Run: 2026-05-31-01KSYX8YZ15X1NNF7AB3F6TVDE

The third deadbolt always stuck. Rory worked it with her thumb, swearing under her breath, the curry-house smell of cumin and frying onions seeping up through the floorboards as it did every evening at half six. Ptolemy wound between her ankles, demanding something she hadn't time to give. She pulled the door open expecting the delivery she'd ordered. Lucien Moreau stood on the landing instead, one hand resting on the ivory handle of his cane, the other tucked into the pocket of a suit that probably cost more than a month of her rent. "Hello, Aurora." She didn't move. The door stayed half-open, her body filling the gap like she could keep the rest of him out by sheer want. "You're not supposed to know this address." "I know a great many things I'm not supposed to." His mismatched eyes moved past her shoulder, taking in the stacked books, the scrolls, the wreckage of Eva's research spread across every flat surface. The amber one caught the hallway light; the black one swallowed it. "May I come in, or shall we conduct this on the stairwell where the gentleman from the curry house can enjoy it?" "That depends on what *this* is." "Five minutes." "You said five minutes the last time. In Marseille." A muscle moved at the corner of his mouth, the closest he ever came to flinching. "And you left before the second one. So we're even." Ptolemy chose that moment to dart out onto the landing. Lucien bent, smooth as water, and scooped the cat up before he could reach the stairs. He held him out across the threshold like an offering. "Yours, I assume." She took the cat. Their fingers touched. She hated that she noticed. "Eva's." Rory stepped back from the door, which was as close to an invitation as she'd give him. "Five minutes." He came in the way he did everything — without hurry, without apology, his cane tapping once against the floorboards before he found a spot near the window where the light from the street caught the platinum of his hair. He looked at the chaos around him and said nothing about it, which was somehow worse than if he'd remarked on it. "You've been busy." "I've been hiding." She set Ptolemy down and crossed her arms. "There's a difference. You'd know it if you ever stopped working long enough to do either." "I am working. That's why I'm here." "Of course you are." She laughed, short and without warmth. "Six months, Lucien. Not a word. Not when Evan's people came sniffing round the restaurant, not when I sent Silas to ask you for one favour — one — and you sent back a note. A *note*. In French. Knowing I can't read French." "You could have learned." "I could have done a lot of things." He set the cane against the windowsill and turned to face her fully. In the half-dark of the flat his eyes were difficult to read, which she suspected was the point. He'd built a career on being difficult to read. "I sent the note in French," he said, "because anyone who intercepted it would have understood it. I wrote it that way so *you* wouldn't." That landed somewhere she hadn't braced for. She kept her face still. "Meaning what?" "Meaning it said things I didn't want you to read in a kitchen with three other people looking over your shoulder." He moved a stack of scrolls a careful inch to the left, then seemed to catch himself doing it and stopped. "It wasn't a refusal, Aurora. It was the opposite. I sent men to watch the restaurant for three weeks. You never knew because you weren't meant to." She stared at him. Outside, a bus hissed past and threw a wash of light across the ceiling. "You're lying." "I rarely lie. It's inefficient. The truth is far more useful, and far more frightening, which is why people assume I'm always lying." He took a step closer. The floorboard between them creaked. "You think I left you in Marseille. You walked out of that room at four in the morning while I was downstairs settling a debt that would have followed you across the Channel. I came back up and the bed was cold and you were gone." "I heard you on the phone." "You heard half of it." "I heard enough to know I was a job to you." The line of his jaw tightened. For a moment the polished surface cracked, and she saw something underneath it that she'd only glimpsed once before, in a hotel room with the lights off and his guard down. "You were never a job." He said it quietly, which from him was a kind of violence. "That was the problem. A job, I could have managed. A job I could have handed off, billed, walked away from. You, I couldn't put down. Do you understand how inconvenient that is, in my line of work?" She did. That was the trouble. She understood it precisely, because she'd carried the same inconvenient weight up four flights of Eva's stairs every night for six months and lain awake under it. "Don't," she said. "Don't do this now. Not when you need something from me. I know how you work, Lucien. You find the soft thing and you press it." "I'm not pressing." But he was close now, close enough that she could smell the cedar and smoke of him, and she hadn't moved away, which she noticed too late to correct. "If I wanted to manipulate you, I'd have lied better. I'd have brought flowers. I'd have apologised." "You're not apologising?" "No." His eyes searched her face. "Because I'd do it again. I'd settle that debt again. I'd keep you alive again, even if it meant you hating me for it. That's not an apology. That's a confession." The radiator ticked. Ptolemy had curled himself onto a pile of Eva's notes and watched them both with the supreme indifference of cats. Rory found that her arms had come uncrossed. She didn't remember telling them to. "What do you need," she said. It came out rougher than she meant. "The thing you came for. Say it." "You." He didn't blink. "There's a name in your friend's research — Malphora. I need to know where she heard it, because someone with a great deal of money is willing to kill for it." A pause. "But that's the second thing. I'd be lying if I said it was the first."