said. "Lucien." "I'll go." He did. The door clicked shut. She stood in the middle of the room with Ptolemy butting his head against her shin, and she didn't lock the third deadbolt for a long time.