Run: 2026-07-01-01KWE9076RK4VKJSFMV3MHTJG1

The three deadbolts took Aurora longer to work through than she wanted to admit, mostly because her hands weren't steady after hearing that particular knock — two short, one long, a pause, then one more. Nobody knocked like that except Lucien. She opened the door and there he was, cane hooked over one forearm, platinum hair catching the hallway light, looking like he'd stepped out of a photograph from a decade she'd never lived in. "You changed the locks," he said, glancing at the deadbolts. "All three of them." "Eva changed the locks. I just live here." "Semantics." His amber eye moved over her face, lingered a beat too long on her mouth before flicking to the black one, unreadable as always. "Are you going to invite me in, or should I stand here and let the curry house downstairs perfume my suit for another hour?" Ptolemy chose that moment to slink between her ankles and out into the hallway, sniffing at Lucien's shoes with the mild interest of a creature who'd met him before and found him acceptable. Traitor. "How did you even find this address?" "Rory." He said her name like it cost him something to keep it gentle. "I'm an information broker. Finding addresses is rather the point of me." She stepped back from the door because the alternative was closing it in his face, and some stubborn, stupid part of her still didn't want to do that, three months on. He walked in like he owned the place, the way he walked into everything, and she watched him take in the scrolls stacked on every surface, the notes pinned crookedly to the wall behind Eva's desk, a teacup gone cold and forgotten on top of a leather-bound book that looked older than the building itself. "Charming," he said. "Very lived-in." "It's Eva's. Not mine." "I didn't ask whose it was." He set his cane against the arm of the sofa, unhurried, like he had all evening and nowhere better to be. "I asked how you were. Which you haven't answered, incidentally, in three months." "You didn't ask either." "I sent word." "You sent Marcus. With a message about a shipment of cursed silver, which you signed off with 'regards.' That's not asking how I am, Lucien, that's a business memo with your name attached." His jaw tightened, just slightly, the only tell he ever gave when something landed. "What did you want me to say?" "I don't know." She crossed her arms, aware of how close he was standing, aware of the particular way the air changed around him, always had, since the first night she'd seen him lean against a bar with that ivory-handled cane like he was daring someone to ask what it hid. "Something that wasn't about work. Something that admitted you left without a word after—" "After what, Aurora?" He said it quietly, and that quiet was worse than if he'd shouted, because it meant he remembered exactly what came after just as well as she did. The bar closed, Silas long gone up to his own rooms, and the two of them left in the dark with a bottle between them and eleven years of restraint that hadn't survived the night. "You know after what." "I do." He didn't look away. "I remember every detail of it, if you're curious. The scar on your wrist. The sound you made when—" "Don't." "You brought it up." "I brought up you leaving. Not a — a recap." He almost smiled, the corner of his mouth twitching in that infuriating way that used to make her forgive him things she shouldn't have. Then it faded, and something more honest surfaced underneath, something she hadn't seen on him before, not even that night. "I left because staying would have meant telling you things about what I am that you weren't ready to hear," he said. "My father's realm doesn't let go of debts easily, Rory, and I have debts. Old ones. I didn't want you anywhere near the collection of them." "That's not your decision to make for me." "No," he agreed. "It wasn't. I made it anyway, because I am, on occasion, a coward when it comes to things that matter, and you—" he stopped, exhaled through his nose, started again. "You matter." The flat was too quiet after that, just the faint clatter of pans from the curry house below drifting up through the floorboards, and Ptolemy padding back in to curl on a stack of scrolls like he hadn't a care for either of them. "You can't just say that and expect—" "I don't expect anything." He picked his cane back up, turned it once in his hand, a habit she recognised as him needing something to do with his fingers when his mouth had said more than he'd planned. "I came because there's a matter involving the Empress restaurant's supplier and a debt collector from Avaros sniffing round Brick Lane, and you deserved to hear it from me before you heard it from someone with worse manners. That's the excuse I told myself on the way over." "And the real reason?" He looked at her for a long moment, heterochromatic eyes doing that thing where the amber seemed warmer than it had any right to be and the black seemed less like an absence and more like a door. "The real reason is I wanted to see your face when you opened that door," he said. "I wanted to know if it would still do that thing to me. It did." Aurora felt the old pull of it, the same gravity that had dragged her toward him a hundred times before common sense could intervene, and hated herself a little for how easily her arms uncrossed, how her weight shifted half a step closer without her permission. "That's not fair, Lucien." "No," he said. "But I never claimed to fight fair. Ask anyone in this city."