Run: 2026-07-01-01KWE9PESBB3NG3FZEJJXKGG62

The three deadbolts took Rory longer than usual to work through, her fingers clumsy with sleep, and when she finally hauled the door open the words she'd been rehearsing for the takeaway delivery she'd assumed was late died somewhere behind her teeth. Lucien Moreau stood on Eva's landing in a charcoal suit that looked absurdly, deliberately out of place against the peeling wallpaper and the smell of curry drifting up from below. His cane was hooked over one forearm. His amber eye caught the hallway light; the black one gave nothing back at all. "You look terrible," he said, which was such a Lucien thing to say that for a moment she almost laughed. "It's two in the morning." "Is it." He glanced past her into the flat, at the towers of books leaning against Eva's bookshelves like drunks propping each other up, at Ptolemy the cat glaring at him from the arm of the sofa with the ancient contempt cats reserve for people they've decided are trouble. "I did knock. Gently. I thought that was rather considerate of me." "You didn't knock. You never knock." Rory pulled her cardigan tighter across her chest, suddenly aware of how thin the fabric was, how her hair was doing whatever it wanted after six hours of sleep. She hated that some old instinct in her still cared what he thought of how she looked. "What are you doing here, Lucien?" "May I come in?" "That's not an answer." "No," he agreed, "it isn't." She should have said no. She'd promised herself, the last time — six weeks ago now, in the back room of his club with his hand still warm against her jaw and his voice low and careful as he told her it would be easier, safer, better, if they simply didn't — that she wouldn't let him talk his way back into a room with her. It had taken her three days to stop crying over it. It had taken her three weeks to stop being angry. She wasn't sure which had been worse. But he looked wrong, standing there. Not his clothes — his clothes were always immaculate, a small tyranny he inflicted on the world — but something underneath them. A tightness around his mouth. The way his good hand kept finding the ivory head of his cane and gripping it like it was the only solid thing left in the world. "You're hurt," she said, and stepped back from the door before she'd decided to. "I'm fine." "You're lying, and you're bad at it, which frankly I've always found endearing." She flicked the hall light on properly and got a better look at him: a thin dark line at his collar that might have been blood, the faint unsteadiness in how he set his weight. "Sit down before you fall down. Honestly." He sat, because apparently even half-demon fixers who ran London's underworld information trade knew better than to argue with a woman holding a kettle like a weapon. Ptolemy abandoned the sofa arm in a show of aristocratic disgust and vanished into Eva's bedroom. "Talk," Rory said, filling the kettle at the sink because her hands needed something to do besides shake. "There's very little to say." "There's an enormous amount to say, Lucien, we just haven't said any of it, which is different." She set the kettle down harder than she meant to. "Six weeks. You don't call, you don't send one of your little errand boys, and then you turn up at gone two in the morning bleeding on my best friend's sofa like this is completely normal." "I didn't know where else to go." It came out quieter than anything she'd heard from him before, stripped of the usual polish, the practiced charm he wore the way other men wore cologne. "That's — that's the truth, Rory. I have safehouses. I have people who owe me favors going back a decade. And I stood outside three of them tonight and I couldn't make myself go in, and I ended up here instead, which should tell you something, though God knows what." She turned around slowly. In the lamplight his face looked younger, unguarded in a way she'd only seen once or twice before — the night in Marseille when he'd talked about his mother, the morning after, when he thought she was still asleep and had looked at her like she was something he couldn't quite believe was real. "It tells me you're an idiot who doesn't take care of himself," she said, but there wasn't much heat in it. "That's certainly part of it." "What happened?" "A disagreement. With people who did not appreciate my particular talents for negotiation." His mouth twitched, not quite a smile. "I'll live. Probably. I would appreciate not bleeding on the upholstery in the meantime, if you have anything resembling a first aid kit in this glorified library." She found the kit under the bathroom sink, and when she came back he'd shrugged out of his jacket, and the shirt beneath was worse than she'd let herself imagine — a long, ugly gash along his ribs, already stiffening at the edges. Her stomach dropped. "Lucien —" "It looks worse than it is." "It looks like you should be in a hospital." "Hospitals ask questions I can't answer." He watched her kneel in front of him, watched her hands go careful and quick as she cleaned the wound, and something in his face cracked open, just slightly, just enough. "You're angry with me." "I'm furious with you." "I know." "You left. You told me it would be easier and then you just — left, and I spent three weeks trying to convince myself I didn't care, and I still don't know if I managed it." Her voice wavered and she hated that too, hated how easily he still found the soft places in her. "And now you're bleeding on my sofa and I'm still the one you came to." "You were always the one I came to," he said. "That was rather the problem." She didn't have an answer for that. She pressed the gauze to his side instead, harder than necessary, and he winced, and neither of them looked away.