Run: 2026-07-25-01KYCR0MX8GDC00FP16MT5E2W2

Three deadbolts, one after the other, and Rory had the chain still hooked when she pulled the door back four inches. Lucien stood on the landing with rain in his hair. The platinum had gone dark at the temples, flattened where he'd pushed it off his forehead, and the shoulders of his charcoal jacket held water in beads that hadn't soaked through yet. Good wool. He held the cane loose in his left hand, tip against the floorboards, and he didn't say anything at all for the length of three breaths. "No," Rory said. "You haven't heard the question." "I don't need to." She shifted her weight so her foot braced the bottom of the door. Below them the curry house was mid-service and the stairwell smelled of cumin and hot oil and the vinegar someone had thrown at the steps that morning. "Whatever it is, the answer's already no, and I've got a kettle on." "Then invite me in for tea and I'll leave the question in my pocket." "You've never left anything in your pocket in your life." His mouth moved — not a smile, the thing that came before one, the crease at the corner. Rain slid down the side of his neck and into his collar and he let it. "Six weeks," he said. "Seven." "Seven." He tipped his head. "You counted." She hated that. She hated the ease of it, how he could find the loose thread in a sentence and pull it before she knew she'd left one hanging. Ptolemy came round her ankles, tail up, and shoved his skull against the door frame to look at the visitor, because the cat had no sense and never had. "You're dripping on Ravi's landing," she said. "He'll charge you for the mop." "I'll pay him." "You'd pay him and he'd still hate you." "Most people manage both." Lucien lifted the cane an inch and set it down again. "Aurora. There's a man across the road in a green Vauxhall who has been there since four o'clock and he isn't waiting for a curry." Her stomach dropped a floor. She didn't move her face. That was the one thing she'd got good at, over the years, with Evan and after — the not-moving of the face. "So you came to warn me." "I came to sit in a warm room and drink whatever terrible tea Eva keeps, and to be visible in the window for approximately four minutes." He said it like a shopping list. "After which he will make a phone call, and someone will tell him to go home, and you will sleep. That's the entire favour. You don't have to speak to me while I do it." Rory looked at him. The chain was cold against her knuckles. "You're bleeding," she said. He glanced down at his own cuff, where the white shirt had gone rust-coloured from the wrist to the base of the thumb, and his eyebrows went up as if he'd found a stranger's blood on him. "Ah." "Is it yours?" "Mostly." She unhooked the chain. He came in and she got the door shut and all three bolts across, one two three, and the sound of them was louder than it should have been in a room stacked to the ceiling with paper. Eva's flat allowed one clear path — door to kitchenette to the sofa — and everything either side of it was books, some of them open and face-down and spine-broken in ways that would have made her mother weep. Lucien stood in the middle of the path and looked around and Rory watched him take an inventory he'd deny taking. "Sit down. Not on the blue chair, that's where the scrolls go. Sofa." "Yes." "And don't get blood on Eva's cushions, she'll skin us both and use the—" "—the hide for a binding, yes, she's told me." He sat. He set the cane against the arm of the sofa within reach of his right hand, which she noticed, because she noticed everything about him and had given up pretending otherwise around week three. She got the first aid tin off the top of the fridge and the good scissors out of the drawer and put both on the coffee table on top of a stack of photocopied Latin. Then she stood there with her arms folded. "Cuff," she said. "I can do it." "Not with one hand you can't." He undid the button himself, one-handed, slowly, to prove something, and then he lost the fight with the fabric where the blood had dried into the weave and he stopped and put his hand palm-up on his knee and said nothing. The concession cost him. She could see the cost. Rory knelt on the floorboards. It put her lower than him, closer, her shoulder between his knees, and the heat came off him the way it always did — a few degrees hotter than a person should be, the demon half running warm. She'd known that heat in the dark of a stairwell in Whitechapel and she'd known it with his mouth on her jaw and his hand flat between her shoulder blades and then she'd known it going out of a room, going away, the door closing. "Hold still." The scissors went through the cuff. The cut underneath ran from the base of his thumb to the heel of his palm, deep enough to want stitches and old enough to have stopped arguing about it. She poured antiseptic on it without warning him. He inhaled through his teeth. "You enjoyed that." "I did, actually." "Do it again, then." "Don't push it." She pressed the gauze down and held it. Under her fingers his pulse went on doing its steady stupid work. "Who?" "Not relevant." "Lucien." "A man who is no longer in a position to do it twice." He watched her hands. "Your wrist." She glanced down at the crescent scar on her left wrist, white and small, and she moved the sleeve of her jumper over it without deciding to. "You used to talk about that," he said. "I told you about it once." "Twice. In the car, going to Camden, and again at four in the morning in my kitchen, when you'd stolen my shirt." "Borrowed." "Kept." "Still got it," she said, and then wished she hadn't, and put the tape on too tight so he'd have something else to think about. He let the silence go on long enough that she had to fill it, which was a trick and she walked into it anyway. "You left," she said, to the bandage. "You didn't even do it badly. You did it like it was a scheduled appointment. Very polite. Very French." "I know." "That's it?" "I knew what was coming through the door of my life in October." His voice stayed level and that was worse. "I made an arrangement to be alone when it arrived." "You made an arrangement." Her hands had stopped moving. "You decided. On your own, about the both of us, and then you told me at half seven on a Tuesday and you'd already called me a cab." "Yes." "You could have asked." "You'd have said stay." "Yes," she said. "I'd have said stay." Rain hit the window in a handful, thrown. Downstairs a pan went onto a burner and someone shouted in Bengali and laughed. Ptolemy jumped onto the sofa, stepped across Lucien's thigh, and sat down on the arm with his back to the both of them. Lucien turned his hand over in hers and looked at the tape. "It's a good bandage," he said. "It's a very good bandage." "You've had practice." "I've had practice," she agreed, and did not look up, and did not let go of his fingers either.