Run: 2026-07-25-01KYD4YG3PB5ZHRTNHBC4M3J28

The knock came three times, measured and polite, which was itself suspicious. Nobody polite knocked on this door at midnight. The curry house below had closed an hour ago, and Ptolemy, curled on a stack of annotated grimoires, lifted his head and stared at the door with the flat contempt of a creature who knew better. Rory looked through the peephole and forgot how to breathe for a second. Lucien Moreau stood in the hallway, charcoal suit immaculate despite the rain that had been hammering East London all evening, platinum hair darkened at the edges where water had found it. His ivory-handled cane tapped once against the floorboards, impatient. "I know you're standing there, Carter. I can hear you not opening the door." She undid the first deadbolt. Stopped. Undid the second. Stopped again. "How did you find me?" "Three deadbolts and you're interrogating me through the door." The amber eye would be catching the hallway light, she knew. She remembered exactly how it caught light. That was the problem. "Your friend Eva talks in her sleep. At conferences. Loudly." "That's not how conferences work." "Open the door, Rory." The third deadbolt slid back and there he was, close enough that she could smell rain on wool and something underneath it, smoke from a place that wasn't London. Six weeks. Six weeks since she'd watched him walk out of Silas' bar without looking back, and he stood on her doorstep like a man returning a borrowed umbrella. "You look terrible," he said. "You look expensive. Same as always." "Expensive isn't the opposite of terrible." Ptolemy wound between Lucien's ankles and Lucien, who she had once seen stare down a creature with too many teeth and no face, leaned down and scratched the cat behind the ears. That small gesture undid something in her chest she had spent six weeks nailing shut. "You're letting the heat out," she said, and stepped aside. He moved through the flat the way he moved through every room, cataloguing it. The books stacked on every surface. The scroll pinned to the wall with a kitchen knife. Her delivery jacket hanging by the door, Golden Empress embroidered in red thread. His jaw tightened at that, briefly, a thing she would have missed six weeks ago and caught now like a reflex. "You should have called." "You should have called. Six weeks ago. When you said you would." She folded her arms. "You said, and I quote, 'I'll ring you Thursday, and then we'll discuss what this is.'" "I remember what I said." "Thursday came and went, Lucien. So did about five other Thursdays." He set the cane against the arm of her sofa with care, and when he turned back the polished composure had a crack in it, the black eye darker than the amber one in the lamplight, both of them fixed on her with an attention she had forgotten the weight of. "Thursday, I was in Avaros. Involuntarily." He loosened his tie, an act of informality so unlike him it landed like a confession. "My father's people decided I owed them a debt. Debts there are collected in time, not money. I came out the other side three days ago. It was still Thursday, to me. Then I looked at a calendar." "That's—" She hated that she believed him. That was the worst part of Lucien Moreau: his lies were elaborate and his truths were worse, and she had learned to tell them apart by the way he held his hands. Right now his hands were still. "You couldn't send word? A note? A carrier pigeon? Anything?" "Would you have rather had a note? 'Dear Carter, detained in a demon realm, don't wait up.'" "I would have rather had anything than standing in Silas' bar watching your back disappear through the door. I thought—" She stopped. The things left unsaid crowded her throat and she refused to let them out cheaply. "I thought you decided I wasn't worth the complication." "You are nothing but complication." He said it almost gently. "You deliver noodles for a living, you live above a bar over a curry house, you have a crescent scar on your wrist you won't explain, and you once talked a debt collector out of kneecapping Yu-Fei using contract law you claim to hate. You are the most complicated person I know, and I know people who are technically two people." "Don't compliment me. You're not allowed to compliment me while I'm angry at you." "You're not angry." "I'm furious." "Your hands have stopped shaking." He took one step closer. The flat was small enough that one step put him in arm's reach, and she hated that her body remembered the distance, remembered closing it. "Rory. Look at me." She looked at Ptolemy instead, who had settled on Lucien's abandoned cane like a dragon claiming gold. "You can't just appear at midnight with an impossible excuse and a nice suit and expect—" "I expect nothing. I came because three days ago I stood in a realm where time eats itself, and the only thing I could think about, the only anchor I kept, was Thursday." His voice dropped, the polish scraping off it entirely. "I missed Thursday. I refuse to miss the rest of them." The radiator clanked. Rain ticked against the window. Rory's pulse was doing something undignified and she pressed her fingers against her wrist, against the small crescent scar, an old habit. "Say something," he said, and for the first time since she'd known him, Lucien Moreau sounded unsure. "Was I the anchor, or was the appointment the anchor? There's a difference." "You. The appointment was logistics." The black eye and the amber one both held steady on her. "It's always been you. That's the thing I didn't say, before. I'm saying it now, badly, at midnight, because apparently that's the only way I know how to say true things." She crossed the distance before she'd decided to, and her fist caught his lapel, and for a moment she genuinely didn't know if she was going to shake him or kiss him. He went very still, the way a man goes still when he wants the second option and will accept the first. "Six weeks," she said. "Six weeks," he agreed, his hand coming up to cover hers against his chest, warm through the rain-damp wool. "Punch me if it helps." "It wouldn't help." "No," he murmured, lowering his head until his forehead nearly touched hers. "But this might." "Don't you dare be charming." "I am not being charming. I am being terrified. There's a difference, as you say." She laughed, one short, unwilling sound, and it broke the last of it, the six weeks and the five Thursdays and the door at Silas' bar. Her fingers loosened in his lapel and slid up to his jaw instead, rough with a day's stubble, real and present and here. "You're sleeping on the sofa," she said. "Of course." "Ptolemy gets the good blanket. You get the scratchy one." "Naturally." "And tomorrow you explain Avaros. All of it. Every word." "Tomorrow," he said, and kissed her like a man keeping an appointment, six weeks late and exactly on time.