Run: 2026-07-25-01KYCR49Q20HT4EM3BBNK90JW9

The third deadbolt stuck, the way it always did, and Rory had to lean her shoulder into the door to get the last one clear. Lucien Moreau stood in the corridor with rain flattening his platinum hair against his forehead, which she had never seen before, not once in the eight months she'd known him. The cane hung from his left hand. His right pressed a folded handkerchief against his ribs, and the handkerchief had stopped being white some time ago. "You," she said. "You have not changed the locks." He said it like a criticism. "I've added two." "Three deadbolts on a door that opens outward." He tipped his head toward the hinges. "One good shove and the frame gives. But it is a comfort, I imagine." She didn't move out of the doorway. Below them, the curry house was frying onions in ghee, and the smell climbed the stairwell and settled over both of them like a blanket that wasn't theirs. "It's two in the morning, Lucien." "Yes." His mismatched eyes came up, the amber one catching the bulb over the landing, the black one swallowing it. "May I come in, or shall we discuss the locks until I fall over?" She stepped back. He came in slower than he wanted to — she watched him manage it, the small negotiation between his ribs and the doorframe — and Ptolemy shot out from under Eva's research table, took one look at him, and vanished into the bedroom. "Your cat hates me." "Eva's cat. And he's got taste." She shut the door. Slid one bolt, then stopped, then slid the other two, because whatever had opened him up out there might still be walking around Brick Lane. "Sit down before you bleed on the scrolls. Eva will have your skin for a bookmark." He lowered himself onto the arm of the sofa instead of the cushions, which meant he intended to leave soon, which meant he was lying about something. She'd learned that much in eight months. She went to the kitchen, pulled the tin down from above the sink, and came back with iodine, gauze, and the good scissors. "Jacket off." "Aurora—" "Don't." She set the tin on a stack of Eva's photocopied grimoire pages. "You don't get to say my name like that and then ask me for a favour. Pick one." He was quiet. Rain ticked at the window over the desk. Then, one-handed, he shrugged out of the charcoal jacket, and she saw the shirt underneath and stopped pretending to be calm about it. "Christ." "It looks worse than it is." "It looks like someone tried to unzip you." "Someone did." He folded the jacket over his knee, careful about the lining, as though the ruined silk were the tragedy here. "Three of them. Outside the Whitechapel bridge. They were waiting, which is interesting, because only four people knew I would be there." "And you came to the flat of one of them." "I came to the flat of the one who would not have needed three men." Something moved at the corner of his mouth. "You would have done it yourself, and neatly, and I would not have seen you coming." She knelt on the floorboards in front of him and started cutting the shirt away from the wound, and neither of them said anything for a while, and the not-saying got louder. The gash ran diagonally under his ribs, deep at the top, shallowing out towards his hip. Already knitting at the edges — the demon half doing its work — but slowly, and dirty, and he'd let it go too long. "You should have gone to Silas." "Silas would have talked." "Silas is a bartender." "Silas is a bartender who talks." His breath hitched when she pressed the iodine in, and he swallowed it down, and his hand came to rest on the sofa arm an inch from her shoulder. Didn't touch. Just rested there. "Also, you live above his bar." "I don't." She kept her eyes on the gauze. "Not since March." "I know." "Then why'd you say it?" "Because I wanted to hear how you would say it." She set the gauze down. Sat back on her heels. Looked up at him properly for the first time since the door had opened, and there he was, hair wrecked, shirt ruined, thirty-two years of careful surface stripped off him by rain and a knife and whatever had made him walk east instead of west. "You didn't come for the bandage." "No." "You've got a woman in Hoxton who stitches people for cash. You told me about her. You *bragged* about her." "Vasilisa. Yes." "So." "So Vasilisa would have asked me nothing, and I have found, tonight, walking with my hand in my side, that I did not want to be asked nothing." He turned his head. The lamp caught the black eye this time and did nothing to it at all. "I wanted to be asked something." "Then here's something." She stood up. Her knees ached from the boards. "Why did you tell Eva to send me away?" He didn't flinch. She'd have preferred a flinch. "Because the Ashcroft woman put my name in a ledger next to yours," he said. "And ledgers are read. And I have buried two people who were read about." "You could have told me that in February." "You would have stayed." "That was mine to decide." "Yes." His fingers curled once against the sofa arm, then flattened. "It was. That is the part I have been carrying up and down this city for four months, Aurora. Not the ledger. The deciding." The onion smell had thickened. Somewhere under the floor a fan kicked on, and the whole flat hummed with it, and Rory stood in the middle of Eva's paper-choked front room with iodine on her fingers and found she couldn't look at him and couldn't look away either, and settled for the ceiling. "I hated you for it," she said. "Good." "Don't do that. Don't be gracious. You're not allowed to be gracious about it." "Then hate me and hold the gauze," Lucien said, "because I am going to be sick otherwise, and I would rather not do that in front of you as well." She got a hand under his elbow. Got him off the sofa arm and onto the cushions, which he permitted, which told her exactly how bad it was, and his weight came against her shoulder for three seconds and she felt every one of them. "Head down. Breathe." "I am breathing." "You're negotiating." She pressed the fresh pad against his side and held it, palm flat, the heat of him coming through the cotton, and his hand came up and closed over her wrist — over the small crescent scar, the way he had once before, in a stairwell in Camden, before anything had been ruined. He didn't grip. He just held it there, thumb over the old mark, like a man keeping his place in a book. "Four months," he said, eyes shut. "You did not come to the bar." "You told Eva to send me away." "I know what I told her." His thumb moved once. "I am asking whether you came anyway." Rory looked at the rain on the window and the three shut bolts and the cat's eyes glinting from the bedroom doorway. "Twice," she said.