Run: 2026-04-25-01KQ2FP6DHJWXEHGHBTYXVYR24

The rain had followed Rory all the way from Whitechapel, plastering her black hair to her scalp and seeping through the shoulders of her jacket. She took the stairs to Eva’s flat two at a time, eager for the warmth of the place, for the familiar chaos of books and the smell of cardamom drifting up from the curry house below. She shoved the key into the first deadbolt, then the second. The third turned with a reluctant grind. The door swung open. The flat was wrong. The air was wrong. Not just the silence — though Ptolemy usually greeted her with a chirp and a figure-eight around her ankles — but the quality of the stillness. The sort of stillness that meant someone was holding their breath. Rory’s hand went to the knife in her jacket pocket. Then she saw him. Lucien Moreau sat in the worn armchair by the window, one leg crossed over the other, his platinum blond hair slicked back even in the dim grey light. The ivory handle of his cane rested between his knees, his long fingers draped over it like he had all the time in the world. He looked like a funeral director who’d wandered into a jumble sale. “Laila,” he said, and the old name from last spring settled in her chest like a splinter. “Get out.” He didn’t move. His lips curved — just barely, just enough to show he’d heard her. “Eva let me in. She’s at the British Library until closing.” Rory stepped inside and shut the door behind her, keeping it close, keeping her hand on the knife. “That doesn’t answer the question.” “I came to warn you.” “Warn me.” She laughed, a short, hollow sound. “You don’t get to show up in my friend’s flat and warn me. You don’t get to do anything, Lucien. We settled that.” He watched her with those mismatched eyes — one amber, one black as coal dust. The left one had changed since she’d known him. It was darker now, the pupil bleeding into the iris like ink into water. She wondered what that meant. She wondered if she cared. “Sit down, Rory.” “Don’t call me that.” “Aurora, then.” He said it like a concession, soft around the edges. “Please.” She didn’t sit. She crossed her arms and leaned against the doorframe, letting the rain drip from her sleeves onto the worn floorboards. The flat smelled of him — sandalwood and cigarette smoke and something metallic. Old blood, maybe. He always carried that scent after a job. “I have two minutes,” she said. “You have as long as it takes.” He rose from the chair with the careful precision of a man who knew exactly how much space he occupied, and then he closed the distance between them. Not fast, not threatening. Just deliberate. Rory held her ground. She’d learned to. He stopped an arm’s length away. Close enough that she could see the fine lines at the corners of his eyes, the way his jaw tightened when he was working up to something he didn’t want to say. “You’ve been seen,” he said. “I’m a delivery driver. I’m seen every day.” “Not by the delivery customers. By someone else. Someone who remembers you from the Verlaine job.” Her stomach dropped. She kept her face still. “That was six months ago.” “And they have long memories, and longer reach.” His voice dropped, and something shifted in his expression — something that looked like the thing she’d pretended not to see the night she walked out of his flat in Soho. “You burned them, Rory. You burned them and you ran, and they want to know who taught you how to use a silver blade like that.” “I taught myself.” “And they don’t believe that. So they’re asking questions. I’ve been tracking their movements for two weeks. They’re circling closer.” She wanted to call him a liar. She wanted to believe he’d invented this, cooked it up as a reason to stand in Eva’s flat and look at her with that heavy, hungry gaze. But Lucien didn’t lie about danger. He was too practical for that. “Why do you care?” she asked. He tilted his head. The amber eye caught the grey light, and for a moment it looked almost gold. “You know why.” “I told you not to.” “I know.” “I meant it.” “I know that too.” He took a breath. She could see him making a decision, could see the exact moment he lost a war with himself. “I’m not here to pick up where we left off. I’m here because you’re alive, and I’d like you to stay that way.” The words lodged somewhere in her throat. She had to look away. The rain drummed against the window. Ptolemy meowed from somewhere under the sofa. Normal sounds. Safe sounds. She focused on them until her heart stopped trying to climb out of her chest. “So what’s your plan?” she said. “Hide me somewhere? Ship me back to Cardiff?” “No. You’d hate Cardiff.” She almost smiled. Almost. “Teach you,” he said. “I’ll teach you to handle yourself properly. Not just silver and quick exits. Real fighting. Real control. The kind you’d need if they put a blade to your throat.” “And if I say no?” “Then I’ll leave. I’ll stay away. I’ll keep your secrets until I die.” She didn’t doubt that. For all his sharp suits and sharper tongue, Lucien had never broken a promise to her. He’d broken her heart, sure — but that had been her fault. She’d known what he was. Half-demon. Fixer. A man who couldn’t afford to want anything too badly. But he’d wanted her. That much had been real. She looked at him now, standing in her friend’s messy flat with rain in his hair and blood on his hands, and she remembered what it had felt like to be seen by him. Not just wanted — seen. Like she was the only interesting thing in a city that bored him. “One session,” she said. His brows lifted. “One session. If you’re lying, or if this is some elaborate way to get me alone, I’ll put this knife through your ribcage.” He smiled then. A real one. Small and crooked and devastating. “I’d expect nothing less.” He turned toward the door, and for a moment she thought he would leave, just walk out into the rain and disappear. But he paused with his hand on the deadbolt. “Tomorrow evening. Nine o’clock. I’ll send the address.” “I don’t have your number anymore.” He reached into his jacket and pulled out a card — cream-coloured, embossed with a single phone number. He held it out to her. She took it. Their fingers brushed. His were cold. “Don’t be late, Aurora.” He was gone before she could answer, the door clicking shut behind him. The flat felt suddenly smaller, emptier. She stood there with the card in her hand and the rain in her ears, and she tried to remember how to breathe the way she had before he walked in.