Run: 2026-04-24-01KQ067SSRA9MP6BYTS2M3GX8P

The second deadbolt stuck. Rory jammed her shoulder against the door and twisted the key until the mechanism ground open. Ptolemy wound between her ankles, nearly tripping her as she stumbled into the flat. "Move, you menace." She kicked the door shut behind her and threw the deadbolts—all three of them—while the tabby yowled at his empty food bowl. Eva's flat smelled like cold curry and old paper. Stacks of books covered the kitchen counter, the coffee table, most of the floor. A half-translated scroll hung off the edge of the desk by the window, its corner weighted down with a chipped mug. Rory dropped her delivery bag by the door and dug through her jacket pockets for her phone. Three missed calls from Yu-Fei about tomorrow's shift. Nothing else. She tossed it onto the sofa cushion—the one clear spot in the entire room—and bent to fill Ptolemy's bowl. The knock came before the kibble bag hit the counter. Three quick raps. Unhurried. Deliberate. Rory straightened. Eva had her own key. The curry shop downstairs never sent anyone up. And no one else knew she was here—she'd made sure of that. She crossed to the door and pressed her eye to the peephole. The hallway warped the image, but she didn't need clarity. That silhouette belonged to only one man in London. Platinum hair, a charcoal suit that probably cost more than her rent, and the ivory handle of a cane gripped in one gloved hand. Lucien Moreau. Her stomach dropped. "Open the door, Rory." His voice came through the wood, low and even, carrying that faint rasp she'd never been able to place—Marseille, she'd guessed once, and he'd neither confirmed nor denied. "I can hear you breathing." "I'm not breathing." "Then your heart is very loud." She pressed her forehead against the cool surface of the door. Her pulse hammered in her wrists, the left one aching where the crescent scar pulled tight against old skin. Six weeks. Six weeks since the Bridgegate fiasco, since he'd handed her over to the Wardens like a wrapped parcel and walked away without looking back. He'd told her it was the smart play. She'd told him to go to hell. "I didn't come to London to stand in hallways," he said. Rory turned the deadbolts. All three. She opened the door six inches and leaned into the gap, arms folded across her chest. Lucien stood in the dim corridor, his suit untouched by the rain she could hear hammering against the windows behind her. He looked the same as always—immaculate, composed, every line of him curated. But his eyes betrayed him. The amber one caught the overhead bulb and burned warm. The black one swallowed the light whole. Both watched her with a careful, measured attention that made her skin tighten. "You look tired," he said. "You look expensive. What do you want?" "Are you going to invite me in?" "Are you going to betray me again?" Something moved behind his eyes. Not guilt—Lucien didn't traffic in guilt. Something closer to a crack in the veneer, there and gone. "That's not what happened." "That's exactly what happened." She held the door steady. "The Wardens had me for nine hours, Lucien. Nine hours in a concrete box with a man who thought it was funny to—" She stopped. Drew a breath. "You sold me out." "I negotiated your release." "After." "After I secured the leverage to make it possible." His jaw tightened. He looked past her, into the cluttered flat, then back. "May I come inside, or shall I deliver my news in a corridor where anyone can listen?" Rory studied him. The cane rested at a precise angle against his thigh. His left hand—ungloved, she noticed now—showed a fading bruise across the knuckles, the skin split in two places. Fresh. No more than a few days old. She stepped back. Lucien crossed the threshold and closed the door behind him. Ptolemy, the traitor, immediately approached and rubbed against his trouser leg. Lucien looked down at the cat with an expression she couldn't decode, then reached into his jacket and produced a small paper bag. He set it on the one clear section of counter. "What's that?" "Pastéis de nata. From the Portuguese bakery on Bermondsey Street." He straightened his cuffs. "You mentioned once that you'd never had one. A gap in your education I found unacceptable." Rory stared at the bag. Her chest did something complicated. She turned away and busied herself with the kettle, filling it from the tap, setting it on the hob. "Talk," she said. Lucien leaned against the doorframe that separated the kitchen from the sitting room. He rested both hands on the cane's handle, one atop the other. "The Hemlock Society knows where Eva is." The kettle slipped. Rory caught it, set it down, turned. "How." "There's a leak in the Wardens. Someone fed the Society the coordinates of the safehouse in Prague." He reached into his breast pocket and withdrew a folded sheet of paper. "I intercepted this three hours ago." She didn't move. "Why bring it to me?" "Because the Wardens won't act in time. Their protocols require—" "Stop. That's not what I'm asking." She stepped closer. One step. Then another. The kitchen was small enough that two steps brought her within arm's reach of him. "Why bring it to me, Lucien? After Bridgegate. After everything. Why show up at my door?" He held her gaze. The amber eye burned. The black one stayed still, depthless. "Because I was wrong." The words fell between them like a stone into water. Simple. Ungarnished. No spin, no leverage, no negotiation. Just the raw admission hanging in the air between their bodies. Rory's throat worked. "You don't say that. You've never said that to anyone." "You don't know what I say to anyone." "I know what you don't say." She pointed at his hand. "And I know you didn't get those knuckles from a conversation." Lucien glanced at his bruised hand as though he'd forgotten it existed. He flexed the fingers, and something tightened at the corner of his mouth. "The man who betrayed Eva's location. I found him." "And?" "And I persuaded him to reconsider his loyalties." The kettle shrieked. Rory didn't move. Lucien didn't move. They stood in the narrow strip of kitchen, close enough that she could smell him—cedar smoke, something metallic, the faintest trace of rain despite every appearance of dryness. "You came here," she said, "because you feel guilty." "I came here because I—" He stopped. His throat moved. For the first time since she'd known him, Lucien Moreau looked like a man