Run: 2026-05-31-01KSYXCCG48S27KCG0X6BWSJXJ

The third deadbolt was always the stubborn one. Rory had to wrench it sideways while leaning her hip against the doorframe, and the curse she muttered was already half-formed on her lips when the door swung open and she saw who stood on the landing. Her breath stopped somewhere behind her ribs. Lucien Moreau filled the narrow stairwell like he'd been poured into it — charcoal suit immaculate despite the rain that had clearly chased him here, water beading on the shoulders and sliding off as if the fabric itself disdained to be touched. One hand rested atop the ivory handle of his cane. The other he'd raised, knuckles toward the door, as though he'd been about to knock again. His amber eye caught the hallway's weak bulb and gleamed; the black one drank the light entirely. "You changed the locks," he said, by way of greeting. His voice carried that low, unhurried cadence she'd spent three months trying to forget. "Three deadbolts. I counted from the sound." "Eva's flat," Rory said. "Eva's locks." "Eva's cat, too, I assume." Lucien tilted his head toward the gray shape that had wound itself between Rory's ankles. Ptolemy regarded the visitor with the flat suspicion of a creature who'd already decided. "He has good instincts." Rory didn't move from the doorway. She kept one hand on the edge of the door and the other on the frame, a barricade made of nothing, and she was acutely aware of how little it would accomplish if he wanted past it. He could have charmed his way through. He could have simply waited her out — Lucien was very good at waiting. "How did you find me?" she asked. "You're asking the wrong question." "Humor me." His mouth curved, not quite a smile. "I'm an information broker, Aurora. Finding people is the least interesting thing I do. The right question is why I came." "Fine." She lifted her chin. "Why did you come?" The amusement faded from his face, and that was worse, somehow — Lucien without his armor of irony was a man she'd only glimpsed a handful of times, and never on purpose. Rain ticked against the window at the end of the landing. From the curry house below came the muffled clatter of pots, the smell of cumin and frying onions threading up through the floorboards. "May I come in?" he said. "I'd rather not say it in a stairwell that smells of someone else's dinner." She should have said no. She'd rehearsed it, in the weeks after Edinburgh — the cool, clean refusal she'd deliver if he ever turned up again, the door closing with a satisfying finality. She'd practiced it in the bath, in the back of the delivery van, lying awake in Eva's spare room listening to the city breathe. *I have nothing to say to you.* Five words. Easy. She stepped back and let him in. He moved past her into the cramped front room, and the flat seemed to shrink around him. Eva's research had colonized every flat surface — towers of books, scrolls weighted down with chipped mugs, sheaves of notes annotated in three different inks. Lucien took it in with a single sweep of his mismatched gaze, the way he took in everything, cataloguing and pricing and filing away. Then he turned to face her, and she shut the door but didn't bother with the deadbolts, and hated that her hands wanted to. "You look well," he said. "I look tired." "Both can be true." Rory crossed her arms. The scar on her left wrist itched the way it did when she was nervous, the small crescent reminder of a childhood that felt like another woman's life. "You don't get to do that," she said. "The compliments. The — the *charm*. Not after you left me standing on a platform at Waverley with a one-way ticket and no explanation." "I left you alive." His voice was very quiet. "There's a difference you're choosing not to see." "Don't." The word came out sharper than she intended. "Don't make it noble. You knew something was coming and you didn't tell me. You put me on a train like luggage you needed to misplace." Lucien set his cane against the edge of the cluttered table, deliberate, and the gesture undid her a little — because he never let go of that cane, not in company, not when there was the faintest chance he might need the blade inside it. Letting it rest meant something. It meant *I am not here to fight you.* "If I had told you what was coming," he said, "you would have stayed. You would have insisted on being clever and brave, the way you always are, and you would have died being clever and brave in a city that wasn't yours. So I did the one ungentlemanly thing I am genuinely good at." He spread his hands. "I lied. I let you hate me. It was cheaper than the alternative." Rory's throat tightened. She looked away, at Ptolemy now perched on a stack of grimoires, tail twitching, watching them both like a tiny disapproving god. "You could have written," she said. Smaller now. "After." "I wrote eleven letters." A muscle worked in his jaw. "I burned all of them. They were either too honest or not honest enough, and I have never in my life found the middle of that particular road." She turned back to him. The rain had darkened his platinum hair at the temples, and a single drop ran down the side of his neck, and she wanted — absurdly, infuriatingly — to wipe it away with her thumb. Three months of practiced indifference, and it crumbled at the sight of one rivulet of rainwater. "Why now?" she whispered. "Because the thing I sent you away from has found its way to London," Lucien said. "Because your name has begun to appear in conversations I don't like, in mouths I trust even less. And because—" He stopped. For the span of a heartbeat, the fixer, the broker, the man who priced everything, looked entirely unsure of his footing. "Because I discovered that I would rather be standing in this ridiculous, fragrant little flat being hated to my face than be safely elsewhere not knowing if you were still breathing." The kettle, which she'd put on before the knock, chose that moment to begin its rising whine from the kitchen. Rory let it sing. "You're staying for tea," she said at last, and her voice only shook a little. "And then you're going to tell me everything. All of it. No more trains." Something eased in his shoulders — relief, carefully hidden, but she'd learned to read him once, and the skill hadn't left her. "No more trains," Lucien agreed. "I promise." "Your promises are worth nothing." "I know." He almost smiled again. "That's why I'm offering it to you anyway. It's the only thing I have that I've never spent." She went to make the tea so she wouldn't have to let him see her face.