Run: 2026-04-24-01KPZV5FZ8NM5MKGGB4HHK093T

The third deadbolt slid back with a reluctant grunt, and Rory pulled the door open barely enough to peer through the crack — old habit now, taught by London, polished by Evan. Lucien Moreau stood on her landing as though he had been carved there, leaning on his cane with the languid patience of someone who had already decided he would be let in. "Rory." He pronounced it the French way, softer, the r rolled just once. "I know. I should have called." "You don't have my number." "A technicality." A small smile. "May I?" She did not move. Behind her, Ptolemy picked that moment to wind a figure-eight between her ankles, purring obscenely at the sight of a stranger, because Ptolemy had never once done anything useful. Three months. That was how long it had been. Three months since she had walked out of the back room of a club in Shoreditch with her hand shaking and her mouth still warm from his, three months since he had said, very calmly, that he could not protect her from what he was, and she had told him not to insult her by pretending that was why. Three months of his business card in the kitchen drawer beneath a takeaway menu, where she could find it by accident any time she wanted to. "Eva's not home," Rory said. "I didn't come to see Eva." The stairwell smelled of cumin and wet brick. Rory looked past him, out of habit, down the narrow flight to the street where the neon of the curry house bled red across the damp pavement. No one with him. No one watching. Just the Frenchman in his charcoal suit, getting rained on by the East End. She stepped back and let the door swing open. He came in the way he did everything — precisely, without hurrying — and stopped in the middle of the front room to take stock of it: the stacks of paperbacks leaning like drunk parishioners against the sofa, the scrolls weighted down with coffee mugs, Eva's half-eaten toast from this morning, the cat now vaulting up onto the radiator to judge him from height. "She hasn't tidied," Lucien observed. "She's never tidied. It's a philosophical position." Rory closed the door. Locked one of the bolts, then stopped, aware of him hearing her stop. She slid the other two home anyway. "Sit down or don't. I'm making tea because I don't know what else to do with my hands." "That is flattering." "It isn't meant to be." She went to the kitchenette, which was less a room than a suggestion, and filled the kettle. Her left wrist felt hot; the little crescent scar was prickling, the way it did when she was nervous, as if her body were trying to remind her of every other time she'd been stupid. She did not look at him. She was very aware of not looking at him. "You cut your hair," he said. "An inch." "I noticed." "Don't," she said. She heard the cane click once against the floorboard, and then he was behind her, not close, but close enough that she could smell him — that specific Lucien smell, smoke and bergamot and the faint metal-tang she'd never learned the name of, something that was not quite human and that she had, to her own disgust, missed. "I came because there's a name being spoken in rooms you don't go into," he said. "Evan Pryce." Her hand stopped, kettle half-lifted. The water sloshed. "He's in London?" "He is asking after you in London. Which is different, for now. I wanted you to hear it from me before you heard it from someone who enjoys delivering that kind of news." She set the kettle down very carefully on its base and pressed the switch. The little blue light came on. She watched it instead of him. "Thank you," she said. It came out thinner than she'd meant. "Aurora." "Don't use my proper name. It makes everything sound like a verdict." "Turn around, then." She turned around. He was closer than she'd realized. Not touching. The amber eye caught the kitchen bulb and held it; the black one drank it. She had forgotten — no, she hadn't forgotten, she had deliberately misremembered — how looking at him straight on felt like standing at the edge of something. "I shouldn't have left the way I did," he said. "You didn't leave. I did." "I let you." "Yes," she said. "You did." A silence. The kettle began its slow climb toward a boil. "I told myself it was decency," he said. "Keeping distance. That you had just crawled out from under one man and didn't need another standing over you. I told myself many elegant things, Rory. They were all true. None of them were the reason." "What was the reason?" He almost smiled. "Cowardice, dressed well." She looked at his mouth and hated herself a little for it. "I'm not going to fall into your arms because you've brought me bad news and a confession," she said. "I haven't asked you to." "Good." "I only ask that you lock your door. And that you let me put someone on the street, if it comes to that." "I'm not a client, Lucien." "No." His voice dropped, and the French was heavier in it now, the way it always was when he stopped performing. "You are not." The kettle clicked off. Neither of them moved. Ptolemy, having lost interest in vigilance, thudded down from the radiator and went to headbutt Lucien's shin, leaving a long streak of ginger fur on the charcoal wool. Lucien looked down at it with an expression of such betrayed dignity that Rory laughed — one short, surprised sound — and then pressed the back of her wrist to her mouth as though she could catch it and put it back. He looked up at her laughing, and something moved in his face that she was not ready for. "Tea," she said, too loudly. "Sit. Don't — sit over there. Not here." "As you wish." He went. He took the chair by the window, and set the ivory-handled cane against his knee, and watched her make tea in a flat full of other people's books while the rain started up again on Brick Lane; and Rory, whose hands were finally steady, understood with a quiet, unwelcome clarity that she was not going to ask him to leave. Not tonight. Maybe not at all.