without a script. "I came because the thought of you learning about Eva's exposure from someone else was intolerable." "That's not the same as an apology." "No. It isn't." Silence stretched. Ptolemy meowed from somewhere under the sofa. Rory reached out and took his left hand. He flinched—an involuntary contraction, there and gone—before his fingers settled against hers. She turned his hand over, examining the split skin, the purple-yellow bruising radiating from the knuckles. "Sit down," she said. "Rory—" "Sit. Down." She steered him to the one clear chair at Eva's desk and retrieved the first aid kit from the bathroom—plasters, antiseptic, a roll of gauze that had seen better decades. When she came back, he'd set his cane across his knees and rested his injured hand palm-up on the armrest. A gesture of surrender. She'd never seen him make it. She pulled a chair close and took his hand again. The antiseptic stung; his fingers twitched but he didn't pull away. She worked in silence, cleaning the cuts, pressing plasters over the worst of the splits. "You're good at this," he said. "I had practice." She didn't look up. "My ex used to come home with hands like this. Different reasons." The silence that followed had a different texture. Heavier. "I read your file," he said quietly. "Evan. The reports from Cardiff." Rory's hands stilled on his skin. "You read my file." "After Bridgegate. When the Wardens had you." His voice dropped. "I needed to know what they might use against you. What leverage they might—" He stopped. "I shouldn't have looked." "No. You shouldn't have." She wrapped the gauze around his knuckles, slow and precise. "But you did." "I did." She tied off the gauze and sat back. His hand rested in hers, bandaged and still. She should let go. She should stand up, walk to the other side of the room, put distance and furniture between them. She didn't. "The pastéis," she said. "Are they any good?" "I wouldn't know. I bought them for you." She released his hand, crossed to the counter, and opened the bag. Six small custard tarts nested in tissue paper, their tops caramelised to a deep bronze. She took one. Bit into it. Custard and flaky pastry and burnt sugar filled her mouth, and she closed her eyes because the sound she made was involuntary and embarrassing. "Well?" She opened her eyes. He'd risen from the chair. He stood by the desk, watching her with an expression she'd seen exactly once before—six months ago, in a back room behind Silas' bar, when he'd thought she wasn't looking. "You're staring," she said. "You have custard on your lip." She swiped at it. Missed. Lucien crossed the distance between them in two strides. He raised his bandaged hand and brushed his thumb across her lower lip, slow and deliberate, catching the spot she'd missed. His touch lingered. His heterochromatic eyes held hers—one warm, one void—and his breath came shallow and quick, the only sign of disorder on an otherwise composed exterior. Rory grabbed his wrist. Not to push him away. To hold him there. "You hurt me," she said. "I know." "I trusted you." "I know." "If you do it again, I will put a knife through your hand. And I won't feel bad about it." The corner of his mouth lifted. Not a smile—something rawer, something that belonged to a version of him she suspected he kept buried under the suits and the languages and the information networks. "Understood," he said. She pulled his hand away from her mouth. Then she kissed his palm, right over the bandaged knuckles, and felt him go still in a way that had nothing to do with composure. "Eva," she said. "We need to talk about Eva." "Yes." His voice had gone rough. "We do." "Sit down. Tell me everything. And eat a tart before I finish all of them." He sat. She poured the overboiled tea into chipped mugs. Ptolemy jumped onto his lap and refused to be moved. Outside, the rain battered the windows over Brick Lane, and somewhere below them, the curry house blasted music that vibrated up through the floorboards. Rory pulled her chair close to his—close enough that their knees almost touched—and listened while Lucien laid out everything he knew, his bandaged hands wrapped around the mug, his eyes on her face. She interrupted when he was vague. He answered without deflection. For the first time in months, they sat in the same room and spoke like people who owed each other the truth. When he finished, the tea was cold and the bag of tarts sat empty between them. "So we go to Prague," Rory said. "We go to Prague." She stood and held out her hand. He took it. His grip was warm, firm, and careful of her—the way you held something you'd broken once and didn't intend to break again. She pulled him to his feet. They stood close, hands linked, his cane forgotten against the desk. The flat smelled like burnt tea and old books and antiseptic, and Ptolemy meowed insistently from the floor, and neither of them moved. "Tomorrow," she said. "First thing." "First thing," he agreed. His free hand found the curve of her jaw. She let him tilt her face up. His thumb traced the line of her cheekbone, and she watched his eyes—one amber, one black—search hers for permission. She gave it. The kiss was slow. Tentative in a way that made her chest ache, because Lucien Moreau did not do tentative. He did calculated. He did precise. This was neither. This was the soft press of his mouth against hers, his bandaged hand tightening around her fingers, his breath unsteady against her skin. When he pulled back, she chased him for half a second before she caught herself. "We should sleep," she said. "Early start." "Yes." He didn't let go of her hand. "The sofa?" "Eva would skin you if you touched her scrolls. I'll take the floor." "I'll take the floor." "You'll take the sofa, and you'll like it." A sound left him—low, disbelieving, half a laugh. She'd never heard him laugh before. "As you wish, Rory." She turned to get a blanket from the bedroom. At the doorway, she stopped. "Lucien." "Yes?" "The custard tarts. Good call." He settled onto the sofa, lifting Ptolemy onto his lap with a tenderness that didn't match a single thing she knew about him. His cane leaned against the armrest, within reach. "Sleep well," he said. She closed the bedroom door. Pressed her back against it. Pressed her hand over her mouth where the ghost of his lips still burned. Her heart hammered against her ribs, loud enough that—damn him—he probably could hear it through the wall.