Run: 2026-06-01-01KT1HXD25M26873PPHZXS3XVX

The knock came at quarter past midnight. Rory was on the floor with her back against the sofa, a law textbook open across her lap and a half-eaten plate of noodles balanced on the armrest. Ptolemy — Eva's tabby, the one Rory had cat-sat so few times recently that the cat still thought he lived here — lifted his head from the cushion beside her and turned his ears toward the door. "Probably Silas forgetting his keys again," she muttered. She set the textbook aside, picked her way around the stack of delivery receipts she kept meaning to sort, and opened the door. The man on the landing was not Silas. Lucien Moreau leaned on his ivory-handled cane as though it was the only thing holding him to the earth, which was funny, because the last time she'd seen him — six weeks and a small lifetime ago — he'd held himself like nothing in the world could touch him. The charcoal suit was immaculate. The platinum hair, slicked back from his forehead. The mismatched eyes, one amber and one black in the sickly light of the stairwell, fixed on her face with an expression she could not, for the life of her, read. "Rory," he said. Just her name. Nothing else. She did not step back to let him in. Her hand stayed on the doorframe, thumb pressed hard into the chipped wood. "How did you find out where I live?" "I asked Silas." A pause. "He was not happy to see me." "That makes two of us." The corner of his mouth twitched. Not a smile. Worse than a smile. He looked at her like he was cataloguing everything that had changed since the last time he'd seen her standing in a doorway, and everything that hadn't. She refused to let herself be catalogued. "You shouldn't be here," she said. "I know." "Then why—" "Because Eva called me." The name landed like a stone dropped into still water. Rory felt the ripples move through her. Eva. Who knew things before Rory did, who saw the shape of trouble coming long before it arrived, who had said only yesterday, offhand, *You know Lucien still asks after you, don't you*, and Rory had pretended not to hear. "About what?" she asked, though she was afraid she already knew. Lucien shifted his weight. The cane creaked under his palm. "There's a man from your past who's been making inquiries. Cardiff. A barrister's son. I believe you know him as Evan." Rory's grip on the doorframe tightened. The crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist — the one she had told him about once, late, in a back room that smelled of cigarettes and something older — seemed suddenly to throb. "Evan doesn't know where I am." "Evan knows where you were. He has friends in the Met. They've been asking after a Miss Carter, last seen making deliveries for a Chinese restaurant in Whitechapel. I intercepted the inquiry this morning. I thought you would want to know before he got close enough to knock on a door himself." The world tilted, very slightly. Rory blinked, and the stairwell came back into focus — the worn carpet, the buzzing fluorescent, the silhouette of a man she had spent six weeks trying not to think about standing on her landing in the middle of the night. "Come in," she said, finally. "Before Silas sees you and calls the police." She stepped aside. Lucien crossed the threshold with the careful, measured steps of a man who knew he was trespassing and meant to leave as small a footprint as possible. Ptolemy, treacherous thing, dropped from the sofa and wound himself around Lucien's ankles, purring. "He remembers you," Rory said, and hated the way her voice caught. "He remembers anyone who scratches behind his left ear." "That's not — I didn't mean —" "I know what you meant." She shut the door. The three deadbolts she had insisted on — her addition, not the landlord's — slid home with a sound like a held breath. The flat was small: a kitchen that was mostly a hotplate, a bed that was mostly a mattress on the floor, the sofa, the stacked books, the receipts. Lucien's presence in it felt like a trick of perspective, a man too large for the room he stood in. He lowered himself onto the edge of the sofa and set the cane across his knees. Up close, she could see the small things. A graze along his jawline he had not bothered to conceal. The way his shoulders sat a fraction lower than she remembered. The faint herbal scent that clung to his collar — something from his world, from the parts of London that did not appear on any map she could buy. "Sit down," he said, looking up at her. "Please." She didn't. She leaned against the kitchen counter instead, arms folded, the hotplate digging into the small of her back. "Start from the beginning," she said. "Tell me about Evan. Tell me what you know." "I know he arrived in London four days ago. I know he has not yet found you. I know that if he does, he will not be coming alone, and the people he is travelling with are not the sort who take no for an answer." "Then why come to me? Why not handle it the way you usually handle things? Quieter. Cleaner. Without —" she gestured between them, "— whatever this is." "Without what, Rory?" She could have bitten her own tongue. *Without whatever this is.* As if she didn't know. As if the six weeks of silence hadn't been her own doing, her own self-preservation, the only way she could think of to put distance between herself and the way he looked at her when he thought she wasn't watching. She unfolded her arms. Refolded them. "Because I told you not to," she said, flatly. "Because the last time I saw you, I asked you to give me space, and you — you didn't. You came to Eva's. You sent flowers to the restaurant. You—" "I respected every boundary you set." "You sent flowers to my *work*." "It was your birthday." "That is not the point." He looked at her then with that unreadable expression, and something in it shifted, and for a moment she saw right through to the man underneath — tired, worried, sorry in a way he would never say out loud, because sorry was not a word he used, not a currency he traded in. "I did not know how else to be near you," he said, "without being in your way." The hotplate burned into her spine. Ptolemy, finished with his betrayals, leapt back onto the sofa and curled against Lucien's thigh, kneading the wool of his trousers. Outside, a fox screamed somewhere in the alley behind the bar. The fluorescent in the stairwell buzzed on and off, on and off. Rory's throat felt very small. "You could have just asked," she said, and her voice came out smaller than she meant it to. "You could have come to the door. You could have knocked." "I am at the door," he said, "and I am knocking." He lifted the cane slightly, as if to prove a point. She noticed, for the first time, that his hand on the ivory handle was shaking.