Run: 2026-05-31-01KSYXASCJGG08S65GK3PE0C9E

The third deadbolt gave with a clack that echoed down the stairwell, and Rory pulled the door open expecting the curry house owner with another noise complaint. Lucien Moreau stood on the landing instead, one gloved hand resting on the ivory head of his cane, the other tucked into the pocket of a charcoal coat beaded with rain. "You changed the locks," he said. "You weren't supposed to know where Eva lived." "I know where everyone lives." His mismatched eyes moved past her, into the cramped warmth of the flat, where Ptolemy had stretched himself across a tower of scrolls. "May I?" Rory didn't move from the doorframe. The cat blinked at the newcomer, unimpressed, and resettled. Behind her the kettle ticked toward a boil she'd started for one. "Eva's not here." "I didn't come for Eva." The rain caught the streetlight behind him, turning the platinum of his hair to something colder. Four months. That was how long since he'd walked out of the Golden Empress kitchen with a thank-you and a debt half-paid and not one word about the thing that had happened between them in the storeroom the night before. She'd told herself she didn't replay it. She replayed it constantly. "You can't just turn up," she said. "And yet." "Lucien." "Aurora." He let her name sit there, the way he always had, like it cost more than the others' did. "It's raining, I've walked from Aldgate, and there are people who would prefer me dead crossing the same river I just crossed. I'm asking you for ten minutes and a chair." She stepped back. Not graciously. Enough. He came in slow, leaning more on the cane than he used to, and she caught it the way you catch a single wrong note in a song you know by heart. "Your leg." "A disagreement." He lowered himself into Eva's armchair and propped the cane against the bookshelf. "The other party disagreed more permanently." The kettle screamed. She killed the gas, poured one cup, hesitated, poured a second. When she set it down beside him their fingers didn't touch, and she made certain of that. "You didn't write," she said, and hated the words the instant they left her, small and exposed on the table between them. He wrapped both hands around the cup. "No." "That's it. No." "What would you have wanted it to say?" "Something." She stayed standing, arms folded, the worktop hard against her spine. "You left me a balance owed on a job and a—" She stopped. Tried again. "You left." "I'm very good at leaving." He drank. "It's the only thing I do without regret." "Don't do that." "Do what?" "The clever line. The deflection. I've watched you sell that to half of London. I'm not buying it at my friend's kitchen table." Something shifted in his face, a fracture under the polish. He set the cup down with more care than it needed. "You want honesty," he said. "Honesty is a poor currency where I come from. It depreciates the moment you spend it." "Try." The cat jumped down, wove between the chair legs, and Lucien watched it go like it was the most interesting thing in the room — anything not to look at her. "That night," he said. "In the storeroom." "We don't have to—" "You wanted to. I started it." His eyes came up, the amber and the black, and held. "I left because the people who own pieces of me notice what I value. The moment they'd seen your face beside mine, you'd have become a thing to take. Leverage. I've watched it done. I've done it." A breath. "So I made you forgettable. I made it look like a debt and a thank-you and nothing under it." Rory's arms loosened. "You decided that. For me. Without asking." "Yes." "That's not protection. That's just leaving with a better story attached." He laughed, low and without humour. "There it is. I knew you'd find the seam." She pulled the second chair out and sat, finally, close enough that his cologne reached her under the curry-house smell soaked into the walls — cedar, something darker beneath. Her pulse did the foolish thing it always did near him. "Why now," she said. "You crossed a river full of people who want you dead to sit in Eva's chair and tell me you abandoned me on purpose. That's not an apology, Lucien. So what is it." "I need your help." "Of course you do." "And." His jaw worked. "And I found that the thing I built to keep you safe was keeping you out. I didn't think those were the same wall until I was on the wrong side of it." The rain filled the silence. Ptolemy leapt onto the windowsill and pressed his nose to the glass. "You can't say things like that," she said, quieter, "and expect me to just—" "I expect nothing." He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and the careful distance she'd built dissolved by inches. "I have spent thirty-two years arranging the affairs of other people so I never have to feel the cost of my own. You were a cost I couldn't arrange. That's the whole of it. That's the only true thing I've said in months." She looked at his hands. At the new stiffness when he flexed them. At the crescent scar on her own wrist she'd been worrying with her thumb without noticing. "What kind of help," she said. "The kind that's dangerous to give." He didn't soften it. "I won't pretend otherwise. You'd be safer if you put me back out in that rain." "And you came anyway." "I came anyway." His voice dropped. "Because I'd rather be in danger with you than safe without. That is the most reckless sentence I have ever spoken aloud, and I'd like it noted that I despise it." A laugh broke out of her before she could stop it, ragged at the edges. He smiled — the real one, the rare one, the one she'd told herself she'd imagined. "Noted," she said. She didn't reach for his hand. Not yet. But she didn't pull hers back when his fingers crossed the last of the distance and rested, light, against the scar on her wrist. "Ten minutes," she said. "You said ten minutes." "I lied," Lucien said. "I'm very good at that too."