Run: 2026-07-01-01KWE8TK878SEPJAE1R5JHHB29

The three deadbolts took Rory longer to work than usual, her fingers clumsy with sleep, and when she finally hauled the door open the words *this had better be good, Eva* died somewhere in her throat. Lucien Moreau stood on the landing, rain beading on the shoulders of his charcoal suit, cane hooked over one forearm like an afterthought. His amber eye caught the light from the hallway; the black one swallowed it whole. "Hello, Rory." "No." She said it flatly, already moving to shut the door, but his hand came up against the frame, unhurried, and she remembered — too late, always too late where he was concerned — that he was stronger than his elegant wrists suggested. "Five minutes." "You don't get five minutes. You don't get five *seconds*. You get the door in your face, which, frankly, is generous given the last time I saw you—" "I know what happened the last time you saw me." "Then you know why this is a terrible idea." Still, she didn't close it. Ptolemy wound around her ankles, unbothered by the tension crackling in the doorway, and butted his head against Lucien's shin as if the cat, at least, held no grudges. Traitor. "Eva's asleep," Rory said, quieter now, aware of the thin walls, the sleeping city below. "It's two in the morning." "I know what time it is. I wouldn't be here otherwise." He glanced past her shoulder at the chaos of books and scrolls stacked on every surface, the candle guttering on the windowsill, and something in his expression flickered — amusement, maybe, or a memory. "You still let her turn the flat into an archive of doom." "Don't." "Don't what?" "Don't do the thing where you're charming. It doesn't work on me anymore." "It never worked on you," he said. "That was rather the trouble." She wanted to laugh. She hated that she wanted to laugh. Six months since she'd seen him last, since the warehouse in Wapping, since he'd looked at her with that same maddening calm while the demon broker Jarek's men closed in and told her to run, and she had — she'd run and left him to whatever came after, because that was the deal, that was always going to be the deal with a man who dealt in other people's secrets for a living. She hadn't known if he was alive until three weeks ago, when Yu-Fei mentioned, almost in passing, that the Frenchman had resurfaced asking questions about a girl named Carter. "Why are you here, Lucien?" "Because someone is asking about Malphora." The name landed like a dropped glass, sharp and immediate. She felt her spine straighten, felt the old careful blankness slide over her face — the mask she'd learned to wear before she'd learned much else in this city. "There's no one here by that name." "Rory." He said it gently, which was worse than if he'd been sharp. "I'm not here to hurt you. I never was." "You left." The words came out before she could stop them, before she could dress them up in something colder. There it was — the thing she hadn't said in six months, hadn't let herself say even to Eva, who asked, who always asked with that careful patient look. *He left. He let me leave. He didn't come after me.* Lucien's jaw tightened, just slightly, the only crack in that maddening composure. "I had three of Jarek's men on me for a week. I couldn't have come after you if I wanted every version of you to survive it." "That's not — " She stopped. Pressed her palm to her eyes. "That's not what I meant." "I know what you meant." His voice had gone low, rough at the edges in a way she remembered too well, a way that used to undo her across a bar table, across a candlelit booth in the back of some club that smelled of smoke and magic. "You meant I should have found a way. And you're right. I should have." The rain kept falling behind him, soft against the brick, against the curry house sign creaking two floors down. Ptolemy had abandoned them both for the warmth of the flat, leaving the doorway achingly, stupidly intimate — just the two of them and the cold air and six months of things unsaid piling up like snow no one had bothered to shovel. "You can't just show up," she said, but it came out smaller than she wanted, less like an accusation and more like a confession. "I know." "At two in the morning. With a name I buried." "I know that too." "Then why—" "Because it's not staying buried, Rory. Someone's digging. And I would rather you hear it from me, badly, at an unreasonable hour on your doorstep, than not hear it at all until it's too late to matter." She studied him — the damp platinum hair, the tired set of his mouth, the cane he was gripping just a fraction too tightly for someone so studiously relaxed. He looked like a man who had rehearsed this on the way over and abandoned the script somewhere around the second flight of stairs. "You could have called," she said, without heat now, just tired. "You never gave me your number." "You're a fixer. You know everyone's number." "I know." The corner of his mouth curved, faint and rueful. "I wanted you to give it to me. There's a difference." Something in her chest gave, small and traitorous, the way it always had around him — that low, persistent pull she'd spent six months trying to convince herself she'd imagined. She stepped back from the door, not quite an invitation, not quite a retreat. "Five minutes," she said. "And you're explaining everything. All of it. Not the version where you get to be mysterious." "I can manage that." He stepped over the threshold, careful, as if the flat itself might change its mind about him. As he passed her, close enough that she caught the rain and cedar smell of him, he murmured, "For what it's worth — I thought about you. Every day." "Don't," she said again, but this time it wasn't a warning. It was something closer to surrender, and they both knew it.