Run: 2026-06-01-01KT1HK3XFZ78433K1FYDABM84

The third deadbolt gave with a clunk that echoed down the stairwell, and Rory pulled the door back expecting the curry-house landlord with another complaint about the smell of Eva's incense. Lucien Moreau stood on the landing instead, one gloved hand resting on the ivory handle of his cane, rain darkening the shoulders of his charcoal suit to the colour of wet slate. "You changed the locks," he said. "You weren't supposed to know where I was." "And yet." He tilted his head, that mismatched gaze sliding past her into the cramped flat, taking inventory the way he took inventory of everything — exits, weaknesses, the tabby cat washing itself on a tower of grimoires. "May I?" Ptolemy hissed and vanished under the sofa. Rory didn't move from the doorway. The frame pressed cold against her shoulder, and she folded her arms across the oversized jumper she'd stolen from Eva's drawer, suddenly aware of her bare feet and the three-day-old ache behind her eyes. "It's nearly midnight." "I'm aware of the hour. I waited for a more civilised one and then decided civility was costing me too much." "That's a lovely speech. You can give the rest of it from the stairs." A muscle moved at the corner of his mouth — not quite a smile, never quite a smile with him. "It concerns Silas. And the men who came looking for you at the bar tonight." The name landed like a stone in still water. She watched the ripples reach him, watched him watch her, and hated that he could read the catch in her breath from a metre away. She stepped aside. He came in without touching her, which was its own kind of touch, the deliberate negative space of a man who knew exactly how close he could stand. He set his cane against the wall and peeled off one glove, finger by finger, surveying the wreckage of Eva's research like a curator at a gallery he found beneath him. "Charming. Your friend collects dead languages." "She collects answers. You'd like her." "I doubt that very much." He turned, and the lamplight caught the amber eye, made it burn against the flat black of the other. "You left without a word, Aurora." "I left a word. The word was goodbye. I wrote it on the back of one of your receipts." "You wrote it in lipstick on a mirror, which is not the same thing, and you knew it wasn't, because you chose the mirror so I'd have to look at myself reading it." She opened her mouth and found nothing in it. The kettle clicked off — she'd put it on before the locks, before him, when the worst thing in her night had been insomnia. She crossed to it just to have somewhere to put her hands. "Tea," she said. "Since you're staying long enough to lecture me." "I drink coffee." "I know what you drink." She slammed the cupboard harder than the door deserved. "I'm not making it for you." Behind her, she heard him lower himself onto the arm of the sofa, heard the small protest of old wood. When he spoke again the edge had gone out of his voice, and that was worse, because the edge she knew how to fight. "Three men. Suits cut wrong for London — Avaros stitching, the kind they think passes for human. They asked Silas for the delivery girl with the blue eyes. He told them she'd quit. They didn't believe him." The mug stilled in her grip. "Is he—" "He's bleeding from a place that will heal. He sent me. Against his better judgement and mine." Lucien's reflection wavered in the dark window, halved by rain. "Which is the only reason I'm standing in a flat that smells of cardamom and someone else's perfume at midnight, rather than asleep in my own bed, where I have spent the last six weeks being remarkably content." "Liar." The word slipped out before she could stop it. The kettle steam curled between them, and in the quiet she heard him stand again, the click of his shoes on the floorboards, two steps, three, until the warmth of him pressed at her back like a held breath. "Turn around," he said. "No." "Aurora." "If I turn around you'll do that thing with your face, that nothing-face, and I'll spend the next hour deciding whether I imagined the rest of it." She set the mug down with exaggerated care. "I'm tired, Luc. I'm tired of guessing what you mean." His hand came to rest on the counter beside hers, the bare one, close enough that she could feel the heat that came off his skin — too much heat, the demon half of him always running hotter than a body should. He didn't touch her. That was the cruelty of it. He never touched until she asked, and she had sworn in lipstick on a mirror that she would never ask again. "I meant all of it," he said, low. "That's the difficulty. I am not built for meaning things. My father gave me a great talent for arrangements and almost none for sincerity, and you walked into my office wanting a forged manifest and walked out with—" He stopped. She heard him swallow. "With something I had not budgeted for." She turned. He hadn't lied about the face. It was the same composed mask he wore at the card tables and the dead drops, the same flawless arrangement of features. But the eyes betrayed him, the human black one wide and the demon amber one bright, and his jaw was tight in the way it got when he was holding still against something. "They'll come here," she said. "Won't they. The men." "Yes." "And you came to warn me. Or to take me somewhere safer." "Both." A breath. "Neither. I came because Silas said your name and my feet were on the stairs before I'd decided anything at all, and a man in my line of work who acts before he decides is a man about to lose something." His hand lifted from the counter, hovered, an inch from her cheek. "I find I don't care to lose this." The rain ticked against the glass. Under the sofa, Ptolemy's eyes glinted, two small green coins watching the pair of them stand on the knife's edge of six weeks of silence. Rory closed the inch herself.