Run: 2026-06-24-01KVX31YNW9HQYRK4Y6WCZPQBZ

The third deadbolt stuck, as it always did, and Rory cursed under her breath as she wrestled it open. She expected Eva on the other side, back from the corner shop with milk and those awful ginger biscuits she loved. She expected Ptolemy to make his usual break for the hallway. She did not expect Lucien Moreau. He stood in the narrow stairwell, collar turned up against the November damp, his ivory-handled cane hooked over one arm. Rain had darkened the shoulders of his charcoal suit. One amber eye caught the light from the flat. The other — the black one — swallowed it whole. "Rory." Her hand tightened on the door frame. The crescent scar on her left wrist prickled, a phantom ache she hadn't felt in months. Behind her, Ptolemy arched his back and hissed at the intruder, which felt appropriate. "You have thirty seconds before I close this door." "I need your help." "No." She started pushing the door shut. His cane shot out, the ivory handle catching the edge of the wood with a precision that bordered on surgical. "It concerns the Empress." Her jaw tightened. Yu-Fei had been good to her. Better than good — the woman had given her a job when no one else would touch a stranger with no references and a face that flinched at loud voices. Rory's hand stalled on the door. "Yu-Fei can call me herself." "She can't. That's rather the point." Lucien's voice dropped, losing its usual theatrical polish. The mask slipped, just a fraction. "She's missing." The words hung between them like smoke. Rory studied his face — the sharp jaw, the platinum hair plastered to his temples by the drizzle, the way his mouth had pressed into a line that had nothing to do with his usual sardonic drawl. He looked tired. She'd never seen him look tired before. Ptolemy had stopped hissing and was now winding between her ankles, apparently having decided the visitor was tolerable. Traitor. She stepped back and let the door swing open. Lucien crossed the threshold like a man entering a minefield, his gaze sweeping the cramped flat — the books stacked on every surface, the scrolls pinned to the walls with thumbtacks, the research notes spread across Eva's tiny kitchen table in a cascade of highlighters and tea rings. He took it all in without comment. His nostrils flared once, and Rory knew he was cataloguing scents. Demon blood did that. Half-demon blood, anyway. Enough to be useful, enough to be dangerous. "Sit down. Don't touch anything." She pulled out the kitchen chair across from the table and dropped into it, folding her arms. Lucien remained standing, which irritated her more than it should have. He rested both hands on the handle of his cane, the concealed blade within it catching a dull gleam through the seams. "When?" "Forty-eight hours. She was meant to deliver something for me. A document. She never arrived at the drop point." "And you waited two days to come here?" "I waited two days to find you." His mismatched eyes locked onto hers. "You've moved. The flat above Silas' bar — you haven't been there in a week." The observation landed like a slap. She kept her expression flat, but heat crept up the back of her neck. So he'd been looking for her. Had come to her place first. Had noted her absence like a man checking a box on a list, or like a man who'd spent sleepless nights pacing a floor he wouldn't admit to pacing. "I'm house-sitting." "For how long?" "That's not why you're here." A muscle in his jaw flexed. He reached inside his jacket and produced a folded sheet of paper, which he laid on the table between them. Rory didn't touch it. She read the symbols inked across its surface — angular, dense, written in a script she recognized from Eva's research but couldn't translate. Old magic. The kind that left marks. "What is it?" "A contract. Yu-Fei agreed to courier it because the sender trusted her. The sender is now dead, and the contract is the only evidence of what was agreed upon." "And whoever killed the sender wants it back." "Three of my contacts have been compromised in the last two days. Two are dead. One is missing. The pattern suggests someone is tracing the document's path through the city." He paused. "You were the last person to see Yu-Fei before she left the restaurant." The implication settled over the room like frost. Rory unfolded her arms and leaned forward, elbows on the table. Her heart had picked up its pace, a steady drum against her ribs, but her voice came out level. "Are you asking if I did something, or telling me I did?" "I'm asking if you noticed anything." She had. That was the problem. Tuesday evening — three days ago now — she'd dropped off the last delivery of the night and found Yu-Fei in the kitchen, staring at a sealed envelope with an expression the older