Run: 2026-05-31-01KSYXJDPAEYHVVPYWDW6KDHWD

The third deadbolt always stuck. Rory wrestled it free, expecting the curry-house landlord come to grumble about the smell of burnt sage again, and instead found Lucien Moreau leaning against the doorframe like he'd been poured there. "You've added a lock," he said. "Two wasn't paranoid enough?" "Three's the number that keeps charming bastards out. Clearly it needs a fourth." Ptolemy threaded between her ankles and stared up at the visitor with the flat, judgmental patience of cats everywhere. Lucien tipped his head down at the tabby, then back to her, the amber eye catching the stairwell light while the black one stayed a hole in his face. "May I come in, or are we conducting this on the landing for the neighbours?" "There's a thought. Mrs Patel downstairs loves a show." He didn't move, and neither did she. The ivory cane rested against his thigh, his weight not really on it. He never really needed it. That was the thing about Lucien — everything he carried was a story he wanted you to read wrong. "Eva's not here," she added. "I didn't come for Eva." The words sat there. Three months of nothing, of her checking a phone she told herself she didn't care about, of rehearsing what she'd say if she ever saw him again — all of it collapsed into the small space between the doorframe and his shoulder. She stepped back. Not an invitation, exactly. A refusal to be the one who looked like she cared. He came in, and the cramped room shrank further around him. Books stacked to the windowsill, scrolls bleeding off the table, Eva's research notes pinned to the wall in a spider's web of red thread. Lucien took it in with one sweep and said nothing, which was worse than commentary. "You look tired, Aurora." "You left." She hadn't meant to lead with it. She'd meant to be cool, opaque, the version of herself she wore like good armour. But it dropped out of her, plain and ugly, and his jaw moved like he'd bitten down on something. "I did." "That's it? 'I did.' Do you know what it was like, waking up to half a note and a key I didn't recognise the door to?" "The key opened a deposit box. There was money in it. Enough to disappear properly if you'd needed to." "I didn't want money." She crossed her arms, the crescent scar on her wrist pale under the bare bulb. "I wanted you to not be a coward." He set the cane against the table with deliberate care, and when he straightened, the practised charm had thinned out of his face. Underneath it was something she'd only seen twice — once in the alley behind Silas's bar when a thing with too many joints had nearly opened her throat, and once in the dark of her own flat, after, when he'd held her hand and counted her pulse like he was afraid of losing the number. "There were men coming for you," he said. "Men I'd done business with. The kind who'd have used what I felt as a lever. Staying would have painted a target on your spine." "So you decided. For both of us." "Yes." "God, you're insufferable." She turned away, busying her hands with the kettle because they needed somewhere to go. Water, the click of the gas, the small domestic ritual that let her keep her back to him. "You don't get to do that, Lucien. You don't get to make me a problem you solve and then stroll back in like — like —" "Like what?" He was closer now. She heard the floor give under him, felt the warmth that came off a body that ran hotter than human. She gripped the counter. "Like I'd be glad." "And aren't you?" The kettle began its low complaint. She watched it instead of him. "Three months," she said. "Three months and not a word. I thought you were dead. I went to your usual table at the place on Greek Street and the waiter looked at me like I was mad. There's no record of you anywhere when you don't want there to be, did you know that? I called every contact Eva had. Nothing. You're very good at not existing." "It's a useful skill." "It's a cruel one." Silence, save for the rising whistle. She killed the gas before it screamed. When she turned, he was watching her with both eyes, the strange mismatched weight of them, and the distance between them was a single careless step. "The men are dead," he said quietly. "All of them. That's where I've been. Not hiding — hunting. I needed the lever gone before I came back, because I had no intention of coming back as anything other than yours." Her breath caught and she hated that it did. "You can't just say things like that." "I've spent thirty-two years saying nothing I meant. Allow me the novelty." "Lucien—" "You asked me not to be a coward." He lifted his hand, slow, the way a man approaches something that might bolt, and let his fingers rest on her wrist, over the scar, exactly where he'd counted her pulse that first night. "So I'm standing in a flat that smells of curry and burnt herbs, with a cat plotting my death, telling you the truth. I left to keep you alive. I came back because alive was not enough. I wanted you furious with me at close range. I wanted to be in the room when you decided whether to throw me out." Her pulse hammered under his thumb and they both knew it. The traitor thing wouldn't lie for her. "I'm still deciding," she managed. "I know." A smile ghosted across his mouth, the real one, the rare one. "Take your time. I find I'm in no hurry to be anywhere you're not." Ptolemy chose that moment to leap onto the table and send a scroll cascading to the floor. Neither of them looked. Rory's free hand had found the lapel of his charcoal jacket, gripping the fabric like she meant to shove him back, and she wasn't shoving. "If you vanish again," she said, "I will find you. And I won't be charming about it." "I'd expect nothing less, Malphora." The old name, the one only he used, undid something in her chest she'd been holding shut for three months.