Run: 2026-04-24-01KPZV64ZR3NKX0SM3N3KF8S8C

The third deadbolt gave with a sound like a neck cracking, and Rory pulled the door open with her sleeve still damp from the sink. Lucien stood on the landing. He had one shoulder against the jamb, the ivory cane tucked under his arm, and rain beaded across the charcoal wool of his suit as though the weather had failed to properly commit. The stairwell light turned his hair to something silvered and unreal. One amber eye, one black. Both of them landing on her like they had the right. "You're soaked." "An astute observation." His mouth moved, not quite a smile. "May I come in, or are we conducting this on the stairs for the entertainment of your neighbours?" She didn't move. Ptolemy wound between her ankles, indifferent to the stand-off, and she bent to scoop him up mostly for something to do with her hands. The cat was warm. Lucien was not. She could feel the cold coming off him from three feet away, which was unfair, because the rest of him looked like a photograph someone had staged deliberately. "It's been four months, Luc." "Seventeen weeks. But who counts." "You, apparently." He inclined his head, conceding it. "I need ten minutes. If after ten minutes you still wish me gone, I will go, and I will not darken your curry-scented threshold again." She stepped back. It wasn't a decision so much as a capitulation to the inevitable. He walked past her with that deliberate, unhurried stride, and the smell of him — tobacco, something greener beneath it, the cold rain — moved through the flat like a guest who already knew the furniture. He set the cane against Eva's bookshelf. He didn't sit. Rory shut the door. Three deadbolts. She took her time with each one. "Drink?" "Please." She poured whiskey into a chipped mug because all the glasses were in the sink, and she handed it to him without meeting his eyes. His fingers grazed hers. He had done it on purpose. She had known he would and had let it happen anyway, and she hated the small bright pulse it set off beneath her sternum. "Talk." "Directly to business. I'd forgotten how bracing you are." "Nine minutes." He laughed once, low, and took a slow pull from the mug. She watched his throat work. She looked away. "A name came across my desk this morning," he said. "Yours. Attached to a contract I did not place and cannot trace, which is — you will appreciate — not a situation I find acceptable." "So this is a business call." "This is a call that concerns your continued breathing, Aurora, which I happen to consider my business whether you do or not." "Don't." "Don't what." "Don't say my name like that." He set the mug down on Eva's cluttered desk with a soft click. A column of research notes tilted and slid. He caught the papers with one hand, righted them, and when he straightened he was closer than he had been, close enough that she could see where the rain had dampened the collar of his shirt, the faint flush under his jaw that suggested he had come up the stairs faster than he wanted her to know. "I spent seventeen weeks," he said, quiet, "trying to decide if I regretted it." "That's nice for you." "Rory." "No." She pressed Ptolemy tighter against her chest. The cat made an aggrieved noise and squirmed free, leaping to the floor with a thud of reproach. Her arms felt suddenly, stupidly empty. "You don't get to come here wet and handsome and talk about regret. You left. That was the arrangement. You told me very clearly what you were and what you weren't and I agreed to it, and then you walked out of that hotel room and didn't even—" "I know what I did." "You don't, actually. You think you do. You think you spared me something." "Did I not?" She looked at him then, properly, for the first time since she'd opened the door. The amber eye had gone soft. The black one, as always, told her nothing. "You spared yourself something," she said. "Don't confuse the two." Silence settled between them like dust. Outside, someone on Brick Lane was shouting at a taxi. Somewhere in the flat, a kettle she didn't remember putting on began its low climb toward a whistle. Lucien exhaled through his nose. "That's fair." "I know it's fair. I've had seventeen weeks to refine it." "Also fair." He didn't move. She didn't move. The kettle escalated and she crossed the room to deal with it only because staying still had become impossible, and he turned to watch her go, and in the galley kitchen with her back to him she shut her eyes and gripped the counter and reminded herself that she was twenty-five years old and had already been ruined once by a man with charm and a temper, and this one only had the charm, which did not make him safer, only more interesting. "The contract," she said, to the cupboard. "Who took it." "I don't know yet." "When will you know." "Tonight. Tomorrow. Soon." A pause. "I'd like you not to be alone while I find out." She laughed, a short flat sound. "Offering your protection, are you." "I'm offering my sofa and a man at the door who owes me favours. The protection is secondary and comes with the property." "And where will you be sleeping, in this arrangement." "Wherever you tell me to." She turned. He hadn't moved from where she'd left him, one hand resting on the back of Eva's reading chair, the other hanging at his side with the loose grace of a man who had never in his life been caught off-guard by a room. But his jaw was tight. And the flush under it hadn't gone down. "Ten minutes is up, Luc." "I know." "You're still here." "I know that as well." She picked up the whiskey bottle. Poured herself a measure. Did not offer him a refill, though he was watching the bottle with faint amusement, as though he could see the shape of her next sentence forming before she made it. "The sofa's broken," she said at last. "Eva sat on it wrong." "I'll manage." "Fine." "Fine?" "Don't make me say it twice." He didn't. He only inclined his head, picked up the cane, and crossed to the window to look down at the wet street — giving her, she realised, the small mercy of his back, so she could finish her drink without him watching her hand shake.