Run: 2026-04-24-01KPZV32N48DX6H0GPVNZM0J3B

The third deadbolt was still sliding back when Rory heard him clear his throat on the other side of the door. She knew that sound. She'd catalogued it, once — the particular dry rasp Lucien Moreau made when he was about to say something he'd rehearsed in a cab ride over. She pulled the door open two inches, kept her foot braced behind it, and let him see exactly as much of her face as she wanted him to. "No." "You haven't heard the question, chérie." "I don't need to." Ptolemy wound between her ankles, purring at the stranger with the kind of uncomplicated welcome Rory resented on principle. Traitor cat. She nudged him back with her heel. Lucien was leaning on the ivory cane the way other men leaned on door frames — an arrangement of limbs designed to look accidental. Charcoal suit, no rain on the shoulders despite the weather doing its worst on Brick Lane, hair still that absurd platinum. The amber eye caught the hallway light. The black one gave nothing back. "Six weeks," he said. "Has it been?" "You know precisely how long it's been." She opened the door another inch, because keeping it closed required more strength than she wanted him to see her using. "If you came to apologise, you can post it. Eva's got a letterbox." "I didn't come to apologise." "Then we're really not having this conversation." He smiled. Not the one he used on clients. The other one, smaller, the one she'd been stupid enough once to think belonged to her. "May I come in, Aurora." "Rory." "May I come in, Rory." She stepped back. She told herself it was because the hallway smelled of curry and cigarettes and she didn't want the neighbours listening, and then she told herself she was a liar, and then she shut the door behind him and threw all three deadbolts out of sheer habit. He took in the flat the way he took in everything — quickly, completely, and without the decency to pretend he hadn't. Books stacked on the radiator. Eva's research pinned to the wall in a spiral Rory had given up trying to understand. A half-drunk mug of tea going cold on a grimoire. "She's not here," Rory said. "I know." "Of course you know." "I waited until she left." "Of course you did." He didn't sit. She didn't offer. They stood in the narrow stretch of carpet between the sofa and the kitchenette, and Rory folded her arms because she needed somewhere to put her hands that wasn't near him. "Say what you came to say." Lucien looked down at the head of the cane, turned it a quarter. "I was wrong." "Congratulations." "About the Malphora business. About what I asked of you." "You didn't ask. You arranged." "Yes." "There's a difference." "There is." He lifted his eyes. The amber one was warmer than she wanted. "I'm aware of the difference, Rory. I knew it then." She hated the way her name sat in his mouth. He said it like it was French, rolled the R a fraction too long, and it did something uninvited to the base of her spine. "So you knew, and you did it anyway." "I did it anyway." "Well." She breathed out through her nose. "Brilliant. Full marks for honesty. Door's behind you." He didn't move. "Lucien." "I haven't finished." "I have." "You have not." He set the cane against the side of the sofa, a small surrender of armament that irritated her more than the weapon itself had. "The night you left — " "I didn't leave. You sent me away." "The night I sent you away," he corrected, with the patience of a man repeating the correct verb to a stubborn student, "I told myself I was protecting you. I've had six weeks to understand that I was, in fact, protecting myself." She laughed — a short, unlovely sound. "From what, exactly? My devastating conversation?" "From the fact that you matter to me." The kettle ticked as it cooled on the counter. Ptolemy leapt onto the arm of the sofa and then onto Lucien's shoulder, because Ptolemy had, Rory decided, always been a bad judge of character. "Don't." She kept her voice low. "Don't come in here after six weeks of nothing and say something like that in my friend's living room at —" she glanced at the clock, "— ten past nine on a Tuesday." "When would you prefer." "Never would be ideal." "Rory." "You don't get to use that voice." "Which voice." "The one from Marseille." He went still. She watched him do it — the small, careful re-gathering of a man who had forgotten, briefly, to be the Frenchman in the charcoal suit, and remembered now that she'd seen him without it. "I didn't know you thought of it as Marseille." "I think of it as a lot of things." "Tell me one." "No." He stepped closer. Not far. One foot's worth of carpet. She should have stepped back; she didn't, and that was her own fault, and she'd examine it later when he wasn't near enough that she could smell the bergamot on his collar. "Aurora." "Rory." "Rory." He said it properly this time, the Welsh lilt of it, the way her mother said it. He'd been listening. He always listened. That was the problem with him. "If you tell me to leave, I will go. I won't come back unless you ask. You have my word, for whatever you think it's worth." "Not much." "Understood." She looked at his mouth, and then at the amber eye, and then at the floor, because the floor at least was not trying to ruin her evening. "Move the cat," she said. "Pardon?" "Ptolemy. Off your shoulder. He sheds." Lucien lifted the tabby down with both hands, as if the animal were made of glass, and set him on the cushion. Ptolemy gave him a slow, appraising blink and began to wash a paw. Rory uncrossed her arms. Crossed them again. Pressed the pad of her thumb to the crescent scar on her left wrist, the small childhood shape of it, the thing she did when she needed to remember she'd survived worse than a man in a good suit. "You get ten minutes," she said. "Sit down. Don't take the armchair, Eva will know." He sat on the sofa. She stayed standing. "Talk."