Run: 2026-07-01-01KWE8S6095051XFP0H8CF3RAZ

The three deadbolts took longer than they should have, Rory's fingers clumsy with sleep and the lingering fog of a double shift hauling sweet-and-sour pork up four flights of stairs for tips that barely covered her Oyster card. She'd expected Eva, back early from wherever Eva went those nights she didn't explain. She had not expected the shape that filled the doorway when the last bolt gave way. Lucien Moreau stood on the landing like he'd been poured there, all charcoal wool and quiet menace, the ivory head of his cane catching the weak light from the stairwell bulb that had been dying for a week. His amber eye found her first, warm and assessing. The black one gave nothing back at all. "Bonsoir, Aurora." Her name in his mouth still did something unfair to her stomach, some traitorous flutter she'd spent three months trying to starve out. She crossed her arms instead of letting her hands shake. "It's two in the morning, Lucien." "Is it?" He glanced at his wrist, though he wore no watch that she could see. "Time is such a slippery thing when one is being followed." Behind her, Ptolemy yowled his displeasure at the open door and the cold air pouring in, then stalked off toward the kitchen with his tail lashing, unimpressed by half-demons or the men who kept them company. Rory didn't move to let Lucien in. She stood in the gap, one hand still on the door, close enough that she could smell him — bergamot and gun oil and something underneath that was just him, that she'd never been able to name and had stopped trying to. "Followed by whom." "Does it matter? I'm here now. Might I come in before whoever it is catches up?" "That's not really an answer." "No," he agreed, and something flickered behind the amber eye, there and gone. "It rarely is, with me. You knew that going in." She should have shut the door. She thought about it — actually pictured herself doing it, the satisfying clunk of three deadbolts sliding home between them — and instead she stepped back and let him pass, because some things about her hadn't changed no matter how far she'd run from Cardiff or Evan or anyone else who'd taught her that wanting something was the same as being a fool. He moved through the cramped flat like he'd never left it, stepping over a stack of Eva's research on ley lines without looking down, his cane tapping once against the floorboards before he set it against the arm of the sagging sofa. He looked older than three months should have made him. There were shadows under both eyes now, human and inhuman alike, and a tightness at his mouth that hadn't been there the last time she'd seen him — the last time she'd watched him walk away from her in the rain outside the Golden Empress, both of them too proud to say the thing that mattered. "You look terrible," she said, because it was easier than anything true. "I feel terrible. It seemed only fair the two should match." He surveyed the flat — the towers of books, the scrolls curling at the edges on every flat surface, the smell of turmeric drifting up through the floor from the curry house below. "Eva's home is exactly as chaotic as I remember." "She's not here. It's just me tonight." "I know." He said it too quickly, too simply, and she felt the floor of the conversation shift beneath her. "You knew." "I have people who watch things, Aurora. It's rather the point of me." He sat without being asked, the sofa groaning under him, and rubbed a thumb along the ivory handle of his cane like it was a worry stone. "I needed somewhere I could be reasonably certain wasn't already compromised. This flat, tonight, with only you in it — it was the safest option available to me." "So I'm a safe house now." "You were never that." His black eye tracked her face, unreadable, but the amber one had gone soft in a way that made her chest ache with something she refused to call longing. "You were never anything so simple as safe, Rory." The use of her nickname undid something in her that his formal Aurora hadn't managed. She sat down on the arm of the chair across from him, putting furniture between them like it might hold back a tide. "You left," she said. "Three months. Not a word." "I sent word." "You sent a bottle of wine and a note that said *forgive me, it's for the best.*" Her voice cracked on the last word despite every effort to keep it level. "That's not word, Lucien. That's a coward's apology." He flinched — actually flinched, and she hadn't thought that was in his repertoire, hadn't thought a half-demon fixer who dealt in secrets and blood debts could be wounded by four words spoken by a girl from Cardiff who delivered Chinese food for a living. "I was trying to keep you out of something," he said quietly. "There are people in Avaros who know my name, who know what it would cost me to care for someone. I thought — " He stopped, jaw working. "I thought if I put enough distance between us, they would lose interest in you as a lever against me." "And did it work?" "No." The word came out rough, stripped of its usual polish. "It made no difference at all, except that I spent three months without you and gained nothing for it but a following in the streets and a headache that won't quit." The silence that followed had weight to it, dense and warm, the kind she remembered from before — from nights in his townhouse with his fingers tracing the crescent scar on her wrist like it was something precious, from the way he used to say her name like a secret he was allowed to keep. "You could have told me," she said. "Instead of deciding for both of us." "I know." He looked at her then, fully, both mismatched eyes fixed on her face like she was the only fixed point in a spinning room. "I am asking you to let me try again. Not tonight — I know better than to ask that of you tonight. But to try, properly, with the truth instead of my own poor judgment standing between us." Rory looked at the deadbolts, still open, the cold London night pressing at the crack of the door. She looked at Lucien Moreau, half-ruined and fully hers whether she liked it or not, waiting in Eva's cramped flat for an answer he had no right to expect and every reason to hope for. "Get the door," she said finally. "All three locks. And then we'll talk."