Run: 2026-07-01-01KWEA6CTKYV5SJYVWPJJTPD2D

The knock came at half past eleven, three sharp raps that made Ptolemy bolt off the windowsill and vanish under a pile of research notes. Rory set down the mug of tea she'd been nursing and crossed to the door, working through the deadbolts one by one. She checked the peephole out of habit more than caution. Lucien stood in the hallway, rain darkening the shoulders of his charcoal suit, his cane hooked over one forearm like he'd forgotten he was holding it. She opened the door but kept her hand braced against the frame. "You've got some nerve." "I've been told worse." His black eye caught the hallway light, the amber one staying dark in shadow. "May I come in, or would you rather conduct this conversation for the benefit of your neighbours?" "There's a bell downstairs. It's not decorative." "I didn't want to give you time to decide not to answer." She held the door a moment longer, long enough to make the point, then stepped back and let him pass. He smelled like rain and cigarettes and something underneath that she refused to name, something that used to mean safe before it meant something else entirely. "Nice place," he said, glancing at the scrolls stacked on every flat surface, the books spilling off shelves onto the floor. "Eva's doing, I take it. You've never been this tidy in your life." "Say what you came to say, Lucien." He set the cane against the wall by the door, an old habit, like he was staying. She hated that he still remembered where things went in a flat that wasn't his. "There's a problem. With the Vasquez situation." "There's always a problem with the Vasquez situation. That's not why you're here at half eleven looking like you walked through the Thames to get here." He didn't answer right away. Water dripped from his sleeve onto Eva's floorboards, and he watched it fall rather than look at her. "No," he said. "It's not." "So." "So I wanted to see you." "That's not how this works." She crossed her arms, aware of how close he was standing, aware of the three feet of space between them that felt like nothing at all. "You don't get to disappear for six weeks and then turn up dripping on my floor because you *wanted to see me*." "I didn't disappear. I was in Marseille. My father—" "I know where you were. Doesn't change that you left a note. An actual note, Lucien, like something out of a bad film, and then radio silence for six weeks while I—" She stopped herself, jaw tight. "While you what?" "Doesn't matter." "It clearly does, or you wouldn't have stopped talking." She turned away from him, busying her hands with the kettle even though she'd just made tea, even though the last thing she wanted was more tea. Behind her she heard him move, the particular quiet way he had of crossing a room like the air itself made way for him. "I thought you were dead," she said, to the kettle, not to him. "For about four days I genuinely thought you were dead, and I didn't know who to ask because half your contacts wouldn't tell me the time of day, and the other half I don't trust as far as I can throw them." "Rory." "Don't." "I should have called." "You should have called on day one. Not day forty-two, standing in my kitchen — well, Eva's kitchen — like this is a normal Tuesday." "Would you have answered? If I'd called on day one?" That stopped her. She set the kettle down without switching it on. "I don't know," she said. "Probably not. I was furious with you." "And now?" "Now I'm furious with you and relieved you're not dead, and I genuinely can't work out which feeling is winning, which is deeply annoying, so thank you for that as well." The corner of his mouth moved, not quite a smile. "I've missed your particular way of insulting me." "I wasn't insulting you. I was being honest, there's a difference." She finally turned to face him properly. Up close he looked tired in a way she hadn't seen before, the fine lines at the edge of his black eye deeper than she remembered. "Why Marseille? You never talk about your father." "He's dying." He said it simply, the way he said most difficult things, stripped of ornament. "Slowly. It's a demon thing, it takes years, but this was — a bad stretch. I went because someone had to, and there was no one else." "You could have told me that." "I could have. I chose not to, because telling you would have meant you'd have come with me, and Avaros is not a place I take people I—" He stopped. "People you what, Lucien?" He looked at her, both eyes now, the amber catching the lamp and the black staying fathomless, and for a second she thought he might actually finish the sentence. "People I'd rather not lose," he said instead. "That's not what you were going to say." "It's what I'm willing to say tonight." She wanted to push, wanted to drag the rest of it out of him the way she'd have done a year ago, before she'd learned exactly how good he was at not saying things. But there was something in the set of his shoulders, something worn thin, and she found the anger in her chest sitting alongside something softer, more complicated, harder to hold onto. "You're soaked through," she said finally. "There's a towel in the bathroom. Second door." "Is that forgiveness?" "It's a towel, Lucien. Don't get ahead of yourself." But she didn't move to unbolt the door and send him back out into the rain, and they both knew what that meant, standing there in Eva's cramped flat with the cat watching them from under a pile of research notes and the whole unfinished shape of six weeks lying open between them like something neither one of them had the nerve to close.