Run: 2026-07-01-01KWE9838HGDN1QGARZ05GBC97

The knock came three times, evenly spaced, the kind of knock that already knew she was awake. Rory set down the mug of tea she'd been nursing and crossed the cluttered front room, stepping over a stack of Eva's research books to reach the door. She undid the first deadbolt, then the second, then the third, and pulled it open expecting Eva forgetting her keys again. Lucien stood in the hallway instead, rain darkening the shoulders of his charcoal suit, his cane tapping once against the floorboards like punctuation. "You look surprised," he said. "I'd have thought you'd sense me coming by now." "I sense you when you want to be sensed." Rory kept one hand on the door, not quite an invitation. "Which is never when it's convenient for me." "Convenient." He tasted the word like it disagreed with him. "May I come in, or would you rather conduct this on the landing where Mrs. Okafor from Flat 3B can enjoy it?" Rory glanced past him at the empty hallway, then stepped back, and he moved through the doorway with that particular grace of his, the kind that made expensive furniture look cheap by comparison. Ptolemy the cat lifted his head from the windowsill, regarded Lucien with the disdain of an old acquaintance, and went back to sleep. "Eva's not here," Rory said, closing the door and locking it again out of habit more than need. "If you're looking for information, you'll have to wait." "I'm not looking for information." Lucien set his cane against the back of the sofa, careful not to disturb the pile of scrolls balanced on the armrest. "Though I notice you assumed that's the only reason I'd come." "Six months, Lucien. What else am I supposed to assume?" He didn't answer right away, and that silence told her more than any of his usual four languages could have. She remembered the last time she'd seen him properly—not the glimpses at Silas' bar where he'd nod from across the room like they were strangers who'd once shared a taxi—but the last real conversation, in an alley off Brick Lane, rain coming down exactly like tonight, his hand on her jaw and his mouth an inch from hers before he'd pulled back and said something about complications and walked away like the words cost him nothing. "I heard about the business with the Whitfield coven," he said instead. "The one that nearly took your arm off." "News travels fast in your circles." "You could have called." "You could have stayed." That landed the way she meant it to. His jaw tightened, and for a moment the composed fixer slipped, showing something rawer underneath—the demon blood in him rising close to the surface the way it did when he was cornered. "I stayed as long as I could afford to," he said, voice lower now. "You don't know what it cost me, walking away from that alley." "Then why do it?" "Because you deserved someone without half of Avaros running through his veins. Someone who wouldn't put a target on your back the moment word got out." He picked up one of Eva's scrolls, unseeing, just to have something to do with his hands. "Someone uncomplicated." "I never asked for uncomplicated." Rory crossed her arms, aware of how close he stood, aware of the particular way the lamp light caught his mismatched eyes, one amber and warm, one black and unreadable. "I asked you to trust me to make my own choices." "And if I told you I regret it? That every day since has felt like walking around with one shoe on?" "Then I'd ask why you waited six months and a near-death coven incident to say so." He set the scroll down, finally looking at her properly, and something in his expression cracked open, the careful composure she'd watched him wear like armor in every underworld deal she'd ever seen him broker. "Pride," he said. "Fear. Take your pick. I told myself I was protecting you, and some nights I even believed it." "And tonight?" "Tonight I heard you nearly lost an arm and I couldn't sit in my flat pretending that didn't matter to me." He took a step closer, and she didn't retreat, though every instinct told her retreating was the smart move, the safe one. "I know I don't get to walk back in here and expect anything. I know what I did." "You don't," Rory said, and her voice came out steadier than she felt. "You don't know what it did to me, Lucien. Watching you decide, all on your own, that I wasn't worth the risk. Like I didn't have a say in what I was willing to risk for you." "Tell me, then." "I would have followed you into whatever mess your father's realm wanted to drag you into. I would have taken the target on my back gladly, because that's what you do when—" She stopped herself, the word too big for the space between them, too dangerous to hand him twice. "When?" His voice had gone soft, dangerously soft. "When it matters," she said instead, chickening out of the real word. "When someone matters." Lucien reached out, slow, giving her every chance to step back, and brushed his knuckles along her jaw the way he had that night in the alley. This time he didn't pull away. "I am not uncomplicated," he said. "I will never be uncomplicated. But I am done pretending walking away from you was anything but the worst decision I've made in thirty-two years of bad decisions." Rory caught his wrist before his hand could drop, holding it there against her cheek, feeling the tremor under his cool skin—the only sign, always, that the composed fixer was as unmoored as she was. "If you walk out that door again," she said, "don't bother coming back." "I know." "I mean it, Lucien." "I know." He leaned in, forehead nearly touching hers, close enough that she could feel his breath, close enough that six months of careful distance collapsed into nothing. "I'm not walking anywhere."