Run: 2026-07-07-01KWZ59C687TAK4QGE1KE0TSX4

The third deadbolt stuck, as it always did, and Rory cursed under her breath as she wrenched it free. She wasn't expecting anyone. Eva was in Cardiff for the week, visiting her mother, and Rory had been enjoying the rare silence of the flat — Ptolemy asleep on a stack of grimoires, the smell of tikka masala drifting up from the curry house below, the luxury of an evening with nothing demanded of her. She pulled the door open without checking the peephole. A mistake. Lucien Moreau stood in the narrow hallway, his ivory-handled cane tucked under one arm, his charcoal suit immaculate despite the rain that was sheeting down outside. His platinum blond hair was slicked back, dry — he'd waited under the awning of the newsagent's downstairs, she realized. Waited until the exact right moment. That was Lucien. Always precise. Always in control. Always calculating. His eyes — one amber, one black — tracked across her face with an intensity that made her stomach clench. She hadn't seen him in eleven weeks. She'd counted, which was pathetic, and she hated herself for it. "Carter." His voice was low, accented, and utterly unruffled. As if eleven weeks of silence was exactly what he'd intended. She gripped the edge of the door. "How did you get past the building's front door?" "The lock on the street entrance is a Chubb 3G114. Adequate, but hardly insurmountable." The corner of his mouth twitched — not quite a smile. "You should speak to your landlord." "I don't have a landlord. I have Eva. And you're not welcome here." Ptolemy chose that moment to stretch awake on his pile of books and meow loudly. The cat had always liked Lucien. Traitor. Lucien's mismatched gaze flicked past her shoulder, and something in his expression softened — barely, just a fraction, just enough for someone who knew what to look for. Rory looked away. "Five minutes," she said. Not because she owed him anything, but because he wouldn't have come here without a reason, and whatever that reason was, it would follow her whether or not she let him through the door. That was how it worked with Lucien. His problems had a way of becoming everyone's problems. She stepped back. He entered the flat with the kind of careful grace that made even a cramped one-bedroom above a Brick Lane curry house feel like somewhere worth being. His presence did that — filled a room, altered its geometry. She'd hated it once. She'd hated it more when she'd realized she was drawn to it. The flat was a disaster, as always. Eva's research covered every surface — photocopies of medieval manuscripts, printouts in languages Rory couldn't identify, a whiteboard propped against the kitchenette with a web of arrows and annotations in red marker. Rory had been sleeping on the sofa, her duvet bunched at one end, a mug with yesterday's tea still sitting on the floor beside it. She should have felt embarrassed. She didn't. If Lucien judged her for the mess, he could keep it to himself. He didn't sit. He stood near the window, rain streaking the glass behind him, and turned the cane slowly in his hands. The ivory handle caught the light from the kitchen. She wondered, not for the first time, how many people had seen that cane and not known what was inside it. "You look well," he said. "Don't." "I'm merely —" "You're not merely anything." She crossed her arms, conscious of the crescent scar on her left wrist, peeking out from beneath her sleeve. She tucked it back. "You don't show up at someone's flat in the rain to tell them they look well. What do you want, Lucien?" He set the cane against the wall. A small gesture, but she noticed. Lucien didn't put down his weapons unless he was trying to seem harmless. Which meant he knew she was angry and was choosing not to press. Which meant he needed something. "The Fontaine job," he said. Her chest tightened. "We're not doing that. We're not talking about that." "Rory —" "Don't call me that." The words came out sharper than she intended. He'd called her Rory during the Fontaine job. Late nights in his office, maps spread across his desk, his sleeve brushing hers as he pointed out exit routes. Rory, come look at this. Rory, your read on the situation was correct. Rory, you should eat something. The name had sounded different in his mouth — softer, careful, like he was handling something he didn't quite understand. It had undone her, and she'd let it, and then Fontaine had happened, and she'd understood exactly why he'd been careful. Why he'd kept his distance even while closing it. Because Lucien Moreau didn't get close to people. He positioned them. Like chess pieces. And when the moment came, he moved them where they needed to go, consequences be damned. "I need your help." The words landed like stones in still water. He said them plainly, without inflection, without the practiced charm that usually coated everything he said. It was the most honest thing she'd heard from him in eleven weeks. "No." "Someone is killing Seers." The silence that followed was heavy. Ptolemy jumped down from his stack of books and wound between Lucien's ankles, purring. Rory didn't move. "What?" "Three in the last month. All within the M25. All drained of something — their gift, their vitality, we're not certain which. The pattern suggests