Run: 2026-04-25-01KQ2FZ2F039003M5T3ATSDMM7

The knock came at half past eleven, three sharp raps against the deadbolted wood. Rory looked up from the stack of delivery receipts spread across Eva’s coffee table, Ptolemy stirring in her lap with an irritated flick of his tail. She wasn’t expecting anyone. Eva was in Edinburgh for the weekend, hunting down a rare grimoire in some university library’s restricted section. The flat above the curry house was supposed to be quiet. Safe. The knock came again, harder this time. A rhythm she recognised. Rory’s blood went cold, then hot, then settled into something tight and wary in her chest. She set Ptolemy aside and crossed the cluttered living room, stepping over a collapsed tower of anthropology textbooks. The three deadbolts slid back one by one with metallic clicks that seemed too loud in the narrow hallway. She opened the door a crack, kept the chain on. Lucien Moreau stood under the flickering bulb of the landing, both hands resting on the ivory head of his cane. His charcoal suit was immaculate despite the late hour, not a hair out of place in that slicked-back platinum blond. The amber eye caught the light, warm and searching. The black one swallowed it. “Aurora.” His voice was low, smooth as polished marble. Rory didn’t unhook the chain. “You’re a long way from Soho, Frenchman.” “I came to speak with you.” He shifted his weight, and the cane tapped once against the floorboards. “I’ve been looking for three days.” “Three days,” she repeated, and the disbelief in her own voice sounded like an accusation. “You couldn’t have called? Sent a text? Hired a pigeon?” “Would you have answered?” She held his gaze. The answer sat between them, heavy and unspoken. She wouldn’t have. She’d blocked his number after the last time, after the warehouse in Bermondsey and the silver-tipped bullets and the way he’d walked out of the smoke without looking back. “What do you want, Lucien?” “To talk. Inside, if you’ll allow it.” He gestured with his free hand toward the deadbolts she’d already undone. “I didn’t come here to make a scene in a stairwell at midnight.” Rory pressed her forehead against the cool wood of the doorframe. The smell of curry and traffic floated up from the street below, mixing with the faint cologne he wore—bergamot and something darker, like smoked leather. She unhooked the chain. He stepped past her into the narrow hallway, and the flat suddenly felt smaller. Taller. He had that effect—filling space without trying, his presence a gravitational pull she’d spent the last four months learning to resist. Ptolemy appeared in the living room doorway, blinked once at Lucien, and retreated under the sofa. “The cat remembers me,” Lucien said, a ghost of a smile touching his mouth. “The cat has good instincts.” She closed the door, redid all three deadbolts. The clicks echoed in the silence. When she turned, he was studying the room—the stacks of books on the floor, the corkboard covered in string and photographs, the half-empty mug of tea growing cold beside her notes. “You’re still working for the Chinese restaurant,” he observed. “Part-time. Pays the bills.” “And the other part?” “None of your business.” He turned to face her fully, and the heterochromatic gaze pinned her in place. She’d forgotten how intense it was, the way he looked at a person like he was reading the fine print of their soul. One amber, one black. One warm, one depthless. “I wouldn’t have come if it weren’t important,” he said. “You said that already.” “Because it bears repeating.” He set the cane against the edge of the sofa and removed his suit jacket, folding it over his arm with practiced care. The gesture was almost domestic, and it threw her off balance. “There’s a woman dead in Camden. A demon-keeper. Someone carved her ribs open and left her heart on the kitchen counter.” Rory’s stomach turned. “Why are you telling me this?” “Because the only witness is a girl she was keeping in a basement. Seven years old. Speaks only Welsh.” The word hung in the air between them. Welsh. Her mother’s language, the one she’d grown up hearing in the kitchen of their Cardiff home, the lilt of it wrapped around Sunday dinners and bedtime stories. Lucien watched her face and saw the recognition flicker. “I need a translator,” he said. “Someone who can talk to her without a room full of badges and clipboards frightening her more than she already is.” Rory crossed her arms, but it was a shield she didn’t quite believe in anymore. “You have contacts. You know people who speak a dozen languages.” “I know people who speak French, Spanish, Arabic, Mandarin. I don’t know anyone who grew up in Cardiff with a Welsh teacher for a mother.” The silence stretched. Ptolemy crept out from under the sofa and wound between Lucien’s ankles. He didn’t look down. “Why should I trust you?” Rory asked. “You shouldn’t.” His voice dropped, and something raw surfaced beneath the polish. “I haven’t given you a reason to. I know that. But I’m not asking you to trust me, Aurora. I’m asking you to help a child.” She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes until colours bloomed behind the lids. When she lowered them, he was still standing there, waiting, patient as stone. “One condition,” she said. “Name it.” “After this, you tell me exactly what happened in Bermondsey. Why you left. Why you didn’t come back.” His jaw tightened. The amber eye flickered, the black one remained still as a pool of oil. “That’s a high price.” “So is asking me to walk into a crime scene with a half-demon fixer I haven’t spoken to in four months.” He held her gaze for a long moment. Then he picked up his cane, slid his jacket back on, and straightened the lapels. “Deal.” Rory grabbed her coat from the hook by the door—a worn leather jacket she’d bought secondhand in Camden Market three years ago. She shoved her keys into the pocket and looked back at the flat, at the scattered papers and the cold tea and the life she’d been carefully rebuilding in the space he’d left empty. “The girl,” she said, pulling the door open. “Where is she?” “Safe house in Hackney. I’ll explain on the way.” She stepped onto the landing, and he followed. The stairwell light flickered again, casting his shadow long and strange against the wall—two shapes that didn’t quite align, the demon and the man wrestling for dominance in the slant of the bulb. Rory locked the door behind her. The deadbolts slid home with three metallic thuds, sealing away the quiet she’d been hoarding. They walked down the stairs side by side, close enough that she caught the smell of bergamot again. Neither of them spoke. The air between them was charged with all the things they hadn’t said in four months, and all the things they’d promised to say after tonight.