Run: 2026-06-01-01KT1G86GGYXKTEPTGYP7AXCWQ

Three deadbolts. Rory worked them in sequence, the metal cold under her fingers, and she expected a courier or Eva forgetting her keys again. She did not expect the silhouette filling the narrow stairwell, charcoal against the dim hallway bulb, an ivory cane resting in one gloved hand. "You changed the locks," Lucien said. "You found the flat anyway." She kept her grip on the edge of the door, not opening it wider. Behind her, Ptolemy threaded between her ankles and let out a low complaint. "That was the point of not telling you where it was." "And yet here I am." He tilted his head, and the hallway light caught the amber of his right eye, left the black one in shadow. "May I?" "No." "Aurora." The way he said her name — full, deliberate, every syllable given its weight — made something tighten under her ribs. She hated that it still worked. "It's late, Luc." "It's nine in the evening." "Late for people who don't want company." He didn't push. That was the thing about him; he never pushed, never raised his voice. He simply stood and waited, the way water waited at the bottom of a hill, certain of where everything eventually rolled. The silence stretched until Ptolemy gave up on her and wandered back toward the kitchen, tail high. "Two minutes," she said, and stepped back. He came in without seeming to move much at all, the door clicking shut behind him. The flat shrank around him the way it always did when someone took up space he had no right to. Books stacked on every surface. Eva's scrolls spilling off the table. The radiator ticking under the window. Lucien took it in with one sweep of his gaze and said nothing about the mess, which she resented, because she'd half-wanted him to. "You look well," he said instead. "Don't." "It's an observation." "It's a softening." She crossed her arms. "You don't make observations unless you want something. So skip it. What do you want?" He set the cane against the arm of the sofa and removed his gloves, one finger at a time, folding them into his breast pocket. The gesture should not have held her attention. It did. "I came to apologise," he said. The radiator ticked. Outside, a car horn flared and died on Brick Lane. "You don't apologise," she said. "No. I don't." His mouth moved, not quite a smile. "Which should tell you how seriously I mean it." She wanted to laugh, and the impulse frightened her, because laughing with him had always been the first step toward forgetting why she shouldn't. The last time she'd seen him, three months ago, she'd been standing in the rain outside a club in Soho with her hands shaking, and he had looked at her with that same composed face and told her it was safer if she didn't know certain things. Safer. As though safety were a gift he could hand her and walk away clean. "You let me walk into that warehouse not knowing what was in it," she said. "I trusted you, and you fed me half a truth and let me find out the rest with a knife at my throat." "I miscalculated." "You lied." "I omitted." He exhaled through his nose. "And I have not slept properly since, if it matters." "It doesn't." But her voice had thinned, and they both heard it. He moved a step closer. The space between them in the cramped room was not large to begin with, and now it was nothing. She could smell him — cedar, something darker underneath, the cologne that had once clung to her own collar for a full day after he'd leaned in to murmur in her ear at a bar she could no longer remember the name of. "I told myself it was strategy," he said. "Keeping you at a distance. That I was protecting an asset." "An asset." She gave a sharp breath. "Lovely." "That is what I called you. In my head. Because the alternative was admitting what you actually were, and I am not a man who handles that admission gracefully." He looked at her, both eyes now, the amber and the black, and there was nothing composed in them at all. "I came to say I'm sorry. And I came because three months has not done the thing it was supposed to do." "Which was?" "Make me stop thinking about you." The radiator ticked. She found she'd backed up against the table without deciding to, the edge of it pressing into her spine, a stack of Eva's notes shifting under her palm. "That's not fair," she said. "I'm aware." "You don't get to vanish for three months and then turn up and—" She stopped. Started again. "You hurt me. You understand that? Not the warehouse. You. The part where I thought there was something, and you handed me a word like 'asset' and walked into the rain like it cost you nothing." "It cost me a great deal." "You hid it well." "I hide everything well." He said it plainly, no self-pity in it, just fact. "It's the only skill my father left me that's worth anything." She held his gaze and felt the old gravity of him, the pull she'd spent twelve weeks pretending she'd outgrown. Her heart knocked against her ribs like something trying to get her attention before she did something stupid. "Why now?" she asked. "Because I heard a name today." His jaw tightened, just barely. "A name connected to you. And I realised I would rather stand in this ridiculous flat and have you despise me to my face than read about you in a report I received too late to do anything about." Cold slid down her arms. "What name." "That's the second conversation." He raised a hand before she could press. "The first is this one, and I won't have it diluted. I needed you to hear the apology first. Untangled from the part where I make myself useful again." She stared at him. "You planned the order of this." "I plan everything." "God, you're insufferable." "Yes." And there — the corner of his mouth lifting, the real thing this time, small and tired and honest. "You used to find that charming." "I used to be an idiot." "You were never an idiot, Aurora. That was always rather the problem." She should have told him to leave. The words sat ready behind her teeth. Instead she stood there with the table biting into her back and the cat watching from the kitchen doorway, and she looked at the man who'd broken something in her and walked into the rain, and she did not reach for the deadbolts. "Two minutes," she said quietly, "is up." "I know." He didn't move toward the door. "Tell me to go, and I will." She didn't.