Run: 2026-05-29-01KSSJX14STC3GEVMSVBJHXJVW

The three deadbolts gave way one after another, each a dull thud against the morning quiet. Rory pulled the door back, expecting Eva's grocery delivery or the landlord come to complain about Ptolemy yowling through the night. Lucien Moreau stood on the landing, one gloved hand resting on the ivory head of his cane. "You changed your hair." She gripped the edge of the door. Two months. Two months of silence after Marseille, after the warehouse, after he'd looked her dead in the eye and told her to forget him. "You don't get to comment on my hair." "A simple observation." His mismatched gaze moved past her shoulder, cataloguing the stacks of scrolls, the books spilling across the floor, the tabby curled atop a pile of research notes. "Eva's nest grows wilder. Is she here?" "No." Rory didn't move. "And you're not coming in." The corner of his mouth lifted, that infuriating half-smile she'd spent weeks trying to scrub from memory. "I've travelled rather a long way to stand in a curry-scented stairwell." "Then it's a wasted trip." She started to close the door. His cane wedged into the gap, and the blade hidden inside it gave the faintest metallic whisper as the wood flexed. "Aurora." Her full name. He only used it when he meant something. "Three minutes. After that, I'll go, and you can bolt your three locks and pretend the Frenchman never darkened your doorstep." Ptolemy lifted his head, ears swivelling toward the new voice. Rory held Lucien's stare for a long moment, then stepped back. "Three minutes." He crossed the threshold, and the flat shrank around him. He'd always done that — filled rooms he had no right to fill, made cramped spaces feel like antechambers to somewhere grander. He set his cane against the bookshelf and peeled off one glove, finger by finger. "You look tired," he said. "I look like someone who didn't sleep because she keeps replaying a man telling her to disappear." She folded her arms. "Two minutes and forty seconds." "That's not fair." "Don't talk to me about fair." Her voice cracked on the last word, and she hated it, hated that he heard it. "You bled out on a warehouse floor in front of me. I held your jacket against the wound. And the moment you could stand, you put me in a car and told the driver an address that wasn't yours, and you said—" She stopped. "I remember what I said." "Then you know why I'm not making you tea." He moved further into the room, careful, the way a person moved around a wounded animal. The light from the window caught the platinum of his hair, the sharp line of his jaw, the faint shadow under his black eye where exhaustion lived. "I sent you away because the people who carved that hole in me were going to come looking for the woman who pulled me out of it. You think I wanted you gone?" He shook his head. "I wanted you alive. Those are not the same wish, but in Marseille they could not both be granted." "You could have told me that." "And you would have refused to leave." "Yes." She said it without hesitation, and the word hung between them, raw as an open palm. Something shifted in his expression — the practised calm slipping, just for a breath. He looked away, toward the window, toward anything but her. "That," he murmured, "is precisely why I couldn't say it." The cat stretched, hopped down from the notes, and wound a slow figure-eight around Lucien's ankles. Traitor. Rory watched him crouch, the movement stiff on his left side where the wound had been, and offer two fingers to Ptolemy's nose. "You're still favouring the ribs," she said. "You're still watching how I move." Heat climbed her throat. She turned away, busied her hands with a stack of Eva's books, squaring their edges that didn't need squaring. "Why are you here, Lucien? Truly. You don't cross the Channel to apologise. You're not built for it." "No." He straightened, slow, one hand bracing on the shelf. "I came because the people I was protecting you from are no longer a concern. I made certain of it. Permanently." A pause. "And because I have spent two months discovering that the silence I demanded does not suit me the way I expected." She set down the book. "Meaning what?" "Meaning I am very good at being alone, Aurora. I have built a life on it. Information, leverage, distance — these things keep a man like me breathing." His amber eye found hers, and for once there was no calculation in it, only something nearer to fear. "And then a delivery girl from Cardiff wandered into a matter that should have killed her, and refused to be afraid of me, and pressed her hands to my chest as though my staying alive mattered to her. I have not been able to think clearly since." The room was too quiet. Outside, a bus groaned past, and somewhere below the curry house clattered its first pans of the day. "You don't get to do this," she said, softer now, less steel and more ache. "You don't get to leave me on a kerb in another country and then show up looking like that and saying things like that, like it costs you nothing." "It costs me everything." He took a step toward her, and his hand lifted, hovered, settled at last against the side of her face. His thumb traced the line of her cheekbone. "I am not a good man. I won't insult you by pretending otherwise. But I am a man who has been counting the days since I last saw you, which is a humiliation I had not budgeted for." She should have pulled back. Every careful, cool-headed instinct she owned told her to step out of reach, to put the bookshelf and two months and a sea between them again. Instead she leaned into his palm, just barely, just enough. "Your three minutes are up," she whispered. "I know." His forehead dropped toward hers, close enough that she felt the warmth of him, the faint scent of cedar and travel and something darker underneath. "Tell me to go, and I'll go. I'll respect it this time. I'll let you bolt the door." Rory closed her eyes. Ptolemy mewled at their feet. Her heart slammed against her ribs like it meant to break free of her entirely. "Don't," she said. "Don't go."