Run: 2026-04-24-01KQ0GC3DZ5J1C8C173V23W5MV

The third deadbolt gave with a sound like a snapping bone, and Rory pulled the door open already halfway into a complaint about the curry smell in the stairwell. The words died somewhere behind her teeth. Lucien Moreau stood on the landing with one gloved hand resting lightly on the head of his cane, the other tucked into the pocket of a charcoal jacket that looked as though it had been cut from a storm cloud. His platinum hair was combed back with the same obsessive precision as always. The amber eye caught the weak hallway light; the black one didn't. Behind him, somewhere on the street two floors below, a man was shouting at a delivery bike. "Rory," Lucien said. Two syllables, arranged the way he arranged everything — with care. She held the door half-closed against her hip. She was barefoot, in leggings and one of Eva's old university hoodies, and her hair was still damp from the shower. She had not, in the long accounting of today, planned for this. "How did you get up here?" "Your downstairs neighbor was coming out. He held the door." "He's not supposed to hold the door." "I am very charming," Lucien said, without smiling, "when I wish to be." Ptolemy slunk around the back of her ankles, took one look at Lucien, and retreated under the sofa with the offended dignity of a cat who had rendered his opinion clear. Rory envied him. She wished she had a sofa to crawl under. She wished Eva were home. She wished, most of all, that her heart would settle back into the rhythm it had used ten seconds ago, before she opened the door. "I told you not to come here." "You told me a great many things, in Southwark. Most of them were unfair, and several of them were untrue." His voice was very quiet. "I did not come to argue about any of them." "Then why are you here, Luc?" He looked down at the toe of his shoe, then up again, and for an instant the carefully composed face slipped, just a shade. It was only in that hairline fracture that she saw he had come up the stairs expecting her to close the door in his face. "Because I have information you need," he said. "And because I could not have this conversation by phone." She considered the door. She considered, quite seriously, shutting it. The memory of the last time she had seen him — the Blackfriars bridge, the rain, the thing he had said that she could not unhear and could not stop turning over at three in the morning — rose up hot under her collarbone. She wanted to be angrier than she was. Anger was simple. Anger she could wield. What she actually felt, standing there in bare feet, was a low and treacherous gladness at the sight of him, and she hated that most of all. She stepped back. "Five minutes." "Generous." "Don't." He came in carefully, as though the flat were a room in a museum. He always did that — took stock of a space the way some men took stock of a woman. Eva's paper tides lapped against every surface: open folios on the coffee table, a mug holding down a stack of photocopies, a scroll unrolled along the back of the armchair and weighted with a saucer. He did not touch anything. He set his cane against the wall beside the door, and that small gesture — setting aside the blade — did something inconvenient to her ribs. "Tea?" she heard herself say, and could have bitten her tongue through. "Please." She went to the kitchenette because the kitchenette had things to do in it. Kettle. Two mugs. The tin of Assam Eva had brought back from Whitechapel. Her hands did the work. Behind her, she heard Lucien lower himself onto the arm of the sofa — never the cushions; he always perched, as if committed to leaving — and she felt him watching her the way you feel a lamp warming the back of your neck. "You're limping," she said, without turning. "Am I." "On the left. You weren't last time." "You're observant." "I deliver takeaway for a living, Luc, I'm not blind." A small breath of laughter. Real, this one. It landed in the center of her chest and sat there like a coin. "It's nothing," he said. "An argument in Camden. I won." "Pity the other man." "He deserved it." She poured. The kettle's small white sound filled the silence. She turned and carried the mug over and held it out to him, and when he took it, his gloved fingers brushed the inside of her wrist — across the little crescent scar there, which he had asked about once, in a hotel bar in Mayfair, a lifetime ago. He had remembered. He had remembered, and his eyes went to it now without meaning to. She pulled her hand back. "Don't do that." "I didn't —" "You did." He set the mug down on the coffee table, on top of a page of Eva's notes, which would leave a ring, which she would have to apologize for later. He stood. He was not a tall man but in this flat, with the ceiling low and the bookshelves leaning, he took up a great deal of the air. "Aurora." No one called her that. He was the only one. He said it like the French word, stretched and soft in the middle, and her full name in his mouth had always been a weapon he used against her without, she suspected, knowing he was using it. "Don't," she said again, quieter. "I told you the truth on that bridge," he said. "You called me a coward for it. Perhaps I was. I am not interested in being brave, Rory. I am interested in being useful to you, and in not doing you harm, and I am discovering those two things are not the same." "Luc —" "Evan is in London." It was a stone dropped into still water. She felt the cold of it travel out through her, to her fingertips, to her bare feet on the cheap laminate. "What?" "Three nights ago. He was seen in a club in Shoreditch, asking questions. Your name came up. Not Laila — Aurora. He knows which one is real." He watched her face. "I came to tell you myself because I did not want you hearing it from someone who does not care how you hear it." She sat down. She had not meant to. The armchair caught her and Eva's scroll crinkled under her elbow and she did not even register the saucer sliding. Lucien crossed the small distance between them and crouched, slowly, in front of the chair. He did not touch her. The ivory cane stayed by the door. The amber eye and the black one were, for once, only looking at her, and not at all of the exits. "I am sorry," he said. "For the bridge. For coming here. For being the one to tell you this." She looked at him — at the slicked hair and the ruined symmetry of his face and the gloved hands he was very carefully keeping on his own knees — and thought, with a clarity that frightened her, that she had forgiven him somewhere on the stairs, before she'd even opened the door, and that this was going to be a problem. "Stay," she said. "While I think." "How long?" "I don't know yet." He nodded once, and did not move, and the kettle ticked as it cooled, and under the sofa Ptolemy began, grudgingly, to purr.