Run: 2026-04-24-01KPZTXKKMGD7D2KVF8CATSK7C

The third deadbolt caught, as it always did, and Rory had to shoulder the door to get it open. She meant to curse at the hinge. She did not, in the end, curse at the hinge. Lucien Moreau stood on her doorstep with one gloved hand braced against the jamb, as though he'd been considering knocking and thought better of it. Rain clung to his shoulders in dark patches. The ivory cane rested in the crook of his elbow. "You're dripping on Eva's welcome mat," Rory said. "Eva doesn't own a welcome mat." "Exactly." He didn't smile. One amber eye held her gaze; the black one drifted, then settled, the way it always did when he was deciding how much truth to spend. Behind her, Ptolemy wound a figure-eight between her ankles and bolted when he scented something he didn't like. "May I come in, Aurora." Not a question. Not quite a plea either. She stepped back because her feet moved before her pride caught up. He crossed the threshold like a man stepping onto thin ice. The flat swallowed him — all those stacked books, the kettle rattling on its base, a half-drunk mug of tea going cold on a stack of conveyancing notes she'd never finish. He looked wrong in it. Too polished. Too expensive. The charcoal suit was cut to the millimetre and the rain hadn't dared soak through to the shirt. "Three weeks," she said. "I'm aware." "Three weeks and you turn up on a Tuesday with no coat." "I have a coat." He set the cane against the side table with a soft knock of ivory on wood. "I left it in the car." "You don't drive." "I had one driven." She laughed — one sharp, unamused note — and went to the kitchen because standing three feet from him was doing things to her sternum that she resented. The kettle had gone quiet. She flicked it back on. "Tea?" "Please." "I only have the cheap stuff." "Then I will drink the cheap stuff." She kept her back to him. It was easier. Two mugs down from the cupboard. The blue one with the chipped handle for him, because she was still, on some petty level, twelve years old. The crescent scar on her left wrist pulsed when her pulse did, and her pulse was doing something embarrassing. "Why are you here, Luc." "Because you didn't answer any of my calls." "That was the point of not answering them." "I deduced as much." She turned. He hadn't moved from the middle of the rug. His hands hung at his sides — ungloved now, she saw; he'd peeled the leather off and tucked it into an inner pocket in that practised, soundless way of his. The black eye caught the lamplight and gave nothing back. "Sit down," she said. "You're making the cat nervous." "The cat has excellent instincts." "Sit *down*, Lucien." He sat. On the one cleared corner of Eva's couch, which meant between a stack of cracked-spine grimoires and a dressing gown that wasn't his business. He looked at neither. He looked at her. "I owed you an apology," he said. "I'm told these are best delivered in person." "Told by whom." "By a very patient bartender." "Silas needs to mind his bar." "Silas was minding his bar. I was minding the stool in front of it. For some hours." She put the mug down on the coffee table harder than she meant to. Tea slopped over the rim onto a printout of something in Enochian. "You don't get to do this," she said. "You don't get to disappear for three weeks after —" She stopped. The rest of the sentence was a door she wasn't ready to open in front of him. "After what happened, and then walk in here and sit on my friend's couch and be *sorry.*" "I'm not asking you to accept it." "Then what are you asking." "Nothing." He folded his hands over one knee. The amber eye warmed a fraction. "I came to say it. You can do with it what you like." She sat down. Not beside him — in the armchair opposite, which had a broken spring and required some negotiation. She chose the discomfort deliberately. "Say it then." He did not look away. That was the worst of him, always — he never looked away. "I should not have left you on that rooftop," he said. "I should not have let you think I walked out because of what you told me. I walked out because I could not trust myself to stand next to you for another minute without doing something I was not certain you wanted." The kettle clicked off in the kitchen. Neither of them moved for it. "That's a convenient story," she said. Her voice came out thinner than she liked. "It's the true one. Convenience does not enter into it." He breathed out, once, careful. "If you would prefer the uglier version — I was afraid. I am not often afraid. I did not handle it with grace." "No. You didn't." "I'm aware." She looked at her hands. At the scar. At the place where his thumb had pressed against her pulse three weeks ago on a rooftop in Shoreditch, when she'd said something she hadn't planned to say and he'd gone very still and then very gone. "You could have called." "I did." "You could have *said* something when you called." "I know." "Lucien —" "I know, Aurora." She looked up. He had not moved an inch. The rain had started again; it ticked against the window behind him and made a halo of grey light around the platinum of his hair. She hated him, briefly, for being beautiful in Eva's ugly flat. "I haven't forgiven you," she said. "I didn't expect you to." "I might. Eventually." Something shifted in the amber eye. Not triumph. Something quieter. "I'll wait," he said. "Don't make it sound romantic." "I wouldn't dream of it." She got up to rescue the tea.