Run: 2026-07-01-01KWEA3YQEB3BHTG5H9YM3RBY8

The three deadbolts took Rory a good ten seconds to work through, and by the time she got the door open she'd half convinced herself it was Eva, forgotten her keys again, back from the library with an armful of grimoires she had no business checking out. It wasn't Eva. Lucien stood on the landing with rain darkening the shoulders of his charcoal suit, his cane hooked over one forearm, that mismatched gaze — amber, black, amber, black — flicking past her into the flat like he was cataloguing every book on the shelves before he'd even said hello. "You look surprised," he said. "I did knock." "I didn't hear a knock." "I knocked softly. Didn't want to wake the cat." Ptolemy, traitor that he was, had already abandoned his post on the windowsill and was winding himself around Lucien's ankles, purring like they were old friends. Rory didn't move from the doorway. "You can't just turn up." "And yet." "Six weeks, Lucien. Six weeks, not a word, and you think you can just—" She stopped herself, jaw tight, because she could hear how it sounded, how much it gave away. "I think," he said, quiet now, "that I owe you an explanation, and I think you deserve to hear it somewhere that isn't a hallway that smells like someone's dinner." Somewhere below them, through the floorboards, a pan clattered and someone shouted in Bengali about the price of coriander. Rory glanced past him down the stairwell, then stepped back, just enough to let the door swing wider. Not an invitation exactly. More a surrender. Lucien wiped his shoes on the mat with more care than the flat deserved and came in, folding himself onto the arm of Eva's ancient sofa like he'd never been anywhere else. The cane he set against his knee, tapping it once, twice, a nervous habit she recognised even if he'd never admit to having nerves. "Drink?" she asked, because her hands needed something to do. "Whatever's open." She poured two glasses of the cheap red Eva kept for emergencies, handed him one without meeting his eyes, and sat in the chair across from him instead of beside him. The distance felt necessary. It also felt stupid, six feet of rug between them when she could still remember exactly what his mouth tasted like. "So," she said. "Explain." "Malphora happened." "That's not an explanation, that's a name." "She heard I'd been asking questions about the Ferrymen's ledgers. She doesn't like questions." Lucien turned the glass in his hand, watching the wine catch the lamplight. "I went underground. Properly underground. No phone, no messages, nothing that could be traced back to anyone I—" He stopped. "Anyone you what?" "Anyone I care about." The word landed between them and neither of them picked it up. "You could've told me you were leaving," Rory said. "Before. Not after." "Would you have let me go?" "That's not the point." "It's entirely the point, chérie." He set the glass down, leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and for a moment the fixer's polish slipped and she saw something rawer underneath it, something that looked almost like fear. "If I'd told you what I was walking into, you would have come with me. And I have seen what Malphora does to people who cross her. I was not about to watch her do it to you." "So instead you just vanished. Let me think—" Her voice cracked and she hated it, hated that six weeks of practiced indifference dissolved this fast. "I didn't know if you were dead, Lucien. I checked the obituaries. I actually did that." "I'm sorry." "Sorry doesn't—" She pressed the heel of her hand against her eye, furious at herself. "You don't get to just say sorry and have that fix it." "I know." "Do you? Because you're sitting there very calmly for someone who apparently understands he's ruined something." "I'm not calm. I have been rehearsing this conversation for six weeks and none of the versions in my head went well, so forgive me if I'm gripping the wine glass like it's the only solid thing in the room." That got a laugh out of her, small and unwilling, and she hated that too, how easily he could still do that. "Why now?" she asked. "Why show up tonight?" "Because Malphora's dead. Because it's finally safe to be seen with me again. Because I spent six weeks in a basement in Southwark listening to rats and thinking about the last thing you said to me before I left, which was that you thought I was worth the risk, and I never told you that I thought the same thing about you, and it seemed, somewhere around week four, like the kind of thing a man shouldn't die without saying." Rory set her glass down very carefully on the coffee table, because her hand had started to shake and she didn't want him to see it. "You don't get to say things like that and expect me to just—" "I don't expect anything." He stood, and for a second she thought he might actually leave, cane and all, back out into the rain like some tragic figure from one of Eva's paperbacks. Instead he crossed the small distance between them and crouched by her chair, close enough that she could smell rain and cedar and something underneath that was just him. "I came to tell you the truth. What you do with it is yours to decide." "That's very convenient. Absolve yourself and hand the guilt back to me." "That's not what I—" "I know what you meant." She looked at him properly now, the rain still caught in his platinum hair, the amber eye steady, the black one giving nothing away as usual. "I missed you. That's the truth, if we're doing truths. I missed you and I hated missing you because you left." "I know." "So what happens now? You just — what, sit back down, we finish the wine, pretend six weeks didn't happen?" "No," he said. "Now I ask if I can take you to dinner somewhere that isn't above a curry house, and you tell me whether six weeks of very good reasons are enough to make up for six weeks of very bad silence." Rory studied him — the crouch that had to be killing his knees, the cane forgotten against the sofa, the way he was watching her like her answer actually mattered more than any ledger or any dead demon woman ever had. "Ask me again in a week," she said. "After you've groveled properly." "A week." He almost smiled. "I can work with a week."