Run: 2026-07-25-01KYCQXFDJ1ACJYRPR9BE7WDR1

The third deadbolt always stuck. Rory shoved her shoulder into the door, twisted, and the whole frame gave a groan the landlord had promised to fix in March. Lucien Moreau stood on the landing with rain sliding off the shoulders of his charcoal suit, the ivory handle of his cane hooked over his forearm, and the expression of a man who had rehearsed several openings and discarded all of them. "Your buzzer's broken." "It's not broken. I disconnected it." "Ah." Water dripped from his cuff onto the mat. "That does explain the twenty minutes." She kept one hand on the door and the other on the frame, which was as close to a barricade as she could manage in socks and a jumper three sizes too big. Downstairs the curry house had started the evening's onions, and the smell climbed the stairwell like it paid rent. "You could have called." "You blocked the number." "I blocked *a* number. You have nine." "Eleven." He almost smiled. The amber eye caught the hall light; the black one gave back nothing at all. "May I come in, Aurora, or would you prefer I ruin an expensive suit on principle?" Ptolemy chose that moment to slink between her ankles, take one look at Lucien, and flatten himself against the skirting board with his ears pinned back. "Even the cat knows," she muttered, and stepped aside. He came in the way he did everything — without hurry, as though the room had been waiting for him. He had to turn sideways past the tower of library books stacked on the radiator. Three of them slid anyway. He caught them, glanced at the spines, set them down on the arm of the sofa in a neat pile. "*The Concordance of Broken Names.* Eva's?" "Mine, actually." "You hate reading." "I hate *pre-law* reading." She shut the door, worked the deadbolts one after another — snap, snap, stick, shove — and turned to find him watching her hands. Something in the set of his mouth had changed. "Don't." "Don't what?" "Look at me like that's my fault." "I said nothing." "You never do. That's the entire problem with you." She pushed past him and cleared a space on the table, sweeping scrolls into a heap. "Sit. Or stand there dripping on Eva's floor, I genuinely don't care." He sat. He unbuttoned his jacket first, one-handed, and laid the cane across his knees, and the small precision of it made her jaw ache. Four months. She'd rehearsed things too — whole paragraphs, in the shower, on the delivery bike, cutting through the traffic on Whitechapel Road with her helmet strap flapping. None of them had accounted for how he took up space. "Tea?" she asked, because her hands needed a job. "Please." She filled the kettle. Behind her, the flat did its usual creaking. Ptolemy fled to the bedroom. "How's the wrist?" Lucien asked. She stopped. The scar sat pale and crescent-shaped where her sleeve had ridden up, an old thing, older than him, older than any of it — but he'd never once asked about that one. He meant the other. The bruise-coloured ring the door of that warehouse had left, the night she'd pulled him out and he'd told her, with blood on his teeth, to go home and forget his name. "Healed." "Aurora." "It *healed*, Lucien." She got two mugs down. One had a chip. She gave him that one on purpose. "You want me to say it hurt? It hurt. It hurt for six weeks and I couldn't lift a takeaway bag and Yu-Fei nearly sacked me. Is that what you came for?" "No." "Then why are you in my kitchen?" "It's Eva's kitchen." She turned round with the mug still in her hand. "*Why are you in my kitchen.*" For a moment he didn't answer. He turned the cane a quarter-rotation against his knee, and she watched him decide to tell the truth, and watched it cost him. "Because I have been standing outside that door on eight separate evenings since February," he said, "and tonight it rained hard enough that I ran out of reasons to keep walking away." The kettle clicked off. Neither of them moved. "Eight." "Eight." "You—" She set the mug down before she dropped it. "You absolute coward." "Yes." "No, you don't get to just *agree*." She crossed the room. He didn't stand, and she was glad, because standing would have put his mouth level with her forehead and she needed the height. "You put me in a taxi. You paid the driver. You told me — what was it — that I'd be safer if I didn't know you." "I remember what I told you." "You said my name wrong on purpose. You called me Carter. Like a file." "Yes." "Why?" "Because if I had said *Rory* I would not have closed the door." His voice stayed level. That was the worst part; it always stayed level, and she'd learnt in six months to read him the way other people read weather. His thumb moved on the ivory. That was all. That was the storm. "Marcus had your address. He had your mother's address in Cardiff. He had a photograph of you outside the Golden Empress with your helmet under your arm, laughing at something, and he put it on the table in front of me to watch my face." Rory's hands went cold. "You never told me that." "No." "Four months, Lucien. You let me think—" She stopped. Swallowed. "I thought you got bored." He looked up then, and the black eye and the amber one both fixed on her, and something crossed his face that she had only seen once before, in a stairwell in Southwark, half a second before he'd kissed her and then apologised for it in three languages. "*Bored.*" "You're a fixer. You fix things and you move on. It's the whole—" she waved a hand, "—brand." "I speak four languages," he said, "and I cannot find a word in any of them for how far that is from the truth." The onions downstairs. Rain hitting the window in handfuls. Rory folded her arms because otherwise they were going to do something reckless. "Marcus is dead," she said. "Silas told me. Three weeks ago." "Yes." "So you've had three weeks." "I have had three weeks," he agreed, "and eight evenings, and a great deal of rain." "That's not an answer." "It's the only honest one I have." He set the cane against the table leg and stood, slowly, and the room shrank by half. "I thought you would have moved. Or married a nice human with a pension. I thought I would knock and find someone else's name on the door and be able to go home." "Disappointed?" "Devastated," he said. "You disconnected the buzzer. I had to stand there and hope." Rory laughed — one short, wrecked sound — and pressed the back of her hand to her mouth. "You're still dripping on the floor." "I'm aware." "Take the jacket off." He did. She took it from him because he handed it to her, and their fingers met on the wet wool, and neither of them let go of it for a full three seconds.