Run: 2026-04-24-01KQ06HSPRBR0C1MV253F15D16

The third deadbolt stuck, as it always did, and Rory cursed under her breath as she wrestled with it. Ptolemy wound between her ankles, meowing his displeasure at the delay in his dinner. She'd just gotten off shift—smelling like sesame oil and motorbike exhaust—and all she wanted was a shower and twelve hours of sleep. The bolt gave. She pushed the door open. Lucien Moreau stood in the hallway. For a moment, neither of them moved. Ptolemy broke the silence first, yowling as he squeezed past her legs and bolted down the stairwell, apparently deciding the outside world was preferable to whatever this was. "What the hell are you doing here?" He looked exactly as she remembered. Charcoal suit tailored to within an inch of its life, platinum hair slicked back from his high forehead, that ivory-handled cane gripped in his left hand. The amber eye and the black one caught the flickering fluorescent light from the hallway, giving him that otherworldly cast she'd once found so unsettling. Now it just made her stomach clench. "May I come in?" His accent wrapped around the words, French vowels softening the English consonants. "No." She gripped the doorframe. "You don't get to show up at—where even is this? How did you find this address?" "You stayed at Silas's bar for three weeks before moving here. It wasn't difficult." "Christ." She laughed, but there was no humor in it. "You had me followed." "I kept track of you. There's a difference." "There really isn't." His jaw tightened. She watched the muscle jump beneath the skin, remembered pressing her lips there once, in another life, in a room that smelled like old books and sandalwood. She shoved the memory down. "What do you want, Lucien?" "Five minutes. That's all I ask." "You don't get to ask me for anything." The words came out harder than she intended, but she didn't soften them. She'd earned her anger. She'd earned every sharp edge of it. "You lost that right when you disappeared." Something flickered across his face—guilt, maybe, or the shadow of it. Good. She hoped it ate at him the way his absence had eaten at her. "I didn't disappear," he said quietly. "I left. There's a difference." "Yeah, I'm not seeing it." "Five minutes, Rory. Then I'll go. You never have to see me again." She should slam the door. She should throw the deadbolts and walk away and let him stand in this reeking hallway until he got the message. That's what smart Rory would do. Cool-headed Rory. The one who'd fled Cardiff in the middle of the night with nothing but a rucksack and her friend's address scratched on a napkin. But she'd never been smart when it came to him. She stepped back. He entered like he entered every space—measured, deliberate, taking inventory. His gaze swept over the chaos of books and scrolls, the research notes pinned to every vertical surface, the stacks of journals teetering on the arm of the threadbare sofa. His expression gave nothing away, but she saw him notice. He always noticed everything. "Whose flat is this?" He picked up a scroll from the nearest stack, and she snatched it from his hand. "My friend Eva's. She's out of town." She didn't elaborate. He didn't deserve the details of her life anymore. "Sit or stand, I don't care. Your five minutes started when you walked in." He remained standing, the cane planted between his polished shoes. She leaned against the kitchen counter, arms crossed, and waited. "You look well," he said. "Don't." "I'm not allowed to—" "You're not allowed to make small talk. You wanted five minutes. Use them." His mismatched eyes held hers. She'd forgotten, or maybe just forced herself to forget, how unsettling that gaze could be. The amber eye caught warmth that the black one swallowed whole, and looking at both of them at once made her feel like she was standing at the edge of something vast and dangerous. "I made a mistake," he said. The words landed like stones in still water. She waited for the ripples to settle, but they didn't. They just kept spreading. "Which one?" she asked. "Leaving without a word? Or the thing you said before you did?" His hand tightened on the cane. "Both." "Convenient." She pushed off the counter, needed to move, needed to do something with the restless energy crackling under her skin. "You get to walk away, Lucien. You get to decide when to come back. You get to stand there in your five-thousand-pound suit and tell me you made a mistake, like it's some kind of revelation." "It's not convenient. It's the opposite." He took a step toward her, then stopped himself, as though he'd hit an invisible wall. "I haven't slept more than three hours a night since I left your flat. I've replayed that conversation a thousand times, and every version ends the same way—with you looking at me like I'd gutted you." "You did." "I know." "So what? You want absolution? You want me to tell you it's fine, that I understand, that I forgive you for saying I was a liability?" The word still tasted like poison. Liability. As if she were a calculation to be managed, a weakness to be eliminated. "Was that supposed to make me feel better? Make it easier for you to leave?" "I said it because I believed it." His voice dropped. "I believed that staying would put you in danger. That being close to me would paint a target on your back." "And you made that decision for me." "Yes." He said it without deflection, without excuse. Just the flat admission of fact. Somehow that made it worse. "You don't get to do that," she said. "You don't get to decide what I can handle. That's not— that's not protection, Lucien. That's control." "I know." He exhaled slowly. "I told myself I was keeping you safe. Perhaps I was. Perhaps I was also keeping myself from having to watch you die because of what I am." The weight of that settled over the room. She thought of the things she'd learned since he left—the shadowed corners of London she'd glimpsed, the creatures that moved through Silas's bar after midnight, the vast and terrible world that existed just beneath the surface of the ordinary. She thought of what it meant that his father was from Avaros, that Lucien carried that realm in his blood. "I'm already in it," she said quietly. "You think living above Silas's bar, working for Yu-Fei, I'm on the sidelines? I'm not some civilian you shielded, Lucien. I'm already in the deep end." "I know that now." He moved again, and this time he didn't stop himself. He stopped a foot away from her, close enough that she could smell his cologne—something dark and expensive, unchanged from before. "Eva's research, the scrolls she collects, the texts she's been studying—do you think I don't know what she's looking for?" Rory's pulse jumped. "What Eva researches is none of your business." "It is when it's going to get her killed. And you with her." There it was. The reason he'd come. The hook beneath the bait. "So that's what this is." She should have known. "You're not here because you made a mistake. You're here because you need something." "I'm here because you're in danger." "And you couldn't just lead with that?" "No." His voice went rough. "Because I wanted to see you. Because regardless of why I came, I needed you to know that leaving was the hardest thing I've ever done. Because every day for the past two months, I've picked up my phone to call you and put it down again, and I am—" He stopped. Swallowed. "I am not strong enough to stay away. I was never strong enough. I just told myself I was." The confession hung in the air between them, raw and unpolished. Nothing like the careful, composed Lucien she'd known. This was something stripped bare. Ptolemy chose that moment to reappear, slipping through the gap in the door with his tail held high. He wound between Lucien's legs, purring loud enough to fill the silence. "Even the cat," Rory muttered. Lucien looked down at the tabby, and something in his expression cracked. Not much. Just enough to see through. "My five minutes are up," he said. She should let him go. Every rational part of her brain screamed it. But rationality had never been her strong suit where he was concerned. "Tell me about the danger," she said. "Then you can tell me the rest."