Run: 2026-05-31-01KSYXCCJRSVZA4TVET00VV6PQ

The three deadbolts always took longer than they should have. Rory worked them in sequence — top, middle, bottom — the way Eva had drilled into her, and pulled the door open expecting the delivery she'd ordered an hour ago, or Eva home early, or the man from downstairs complaining about Ptolemy yowling through the floorboards again. She did not expect Lucien Moreau. He stood on the narrow landing with the stairwell light flickering behind him, and for one disorienting moment she simply looked at him — the slicked-back platinum hair, the charcoal suit cut so precisely it seemed painted on, the ivory-handled cane resting against the toe of one polished shoe. His mismatched eyes found hers. Amber and black. The black one always made her feel like part of her was being read off a page. "Hello, Aurora," he said, and the way he said her name — the full weight of it, the soft French rounding of the vowels — was exactly the same as it had been the last time, in the rain, when she'd told him not to follow her. "No," she said, and started to shut the door. His cane caught it. Not roughly — there was nothing rough about Lucien, ever — but the ivory tip slid into the gap with the unhurried confidence of a man who had never once been turned away and didn't intend to start now. "Three deadbolts," he observed, glancing at the door's edge. "Eva's handiwork. She always did mistake paranoia for security." A pause. "May I come in?" "How did you find me?" "Aurora." He tilted his head, almost gentle. "Finding people is what I do." Behind her, Ptolemy threaded between her ankles, tail high, utterly unbothered. Traitor. Rory's hand stayed on the door, knuckles pale, and she hated that her heart was doing the thing it did — that lurch, that traitorous skip, the same one it had done four months ago across a candlelit table in a place that no longer existed. "You shouldn't be here," she said. "Possibly not." He didn't move. "And yet." She should have shut the door. She had spent four months building the version of herself that would shut the door. But there were shadows under his eyes she'd never seen before, a tightness at the corner of his mouth, and Lucien Moreau did not, as a rule, allow himself to look tired. So she stepped back, and the door swung wide, and she said, "Five minutes," because it was a lie that let her pretend she was still in control of something. He came in like he owned the place, which was simply how he came into everywhere. The flat seemed smaller with him in it — and it was already small, books stacked in unsteady towers on the floor, scrolls unfurled across the table and weighted with mugs, Eva's research spilling over every surface in her absence. Lucien took it in with a single sweep of his gaze, cataloguing, the way he catalogued everything. "She's gotten worse," he said. "She's thorough." "Mm." He lifted a yellowed page between two fingers, read it, set it down with peculiar care. "And you've been hiding in it." "I've been living, Lucien." She crossed her arms. "There's a difference. You'd know that if you ever did either." That landed. She saw it land — a flicker in the amber eye, gone before it fully arrived. He set his cane against the bookshelf and turned to face her, and the easy fixer's mask he wore for the rest of the world slipped, just slightly, just for her, the way it always had. That was the trouble with him. That was the entire trouble. "You left without a word," he said. "I left after a great many words. You just weren't listening to the ones that mattered." "Aurora—" "You let me think it was real." Her voice came out steadier than she felt. "And then I find out you'd made a deal. That I was — what was it. A consideration. A piece you were moving." "That is not what I said." "It's what you did." The silence sat between them, thick as the smell of cardamom drifting up from the curry house below. Ptolemy leapt onto the windowsill and folded himself into a loaf, watching them with the bored superiority of cats who have witnessed too many human disasters to be impressed by another. Lucien drew a slow breath. "I made the deal," he said, "to keep you out of it. There is a difference between protecting someone and using them, even if from the cheap seats they look the same." "You don't get to decide what I need protecting from." "No," he agreed, surprising her. "I don't. I learned that. Rather expensively." He took a step closer, and she didn't retreat, and she was furious at herself for not retreating. "I have spent four months learning it. I told myself I came tonight because there is a threat you need to know about — and that is true, there is, and I will tell you. But I would be lying to you, and I have done quite enough of that, if I pretended that was the only reason I am standing in this absurd little room full of someone else's books." She felt the words go through her like cold water. "Lucien." "I missed you." It came out plain, unadorned, no charm laid over it. From him that was nearly indecent. "I have done business in three cities and slept in none of them and every dull negotiation, every tedious favour traded, I kept thinking — she would have said the thing that cut to the heart of it in five seconds. She would have made me laugh in the middle of being insufferable." His mouth twitched. "I am, apparently, very insufferable without you to point it out." She wanted to laugh. She wanted, horribly, to cry. She did neither, because she was Rory Carter and she had built herself sturdier than that, except that her hands had uncrossed without her permission and one of them had drifted, betraying, toward the lapel of his ridiculous, beautiful suit. "You hurt me," she said quietly. "I know." "I don't trust you." "You shouldn't. Not yet." His hand came up — slow, asking — and caught hers where it hovered over his chest, and his thumb found the small crescent scar on the inside of her wrist, the one he'd traced once before in the dark and asked about, the one she'd told him the truth about when she'd told no one else. "But you opened the door." "You jammed your cane in it." "You opened it first." And the worst of it, the absolute worst, was that he was right.