Run: 2026-07-25-01KYCR785F17TD2NX3S8A37SGH

The third deadbolt always stuck. Rory shouldered the door while she worked it, swearing under her breath at the cheap brass, and when it finally gave she was already halfway through an apology to whoever from the curry house downstairs had come up to complain about Ptolemy howling at four in the morning. Lucien Moreau stood on the landing with rain in his hair. Not slicked back. That was the first thing she noticed — the platinum blond fell loose over his forehead, darkened at the ends, and a drop of water hung off his jaw like it had been waiting there for permission. Charcoal suit soaked through at the shoulders. Cane in his left hand, tip resting against the skirting board. "You're not the delivery boy," she said. "I passed him on the stairs. He asked me to tell you the sag aloo is on the house." Lucien's mouth moved, not quite a smile. "I told him you'd finished with free things." "Did you." "It seemed accurate." Rory didn't move out of the doorway. Behind her the kettle clicked off, and the flat breathed out its usual fug of cumin and old paper. Eva's research had colonised the hall table, the shoe rack, the top of the radiator. Somewhere under it all, Ptolemy started grumbling. "Four months," she said. "Four months and eleven days." "You counted." "I count everything. It's how I stay useful." He shifted his weight, and she caught the flinch he tried to bury in it — right leg, high up, the hitch of a man who'd learned a new way to stand. "You're leaning on that thing properly now," she said. "You used to carry it like a prop." "Yes." "That happen in Avaros?" "It happened on the way back." He looked past her, into the flat, and something in his face changed — went smoother, which was worse. "May I come in, Aurora?" "Nobody calls me that." "I do." Rain hammered the skylight over the stairwell. She thought about the last time she'd seen him: the back of his coat, the wet street outside Silas' bar, the way he'd said *it's better if you don't know* with the absolute calm of a man closing a ledger. She'd thrown a glass. He hadn't ducked. That was the part that still got under her ribs — he'd stood there and let it break against the wall behind him, because he'd already decided what she was owed. She stepped back. He came in slowly, hooking the cane over his forearm to ease the door shut behind him, and she watched him take inventory of the room the way he took inventory of everything. Three deadbolts, noted. Salt line along the window, noted. The kitchen knife on the coffee table next to a mug of cold tea, definitely noted. "You've been sleeping out here," he said. "Eva snores." "Eva's been in Prague since Tuesday." Rory turned. "How do you know that?" "Because I put her on the train." He set the cane against the arm of the sofa. "She asked me not to tell you. She thought you'd take it as interference." "It *is* interference." "It's both." He peeled off his jacket, and the shirt underneath clung, and she made herself look at the bookcase instead. "She also asked me to check on you, which I have been doing from the pavement for the last three nights, and which is, I'm told, the sort of thing that gets a man arrested in this country." "Three nights." Her voice came out flatter than she wanted. "You've been standing outside for three nights." "There's a doorway across from the curry house. Reasonable sightlines." "You could have knocked." "I could have." "So why now?" Lucien looked at her then — properly, both eyes, amber and black, and the black one always felt like the one doing the actual seeing. "Because it rained," he said. "And I discovered I'm no longer the sort of man who can stand in it." Ptolemy chose that moment to arrive, shouldering out from under an armchair, and went straight for Lucien's shins with the enthusiasm of a traitor. Lucien bent — carefully, weight on the good leg — and let the cat headbutt his knuckles. "Even the cat," Rory said. "The cat has no principles." "The cat has *excellent* principles. He bit Silas." "Silas deserves it." Lucien straightened. Water ran from his hair down his neck and disappeared into his collar, and Rory's whole body registered it, uninvited, a small hot flare behind her sternum that she resented on sight. Four months. Eleven days. Apparently the body kept its own ledger. She went to the airing cupboard and threw a towel at his chest. He caught it one-handed. "Dry off," she said. "Then say whatever it is." "There's a great deal of it." "Start with the worst." He didn't dry off. He held the towel and stood there in her friend's cramped hall with rain pooling on the lino, and said, "The reason I didn't tell you what your ex-husband's family paid for your name — " "He wasn't my husband." " — the reason wasn't protection." He said it evenly. "I want that clear before anything else. I told myself it was protection. It was leverage. If you didn't know what you were worth, you'd stay where I could reach you." The kettle ticked as it cooled. Rory found she'd folded her arms without deciding to. "Say that again," she said. "I used your ignorance to keep you close." He met her eyes. "I'm a broker, Aurora. I don't know another way to hold on to a thing except by owning the information about it. I'm telling you now because in Avaros I had eleven days in a room with no light and nothing to trade, and I found out what I am when the trading stops." "And what's that?" "Someone who thinks about you," he said, "in a way that has no market value at all." She laughed — one sharp note, nothing funny in it. "That's a hell of a line." "It's not a line. Lines are shorter." He finally lifted the towel to his face, dragged it back through his hair, and when he lowered it the platinum stood up in ridiculous soft spikes, and he looked thirty-two and human and tired. "You threw a glass at me." "I missed on purpose." "You didn't." "No," she admitted. "I didn't." "Good." Something eased at the corner of his mouth. "I'd hate to think you'd gone soft." Rory crossed to the coffee table, moved the knife two inches to the left, and stopped with her back to him because it was easier to say things to a wall of Eva's stacked grimoires. "You don't get to come here and be honest at me," she said. "You had four months. You had the whole night in the bar. You could've said one true sentence and I'd have — " She stopped. "You'd have what?" "Don't." "Aurora." "I said don't." She turned. He hadn't moved closer. That was the infuriating part, how he held his ground and let her come to the edge of it herself, every single time. "You want the receipt? Fine. I'd have stayed. I'd have said stay. I stood in that street for twenty minutes after you walked off, in February, like an idiot, waiting for you to come back and be a person about it." The rain filled the silence for them. "I went back," Lucien said. "At two. You'd gone up." "You didn't knock." "No." He turned the towel over in his hands. "I've been standing outside your doors for a long time. I'm told it's a pattern."