Run: 2026-07-25-01KYCRJ38C56R7JV8DJB4K11X3

The third deadbolt stuck, the way it always did, and Rory had to shoulder the door to get it open. Lucien Moreau stood on the landing with rain beading on the shoulders of his charcoal suit, one hand resting on the ivory head of his cane, and the smell of the curry house rising up the stairwell behind him like something he'd chosen to ignore. "You changed the locks." "Eva changed the locks." Rory kept her hand on the frame. "Twice. The second time was after you." "That seems unfair. I only ever used the key you gave me." "I didn't give you a key." "No." He tipped his head, the amber eye catching the bare bulb above him, the black one swallowing it. "You left one under the loose tile and told me you hadn't. It's a distinction I've thought about a great deal." Ptolemy shot between her ankles, took one look at Lucien, and retreated under the radiator with his ears flat. "Even the cat remembers," she said. "Cats are excellent judges of character. It's why I don't keep one." He didn't move to come in. Water ran off the sleeve of his jacket and onto the doormat. "May I?" She should have said no. Four months of practising that word in her head, rehearsing it in the shower and on the number 8 bus and over cartons of cooling chow mein in the back of Yu-Fei's van, and it sat in her throat like a stone she couldn't get purchase on. She stepped back. He came in the way he came into everywhere — as though the room had been arranged for him and someone had done a slightly poor job of it. Books stacked three deep on the floor, a spill of scrolls across the coffee table, Eva's research notes pinned to the wall in a spidering web of red string. He looked at all of it and said nothing, which was somehow worse than commentary. "She's in Bristol," Rory said. "Some archive. She'll be back Sunday." "I know. I didn't come for Eva." "Right." Rory crossed to the kitchenette, three steps, and put the kettle on because her hands needed a task. "Then say whatever it is and go, because I've got a shift at six and I smell like sweet and sour already." "You smell like ginger." "That's the ginger." "It suits you better than the perfume you were wearing in Bermondsey." The kettle began to tick. She watched the element flush orange and did not turn around, because the mention of Bermondsey went through her like a nail through a plank — the warehouse, the rain, his hand pressed flat against her sternum to keep her behind him, the way he'd said her name once, low, and then hadn't said it again for four months. "Don't do that," she said. "Do what?" "Come in here and be charming about it. You had a phone. You had my number. You have—" she turned, "—you have people who deliver messages for you. Actual employed humans." "Yes." "So?" Lucien set the cane against the arm of the sofa. He unbuttoned his jacket, and it was such a small, domestic gesture that it made her angry all over again. "So I found that I could not make the words fit into a message," he said. "I tried. I have a drawer of attempts. Four in English, two in French, one in a language you don't speak, which was cowardice." "That's not an apology." "No. It's context." He looked at her steadily. "Do you want the apology first, or the reason?" "I want you to not have left me standing in the rain on Tooley Street thinking you were dead." Silence. The kettle climbed toward its scream. Under the radiator, Ptolemy's tail thumped once against the pipe. "Ah," Lucien said. "Ah. Yes. Ah." Rory pulled two mugs down without asking whether he wanted one. "Six hours, Lucien. Six hours in a Pret with my phone on the table and blood on my sleeve, and then Silas rings and says he's seen you at a card game in Whitechapel. Card game. Laughing, he said. He said you looked well." "I did not feel well." "You looked well." "That is my profession." Something moved in his face — a crack in the porcelain, quickly plastered. "Aurora. If I had come to that Pret, I would have brought three people with me who had spent the afternoon looking for whoever survived that warehouse. So I went where they could find me, and I made it very clear that I had been alone, and I let them count me as a man with nothing worth protecting." The kettle clicked off. Steam hung between them. "You could have told me that," she said. "After. Any day after." "Yes." "Instead of four months." "Yes." He came a step closer, stopped himself with visible effort, and rested his hand on the back of Eva's ruined armchair instead. "Because the longer I said nothing, the more it became true, and the true version was easier. In the true version you go to law school or you don't, you deliver noodles, you live above a bar with a man who keeps a shotgun under the till and would use it for you. In the true version nobody puts a knife to your throat to get to me." "Don't decide that for me." "I decided it for me." His voice dropped. "There's a difference, and it is not flattering, and I'm aware of it." Rory poured the water. Her hand was steady, which felt like a small victory she'd remember later. "Milk?" "You know how I take it." "I'm asking anyway." "Then yes. Please." She brought the mugs over and held one out, and he took it, and their fingers overlapped on the handle for a half second longer than the transaction required. She felt it up her arm, into her jaw, that stupid animal recognition that had never once asked her permission. She stepped back and sat on the arm of the sofa, mug in both hands, out of reach. "Why now?" she said. "Because someone used your name last week. Not Carter. The other one." The tea went to ash in her mouth. "Who?" "That's the reason I couldn't fit into a message." He looked at her over the rim of the cup, and for once the amber eye and the black one seemed to be looking at the same thing. "And, since we're being honest in this flat, it is also not the only reason I came." "Lucien." "You asked why now. I'm answering both parts. You may ignore the second." "I've been ignoring the second for four months." "How has that been?" "Fine," she said. "Brilliant. Excellent." "Mm." He set the mug on a stack of Eva's books, which was heresy, and neither of them moved it. "You're a very poor liar for someone who was going to be a barrister." "I never wanted to be a barrister." "I know," he said. "That was the first thing you ever told me, and you were three drinks in, and you cried about it, and I have thought about it approximately once a day since." Rain hit the window in a fistful. Rory looked at the red string on the wall, at Ptolemy's yellow eyes glowing under the radiator, at the man standing in the middle of Eva's paper wreckage with his hair coming loose from its slick and rainwater darkening his collar. "Say the apology," she said. "The actual one. Then tell me about my name."