woman had never worn before. Fear. Rory had asked about it. Yu-Fei had tucked the envelope into her coat and waved her off with a joke about late-night dumplings and early-morning regrets. Rory had let it go, because that was what you did when someone didn't want to talk. She'd learned that skill in a flat in Cardiff, perfected it in a relationship that had left its marks in places no one could see. But this wasn't about Evan. This was about Yu-Fei, who had fed her soup on her first night in London and never once asked why she flinched. "There was a man. Standing across the street when I left. I didn't recognize him." "What did he look like?" "Tall. Dark coat. He was watching the restaurant, not me. I figured he was waiting for someone." Lucien's knuckles whitened around the cane's handle. "Did he see you?" "I don't know. Maybe." She met his gaze and held it. "What's on that contract, Lucien?" "Something worth killing for." "That's not an answer." "It's the only one I have." The flat felt smaller suddenly. The walls pressed in, stacked high with Eva's books and Eva's knowledge, none of which could help her now. Ptolemy jumped onto the counter and knocked a mug to the floor. It shattered. Neither of them moved. "Why me?" Rory asked. "You have resources. Contacts. Four languages and a blade in your cane. Why come to a delivery girl in a borrowed flat?" Something shifted behind his eyes — the amber one, the one that still carried something human. He looked at her the way he had that night six months ago, across a crowded room in Silas' bar, when she'd been three drinks in and he'd been two shadows deep in a corner booth. The night he'd walked her home and stopped at her door and almost — almost — leaned in. The night she'd shut the door in his face because she'd recognized the hunger in him and it reminded her of a hunger she'd sworn never to feed again. "Because you notice things," he said. "Because Yu-Fei trusts you. Because—" "Because I'm expendable?" "Because you're the only person in this city I trust not to sell me out." The confession sat between them, raw and unintended. Lucien's expression hardened, as if he could retroactively sand down the edges of what he'd just admitted. He straightened, adjusted his cuffs, became the immaculate fixer again. But the crack was there. She'd seen it. Rory picked up the folded paper. The ink was cold against her fingers, the script crawling with faint, residual energy that made her skin crawl. She turned it over. On the back, in a hand she didn't recognize, someone had written a single word in English. Avaros. She looked up. Lucien had gone still, the kind of stillness that preceded violence or confession. His black eye reflected nothing. His amber one burned. "That's where your father's from." "That's where this contract leads. And that's where Yu-Fei has gone, whether she knows it or not." Ptolemy mrowwed and butted his head against Rory's elbow. Rain streaked the single window, blurring the lights of Brick Lane into smears of amber and red. Somewhere below, the curry house cranked up its exhaust fans, filling the flat with the ghost of cardamom and ghee. Rory set the paper down and stood. Lucien tracked the movement, his gaze following her hands as she reached for her jacket on the back of the chair — the worn leather one with the broken zipper she'd been meaning to fix for months. She shrugged it on. "I need to change my shoes. And we're taking Eva's car." "You can't drive." "Eva can." She pulled open a drawer and fished out a set of keys. "She's in Bristol until Thursday. She won't mind." Lucien watched her with an expression she couldn't read — something between admiration and exasperation, the same look he'd worn the night she'd picked the lock on a safe he'd spent an hour trying to crack. "You're not coming with me." "I'm not staying here." She met him at the door, close enough to smell rain and charcoal wool and something underneath that was just him — something sharp and dark and electric. The scar on her wrist pulsed. "Yu-Fei gave me a job when I had nothing. She fed me. She never once asked me what I was running from." "And if this gets dangerous?" "I've survived dangerous." "Rory—" "Are we going, or are you going to stand in Eva's kitchen and tell me all the reasons I should stay behind?" She held up the keys, letting them jingle between them. "Because I've heard that speech before. From a man with nicer suits and worse intentions. And I didn't listen to him, either." The corner of his mouth twitched. Not a smile — Lucien Moreau didn't smile — but the ghost of one, the memory of a shape his face might one day learn. He stepped aside to let her through the door. Ptolemy watched from the counter, tail flicking, as the deadbolts clicked home one by one behind them.