Run: 2026-07-25-01KYCR50JPSKK99N96PQKJVGWX

The third deadbolt stuck, the way it always did, and Rory had to put her shoulder into the door before it gave. Lucien Moreau stood on the landing with rain beading on his shoulders and his cane hooked over one forearm, and he looked at her like a man checking a sum he'd already done twice. "You've lost weight." "You've lost your manners." She kept one hand on the door frame, filling the gap. Below them, the curry house extractor fan roared and the whole stairwell smelled of cumin and hot oil. "How did you get this address?" "I bought it." "From who?" "Someone who won't sell it again." He glanced past her ear, into the flat, cataloguing. "May I come in, or shall we do this where the neighbours can enjoy it?" Ptolemy chose that moment to shoulder between her ankles, tail up, and butt his head against Lucien's shin like they were old friends. Traitor. Rory stepped back. He came in the way he came into every room — slowly, taking inventory. The kitchen table under its landslide of Eva's research, three teetering stacks of library books with the spines cracked, a scroll weighted at both ends with mugs. He set his cane against the wall, and she watched him do it, because he never let go of that cane unless he intended to stay a while. "Charming," he said. "Very much a scholar's den. The smell of the curry house or a warding effect?" "Both, if you ask Eva." She shut the door. Slid one deadbolt, then the second, then caught herself reaching for the third and left it. "She's in Prague until Thursday. Which I assume you also bought." "I assumed you'd be alone. I hoped." "Don't." "Don't hope?" "Don't do the voice." She crossed to the kettle, mostly to have somewhere to put her hands. "The one that makes everything sound like a favour you're doing me." Water hissed against the element. Behind her, the floorboards creaked, and she knew exactly how far away he was without turning — three feet, maybe less, near enough that she could smell wet wool and the cedar thing he wore. "Four months," Lucien said. "Four months and eleven days. If we're counting." "Are we?" She turned round. He had one hand in his trouser pocket, the picture of a man at ease, except for the muscle at the hinge of his jaw. The amber eye caught the kitchen light. The black one drank it. "You left me on a wet pavement in Whitechapel," she said, "with a dead man's blood on my shoes and no idea whether you were coming back." "I came back." "In February." "I came back," he repeated, quieter, "and you had already changed the locks." "I changed one lock. You could have knocked." "I did knock, Aurora." He said her whole name like it cost him something. "You were standing on the other side of the door. I heard you breathing." The kettle climbed toward the boil, filling the silence with something to listen to. She got two mugs down because her hands wanted an errand. Milk from the fridge, sniffed, judged acceptable. "You didn't say anything," she said. "You just stood there and then you went away." "What would you have had me say?" "Anything. 'Sorry.' 'I'm alive.' 'I burned the body and I'm sorry you had to see it.'" The teaspoon rang against porcelain, sharper than she meant. "You speak four languages, Luc. You'd think one of them would have a word for it." "Not one that would have survived a door between us." She set the mug down in front of him hard enough to slop tea onto Eva's notes. He didn't move to save the paper. He watched her wrist instead — the small crescent scar, white and old, where a garden gate had caught her when she was seven. "You still favour that hand," he said. "You still notice everything and say nothing about the important parts." "I notice everything," he agreed. "It's how I've stayed alive. It's also how I know you haven't slept properly in a week and there's a knife under that stack of grimoires, hilt toward the door." "Two knives." "Better." Something crossed his face that might have been pride, and she hated how warm it made her. Rory leaned back against the counter, arms folded, three feet of scuffed lino between them that felt like a border crossing. "Why are you here?" "There's a name I need to give you before someone else gives it to you badly." "That's not why you're here." He picked up the tea. Held it without drinking. "No." "Then say the real thing or take your cane and go." The extractor fan below them shuddered and cut out, and the flat dropped into a silence so sudden it felt like altitude. "You should not have been on that pavement," Lucien said. "You should not have been within a mile of it. I put you there because I wanted you close and I told myself it was because you were useful." He set the mug down. "That is the real thing. I have been carrying it about for four months and eleven days and it has not got any lighter." Rory's throat did something complicated. "I'm not a liability." "I never said—" "You did, though. Not with words." She pushed off the counter, and now she was the one closing the distance, one step, two. "You said it every time you put yourself between me and a door. Every time you decided what I could survive hearing." "You were twenty-five and human and standing in an alley with a demon's blood drying on your shoes—" "And I didn't scream. Did I." He stopped. "I didn't scream, I didn't faint, I got the plates off the van, I got us out, and then you sent me home in a cab like a girl who'd had too much wine at a party." She was near enough now to see the rain still sitting in his hair, silver on platinum. "You don't get to protect me by lying to me. Pick one." "I have never lied to you." "Omission's a dialect." His mouth moved — almost a smile, killed early. "You've been reading." "I've had four months." Lucien lifted a hand. Stopped it halfway, the way a man stops at a threshold he's been told not to cross, and then finished the motion anyway, two fingers brushing the hair back from her temple. Barely a touch. She felt it in her heels. "I don't know how to want something without deciding it needs guarding," he said. "Then learn." "That is not a small ask." "It's not a small thing I'm offering." Ptolemy jumped onto the table and sat on the wet notes, and neither of them looked at him.