a ritual component, but I can't identify the methodology without someone who understands how Sight functions at a practical level." He met her eyes. "I need someone who can read the scenes. I need you." She wanted to say no. The word was right there, formed and ready. She'd walked away from this world — from his world — because the last job had nearly killed her, and he'd known it might, and he'd sent her in anyway. He'd apologized. Once. In his office, the night after, when she'd shown up with blood on her jacket and fury in her chest. I misjudged the risk. The most honest he'd been in the entire job, and it had still sounded like a report. "You sent me into Fontaine's safe house knowing the wards would trigger on a human carrier," she said. "You used me as a key." "I did." "People died." "Fewer than would have died if we'd gone in blind. The Seer you extracted — Margaret Ashworth — is alive. Teaching. Safe." "She won't leave her flat. Eva told me. She won't leave her flat and she hasn't had a vision in six months because of what happened in that house." Something shifted in his expression. Just a flicker. The amber eye darkened, or the black one caught the light differently, or maybe it was just the rain outside shifting the mood in the room. He looked, for a moment, like someone who had rehearsed this conversation many times and was still getting it wrong. "I know," he said. "I've spoken to her." Rory stared at him. "You what?" "I visit. Monthly. I've arranged for a ward specialist to reinforce her protections, and a counselor familiar with supernatural trauma to see her twice a week. It's not enough. I know it's not enough. But it's what I can do." She wanted to be angry. She was angry — her pulse was loud in her ears and her hands were fists at her sides. But underneath the anger was something worse. Something that had been there since the first night in his office, when he'd looked at her like she was a problem he couldn't solve, and she'd looked back at him like he was a question she couldn't stop asking. "Three Seers," she said. "In a month." "Three that we know of. There may be more." "And you think there's a pattern." "I think someone is harvesting Sight. The question is what they intend to do with it." She turned away from him. The whiteboard loomed in the kitchenette, Eva's handwriting a tangle of theory and speculation. Rory had been avoiding it for days. Now it seemed to pulse at the edge of her vision, demanding attention. She'd always been good at patterns. It was the thing Lucien had spotted in her first — that instinct for the shape of things, the way connections surfaced in her mind before she could articulate them. He'd called it valuable. He'd said it like a compliment, but it had sounded like an appraisal. "I'll need everything you have on the victims," she said, still facing the wall. Behind her, Lucien exhaled. A controlled sound, barely there, but she'd spent enough time in his proximity to know what his restraint sounded like. She'd learned to read his silences the way she read scenes — for what was missing, not what was there. "You'll have it." "And I'm not working out of your office. This is my space. Eva's space. We do it here, or we don't do it." "Agreed." She turned. He was closer than she expected — not touching, nowhere near touching, but near enough that the air between them had weight. His hands were at his sides, empty, the cane still leaning against the wall. He looked, for the first time since she'd met him, like he didn't know what to do with his hands. "Eleven weeks," she said. "You waited eleven weeks to come here." "I gave you the time you needed." "You gave yourself time to figure out how to ask." His mouth thinned. "That too." Ptolemy jumped onto the kitchen counter, knocking a stack of papers to the floor. Neither of them moved. "I'm still angry with you," Rory said. "I'm going to be angry with you for a long time. This doesn't change that." "I know." "And if you lie to me — if you send me into something without telling me what I'm walking into — I'm done. For good. No extraction, no Seer, no end of the world. Done." "I understand." She reached past him to pick up the papers Ptolemy had scattered. Her sleeve rode up as she did, the crescent scar catching the light. His gaze flicked to it — involuntary, quick — and then to her face. She saw something in his mismatched eyes that she couldn't name. It wasn't calculation. It wasn't strategy. It was raw and unguarded, and it was gone before she could be sure it had been there at all. "Sit down," she said. "I'll make tea. You can tell me about the first victim." Lucien sat on Eva's sofa, the duvet bunched beside him, and for a moment he looked out of place in the cramped, cluttered flat — a figure from a different world, pressed into charcoal and precision, sitting on a secondhand sofa in Brick Lane. Then Ptolemy climbed into his lap, and he stroked the cat's fur with a gentleness that didn't match his reputation, and Rory thought: This is who he is. Both things. All at once. And I knew that. I knew that, and I stayed anyway. She put the kettle on and listened to the rain, and to the sound of Lucien Moreau sitting in her space, waiting for her to decide whether to forgive him. She hadn't decided yet. She wasn't sure she ever would.