Run: 2026-07-25-01KYD6S9YR6MZ2WS406SYWBM3F

The knock came at half past eleven — three short raps, a pause, then two more. A pattern. Rory froze over the takeaway container in her hands, chopsticks suspended. Ptolemy lifted his head from the stack of scrolls he'd claimed as a bed and stared at the door. "You're not expecting anyone?" she asked the cat. He offered no opinion. She crossed the flat on bare feet, avoiding the atlas open on the floorboards, and put her eye to the peephole. The corridor bulb had burnt out weeks ago, but the figure on the landing needed no light. Platinum hair caught what little spilled from the window at the end of the hall. Charcoal suit. Ivory cane. Her stomach dropped through the floor and kept going. She undid the first deadbolt. Stopped. Took a breath. Undid the other two and pulled the door open before she could think better of it. Lucien Moreau stood with one gloved hand braced on the doorframe, and he looked — wrong. That was the thing that registered first. Lucien never looked wrong. His collar sat crooked. A bruise darkened the line of his jaw, and his heterochromatic eyes, amber and black, tracked her face with a focus that made her feel x-rayed. "Rory." "You have a lot of nerve." "I know." No apology in it. Just fact. "Four months. Not a word. And you turn up at—" She caught herself. Lowered her voice. "How did you even know I'd be here?" "I know where everyone is. It's the whole of my profession." He glanced past her shoulder, cataloguing the books, the scrolls, the chaos of Eva's research buried under three weeks of Rory's occupation. "May I come in? I wouldn't ask if it weren't important." "That's exactly what you said in Antwerp." Something flickered across his face — the ghost of the smile that had started all of it. "In Antwerp, I was lying." "And now?" "Now I have nowhere else to go." She should have shut the door. She'd rehearsed shutting the door. She'd rehearsed entire speeches for this moment, standing in the shower, standing over the wok at the Golden Empress between deliveries — speeches with excellent structure, barrister's-daughter speeches, the kind that left no opening. All of them evaporated under the sight of blood seeping through his left sleeve. "You're bleeding on Eva's doorstep." "So I am." She stepped aside. "If you drip on the scrolls, I'll finish whatever started that." He moved past her with the careful economy of a man concealing how much each step cost. The cane bore more weight than it should have. Ptolemy took one look at him, flattened his ears, and vanished into the bedroom. "Your cat remembers me." "Eva's cat. And he has excellent judgement." Rory locked all three deadbolts behind him and turned to find Lucien surveying the flat the way he surveyed everything — exits first, then occupants, then opportunities. His gaze snagged on the photograph tucked into the mirror frame: Rory and Eva at sixteen, grinning outside a Cardiff chippy. "Sit down before you fall down," she said. "Kitchen chair. Now." "You're enjoying this." "Furiously." She fetched the first aid kit from under the sink — Eva kept one stocked with things no chemist sold, rowan oil and salt sachets alongside the plasters. When she came back, Lucien had shrugged out of his jacket and unbuttoned his shirt cuff with one hand. The cut ran from elbow to wrist, clean-edged, deliberate. A blade wound. She sat across from him and took his arm. His skin ran hot. Half-demon hot — she'd forgotten that, or tried to. "Who?" "A client who decided the information should come cheaper." His eyes stayed on her hands. "You changed your hair." "I cut it." "It suits you." "Don't." "Don't what?" She pressed gauze to the wound harder than necessary. He didn't flinch, which irritated her more. "Don't walk back in here after four months of silence and compliment my hair like we're — " She stopped. Breathed. Wound the bandage. "You left, Lucien. You left the morning after — " "I remember the morning." "Do you? Because from where I was standing, it looked a lot like you climbing out a window before sunrise, leaving a note with a poem in it. A poem, Lucien. In French. As if that made it better." "As I recall, you were asleep, and there were three men from the Court of Thorns waiting outside the hotel with an interest in my whereabouts. Staying would have made you interesting to them." His free hand turned over on the table, palm up, an old gesture of his — I have nothing hidden. It had never once been true. "I did what I did so you could go back to your life. Deliveries. Cardiff. Law school, if you wanted it. Ordinary things. Safe things." "I didn't want safe things." The words came out flat and fast and hung between them like smoke. She finished tying off the bandage and didn't let go of his wrist. His pulse hammered against her fingers — faster than his composed face admitted. "Then what did you want?" His voice dropped, roughened around the edges, the Marseille in it bleeding through. "Honestly? A bloody phone call. A letter. One of your ridiculous courier pigeons or whatever it is you people use." She looked up at him. "You decided for me. You decided I'd be better off, and you disappeared, and the worst part — the absolute worst part — is that you were probably right. That's what I couldn't forgive." "Rory." "No, let me finish, because I've been rehearsing this for four months and you're going to sit there and bleed quietly while I say it." She jabbed a finger at his chest. "I spent six years letting other people make my choices. My parents picked my degree. Evan picked my friends, my clothes, what I was allowed to think. And then you — you, who knew all of that, who I told all of that — walked out of that hotel and made the biggest choice of all without asking me. You weren't protecting me. You were being exactly like them." Silence. The curry house downstairs thumped music through the floorboards. Ptolemy crept back in, decided the danger had passed, and leapt onto the table between them. Lucien looked down at the cat. "You're right." She blinked. "Sorry?" "You're right. I told myself it was protection because protection sounds noble, and I have a professional weakness for sounding noble." He turned his hand in hers — slow, giving her every chance to pull away — and threaded his fingers through her fingers. His thumb found the crescent scar on her left wrist and rested there, feather-light. "The truth is simpler and uglier. No one had ever looked at me the way you did that night. Like I wasn't a transaction. And I ran, because a man in my trade cannot afford to want anything that much. Want is leverage. Want is a door someone else can kick in." "And now you're here anyway." "Now I'm here anyway. Bleeding on a borrowed chair, having apparently ruined your rehearsed speech." "You haven't ruined it. There were three more sections." "By all means." She laughed despite herself — a short, cracked sound — and hated how good it felt, how the flat suddenly seemed warmer with him in it, how four months of anger turned out to be four months of waiting dressed up in a costume. "I missed you," she said. "That's section two. I'm furious about it." "Noted." The amber eye gleamed; the black one held her steady. "And section three?" She leaned in and kissed him, because she'd never in her life followed a structure anyway. He made a low sound of surprise against her mouth — Lucien Moreau, surprised, a genuine first — then his good hand came up to cup her jaw and he kissed her back like a man who'd spent four months drowning. The bruise on his jaw made him wince. She didn't stop. Neither did he. When they broke apart, his forehead rested against hers and his breath came uneven. "For the record," he said, "the poem rhymed in the original." "I know. I translated it. It was terrible." "It was heartfelt." "It rhymed 'Carter' with 'depart, her.'" "French is a difficult language." She pulled back far enough to look at him properly — the bruise, the bandage, the crooked collar, the man underneath all the tailoring, sitting in a cramped flat on Brick Lane with nowhere else to go. Her. He'd meant her. "You're staying tonight," she said. "Sofa. And in the morning you're going to tell me who cut you, and then you're going to make coffee, and then — " she pointed a finger in warning, " — we're going to have the conversation you should have had before climbing out that window. All of it. No poems." He lifted her hand and pressed his lips to the crescent scar on her wrist, and his smile was the real one, the one she suspected the whole of London's underworld had never seen. "No poems," he agreed.