Run: 2026-05-29-01KSSJKYHVHG4FZSVF5HANTYB7

The third deadbolt gave with a reluctant clunk, and Rory pulled the door open expecting the curry house downstairs to have buggered up Eva's takeaway order again. Instead she got Lucien Moreau, leaning on his cane in the dim stairwell light like he'd been carved there for her inconvenience. For a moment neither of them said anything. Ptolemy, traitorous beast, slipped between her ankles and wound himself around the polished toe of Lucien's shoe, purring like he'd been waiting weeks for exactly this. "You're letting the heat out," Lucien said. "I'm considering letting something else out." She didn't move from the doorway. Behind her the flat smelled of old paper and the lavender tea Eva insisted helped her concentrate, and Rory was suddenly, absurdly aware of how she must look — one of Eva's oversized jumpers, hair shoved behind her ears, a smudge of biro on her wrist where she'd been taking notes for three hours on something that was supposed to keep her too busy to think about precisely this man. His mismatched eyes moved over her, amber and black, cataloguing in that infuriating way of his. "You changed your hair." "It's the same hair." "It's shorter." "It's been six weeks, Lucien. Hair does that." She crossed her arms. "How did you find me?" A faint smile, there and gone. "Cara, I find people for a living. The question you mean to ask is why I bothered." She did mean to ask that. She didn't, because asking it would mean she wanted the answer, and she'd spent six weeks teaching herself not to want anything that came wrapped in a charcoal suit and an accent that turned her name into something she didn't recognize. The last time she'd seen him, it had been on a rain-slicked rooftop in Whitechapel, and he had looked at her like she was a problem he genuinely didn't know how to solve — which, from a man who solved problems for a living, had felt like the closest thing to a confession she was ever going to get. Then he'd told her to go home. To stay out of it. He'd said it was for her safety with the cold competence of a man closing a ledger, and she'd believed exactly none of it, and she'd left anyway because the alternative was standing there in the rain begging him to give her a reason to stay. She had not begged. She was proud of that, mostly. "Eva isn't here," Rory said. "I know. I didn't come for Eva." He shifted his weight, and for the first time she noticed the line of tension in his shoulders, the way his hand wasn't resting on the ivory handle so much as gripping it. Lucien Moreau did not grip things. He held them, lightly, the way he held everything, including conversations he had no intention of finishing. "May I come in, or would you prefer we conduct this on the landing for the benefit of your neighbours?" She should say no. Every sensible cell in her body, all the cool-headed quick-thinking machinery that had gotten her this far, was lined up and voting no. She stepped back and let him in. He moved past her into the cramped front room, and the flat seemed to shrink around him — all those books and scrolls and Eva's chaos of research, and Lucien in the middle of it, immaculate, out of place, like a blade laid down on a kitchen table. Ptolemy followed him in and leapt onto the only clear chair, claiming it. "Charming," Lucien said, surveying the disorder. "We can't all live in cathedrals of taste." Rory shut the door, did not redo the deadbolts, and hated that she'd noticed she hadn't. "You've got five minutes. Talk." He didn't, not right away. He turned to face her, and the easy fixer's mask he wore — the one she'd watched him deploy on dock bosses and witches and once a very angry vampire — wasn't quite sitting right. There were shadows under his eyes. He'd been somewhere unpleasant, or done something he didn't like, and she despised the small soft thing in her chest that wanted to know which. "The Avaros business," he began. "Is over. You told me. You said go home, stay out of it, it's handled. I went home. I stayed out of it." She heard her own voice climbing and dragged it back down. "So unless you came to apologize, which I notice you haven't, I genuinely can't imagine—" "Your name," he said quietly, "is on a list." The room went very still. Even Ptolemy stopped washing his paw. "What list." "The kind I make my living staying off of." He set the cane against the bookshelf — deliberately, both hands free now, which was its own kind of language from him. "Someone connected the delivery girl on the rooftop in Whitechapel to a name. To several names, in fact. You have rather a lot of them." A ghost of that smile. "Aurora. Rory. Laila. I've always wondered which one is real." "They're all real." She'd stopped breathing somewhere in the middle of it. "Who put me on a list, Lucien?" "That," he said, "is what I came to find out. And what I came to tell you is that the reason I sent you away was not because I didn't—" He stopped. His jaw worked. For a man fluent in four languages, he seemed, for one remarkable moment, to have run out of words entirely. "Was not because you didn't what." Her voice came out barely above a whisper. He looked at her then, fully, no mask, amber eye and black, and she felt it land somewhere under her ribs like a struck match. "Because I didn't care," he finished. "I sent you away because I do. Which makes you a liability I cannot afford and apparently"—he exhaled, something raw cracking through the polish—"cannot stay away from. So you'll forgive me, cara, if I came in person to keep you alive. I find I rather can't tolerate the alternative." The note-strewn flat was utterly silent. Outside, somewhere down on Brick Lane, a bottle broke and somebody laughed. Rory's mouth was dry. Six weeks of careful not-wanting collapsed, quietly, like a tide going out. "You're a coward," she said, and her voice shook, "for waiting until I was on a list to say that." "Yes," Lucien agreed. "I am aware." And he didn't move toward her, didn't reach — just stood there in the ruin of Eva's research with his hands open at his sides, waiting, for once in his careful life, to be the one who got refused. She crossed the room instead.