Run: 2026-07-25-01KYCRKR9E9RFXQFNW5WR7D695

The third deadbolt stuck, the way it always did, and Rory had to lean her shoulder into the door to get it to turn. She'd expected the kid from downstairs with the wrong order again. Vindaloo for a flat that ate nothing but toast. Lucien Moreau stood on the landing with rain in his eyelashes. "You've added a lock," he said. "You've added a bruise." She didn't move out of the doorway. There was a purple bloom along his jaw, half-hidden by the collar he'd turned up, and the ivory handle of his cane sat crooked in his grip, like he'd been holding it a different way. "Three locks, actually. Two of them since April." "Since April." He let that sit. Water dripped from the hem of his coat onto Eva's welcome mat, which said GO AWAY in curling script. "May I come in, or shall we do this where the neighbours can enjoy it?" Ptolemy came down the hall at a trot, tail up, and wound himself around Lucien's ankles like they were old friends. Traitor. Rory looked at the cat, then at the puddle spreading under his shoes, then stepped back and let the door swing. "Wipe your feet." He did. Meticulously. That was the thing about him — he'd murder a man in a cellar and still knock the mud off before he crossed your threshold. The flat swallowed him. Eva's research stacks rose off every flat surface, a paper city, and Lucien had to angle sideways past a tower of Latin folios to reach the kitchen counter. The curry house below was doing something with cumin and burnt onion; the smell came up through the floorboards, through the walls, and had lived in Rory's clothes for eight months. "Charming," he said. "Eva's out." "I know. She's at the Whitechapel archive until midnight. She books the reading room under her mother's name, which is—" he set the cane against the counter, "—sweet, but not clever." "You checked." "I always check." He shrugged out of the coat and looked for somewhere to put it. There was nowhere. He folded it over his arm instead, and that small defeat did more to soften her than anything he could have said. Rory filled the kettle because her hands needed a job. "Say it, then." "Say what?" "Whatever you came to say. You don't cross London in the rain for tea, and you don't come here at all, because you told me — and I want to get this right — you told me that the safest thing I could do was pretend I'd never heard your name." "I did say that." "You said it in an alley off Berwick Street with my blood on your shirt." "Yes." His jaw worked. The bruise moved with it. "I remember the shirt." The kettle started its low complaint. Rory turned to face him and set her back against the counter, arms crossed, because she'd learned in the last eight months that if she gave him her profile he'd talk to the side of her head all night and never say the true thing. "I sat in this flat for three weeks," she said. "I jumped every time the stairs creaked. Eva put wards on the windows that made the glass hum. And you were in a wine bar on Greek Street the whole time, Lucien. Silas told me. Tuesdays and Fridays, corner table, that awful Sancerre you pretend to like." "It's not awful." "You let me think you were dead." "I let you think I was gone. There is a difference, and you are clever enough to know it." "Don't." She pointed at him, one finger, steady. "Don't do the thing where you compliment my intelligence so I'll stop shouting." "You're not shouting." His mismatched eyes moved over her — the amber one caught the kitchen bulb and threw it back, the black one gave nothing. "That's rather worse." The kettle clicked off. Neither of them touched it. "There was a man," Lucien said, "who wanted to know who you were. What you could do. Whether you'd be missed." He said it flatly, an accountant reading a column. "He asked me. He paid, in fact, and I took the money, because a man like that gets suspicious when you refuse it. Then I gave him a name that wasn't yours and an address in Deptford that hasn't existed since the Blitz, and I spent April and May and most of June making certain he stayed interested in the wrong Aurora." Rory's throat closed. She got it open again. "And you couldn't have told me." "If you had known, you would have gone looking for him." "That's—" It was true. She hated that it was true. "That's my decision to make." "Yes." He picked at a thread on his cuff. "That is the part I've come to concede." Ptolemy jumped onto the counter and sat between them like a chaperone. Rory scratched the cat's ear because it was easier than looking up. "Where is he now? The man." "Avaros, I imagine. Or wherever they file the pieces." Lucien touched his own jaw, absently, the way you check a tooth. "He objected to being lied to. Loudly. On Thursday." "Is that—" she gestured at the bruise. "That is the cheerful half." "Sit down." "I'm fine." "Sit down, Lucien, or I'll swear at you in Welsh and you'll pretend not to understand it." He sat. She had to move a stack of grimoires off the kitchen chair to make room, and when she came back with the first-aid tin from under the sink he'd gone still and obedient in a way that unsettled her more than blood would have. She stood over him. Tilted his chin with two fingers to catch the light. His skin was warm. Warmer than a person's. "You've split it," she said. "Here. Along the bone." "It'll close." "It'll scar." "I have a number of those." "Hold still." She wet the gauze. He didn't flinch when she pressed it, which was its own kind of showing off, and she was close enough now to smell the rain in his hair and the cedar underneath it, and the fact that she noticed made her furious. "You could have written," she said quietly. "Two lines. *Alive. Don't look for me.* I'd have burned it and slept." "I wrote nine." Her hand stopped. "Nine letters." His voice didn't change. "They're in a drawer in Marylebone. I read them the next morning and each one said the same thing underneath, which was *come and find me*, and that would have killed you." He caught her wrist then — the left one, thumb landing exactly over the small crescent scar, the way it always had, like his hand had memorised it. "I was not willing to be the reason. Not again." She should have pulled away. She counted three floorboard creaks from downstairs, and the extractor fan in the curry house kitchen, and her own pulse under his thumb, and she didn't pull away. "You're an arrogant, manipulative, catastrophically French coward," she said. "Yes." "And you still haven't said why you're here tonight." He let go of her wrist. Straightened his shoulders inside the ruined suit. Looked up at her with the amber eye and the black one both. "Because he asked about you, Aurora," Lucien said. "And before he stopped asking, he told me who sent him."