Run: 2026-04-24-01KQ0G1SDJ4AYMVSGG2GA03712

The third deadbolt stuck, the way it always did. Rory jiggled the chain, swore under her breath, and yanked the door open with her shoulder braced for a delivery courier or Mrs. Patel from below come to complain about Ptolemy yowling at three in the morning. Lucien Moreau leaned against the doorframe like he'd been poured there. "Rory." She shut the door. Three deadbolts. She took her time on each one, the metallic click of the topmost sliding home loud enough to carry. Then she stood with her forehead against the wood and counted to ten in Welsh because English wasn't enough. "I can hear you breathing," he called from the other side. Amused. Of course amused. "I'd rather not conduct this through two inches of cheap pine." "Then don't conduct it at all." "Aurora." Nobody said her full name like that. Not her mother, not her father with all his courtroom polish. Only him, and only when he wanted something he thought she wouldn't give. She undid the locks. He hadn't moved. One shoulder to the frame, the ivory cane hooked over his wrist, that charcoal suit fitted within an inch of its life. The amber eye caught the hallway bulb. The black one didn't reflect anything at all. "You look tired," he said. "You look like a man about to get a door shut in his face a second time." "A fair assessment." He inclined his head at the flat behind her. "May I?" "No." "Rory." "You don't get to turn up here, Luc. You don't get to stand in Eva's hallway at eleven at night in your funeral suit and say my name like we left things anywhere but where we left them." "And where was that, exactly?" Ptolemy wound between her ankles, unbothered, and went to sniff at Lucien's polished shoes. The traitor. Lucien crouched with the kind of liquid ease that still, after everything, did something unforgivable to her pulse, and offered the cat two knuckles. Ptolemy head-butted them. "He remembers me," Lucien said. "He's a cat. He remembers whoever feeds him veal." "He has excellent taste." "Get up." He rose, slow, and she caught a flicker of something in his face when his weight went through the cane — not pain exactly, but the memory of it. The last time she'd seen him, he'd been bleeding through a white shirt onto the cobbles behind Silas' bar and telling her, quite calmly, to run. She'd run. "Five minutes," he said. "Three." "Four." "You're negotiating with me on my own doorstep, Moreau." "I'm negotiating with you anywhere you'll let me." She stepped back. He took it as invitation, because he always did, and moved past her into the cramped little warren of Eva's living room with its towers of books and its scrolls going yellow at the edges. He didn't sit. He knew better than to sit. He set the cane against the arm of the sofa and stood with his hands clasped behind him like a man at inspection. She closed the door. Didn't lock it. She wanted the option. "Talk." "There's a job." "No." "You haven't heard it." "No." "Aurora —" "Is that what you came for? A job?" She folded her arms. The crescent scar on her wrist caught the lamplight and she watched his eyes track to it and then politely away, the way they always had. "You could've sent a note. You love sending notes. Cream paper, that ridiculous wax seal —" "I didn't come for the job." That landed in the quiet between them like a dropped glass. She uncrossed her arms. Crossed them again. "Then what." He looked at her properly for the first time since she'd opened the door. Whatever he'd been holding behind the amusement cracked a fraction, and she saw the shape of the thing underneath, and she wished, briefly and fiercely, that she hadn't. "You didn't answer my letters," he said. "I burned them." "All of them?" "The last one I kept. Then I burned that one too." "Why the delay?" "Because I'm a bloody idiot, Lucien, is that what you want me to say?" "No." His voice had gone quiet. "I wanted to know if you read it." "I read it." He waited. "Twice." She looked at the ceiling. The water stain there was shaped like a rabbit if you squinted. "Three times. Don't make me count." "Rory." "Don't." He took a step. The floorboards gave him away — Eva's flat had no secrets from its own floor — and she heard him stop when she flinched. "I'm not going to touch you," he said. "If that's what you —" "It isn't." A pause. "Then would you prefer I did?" She laughed. It came out wrong, cracked down the middle, and she pressed the heel of her hand to her mouth to push the rest of it back in. "You don't get to ask me that. Not after Southwark. Not after you bled all over my shoes and told me to disappear and then sent me, what, six letters in six weeks like I was a girl in a novel —" "Seven." "What?" "Seven letters." "I didn't get a seventh." "No." His mouth did something complicated. "I didn't send that one." She lowered her hand. "Why not?" "Because when I'd finished writing it I realised I'd have to deliver it in person or I wouldn't mean any of it." Silence. Ptolemy jumped onto the back of the sofa and began washing a paw with tremendous dignity, as if the two of them were very much beneath his notice. "And here you are," she said. "And here I am." "In your funeral suit." "I came from a funeral." "Oh." She swallowed. "Whose?" "Nobody you knew." He didn't elaborate. He never did. "May I sit now?" She looked at him — the platinum hair slicked back, the cane, the slight favour he was still giving his left side — and at the door she hadn't locked, and at her own hands, which had begun to shake somewhere around the word *seventh*. "Sit," she said. "I'll put the kettle on." "Rory." "Don't say anything nice to me, Lucien. Not yet. I haven't got the constitution for it." He sat. She went to the kitchen. And she took a very long time filling the kettle, because her reflection in the dark window above the sink looked like a woman who'd already made up her mind, and she wasn't ready for him to see it on her yet.