Run: 2026-09-02-01M1GT10XH0FNKEATTX8J2Z35M

The third deadbolt gave with a click, and Rory hauled the door open on Lucien Moreau. Rain ran off the point of his chin and pooled on Eva's welcome mat, which had never once in its life welcomed anyone. His charcoal wool had gone dark across the shoulders, his platinum hair had surrendered its shape, and the ivory handle of his cane shone wet under the landing bulb. One amber eye. One black. Both on her. She moved to shut it. Ptolemy shot between her ankles and out onto the landing, threading a figure eight around the cane. "Three weeks," Lucien said, holding still while the cat completed his circuit. "The cat remembers me." "Ptolemy, inside." She snapped her fingers. The cat headbutted his shin. "Your friend threw a teapot at me when I asked after you. Good arm. She missed on purpose, I think, which was kind." "Good," Rory said. "She should've aimed better." She glanced past him at the stairwell — empty, out of habit, always out of habit — and hated that the checking came automatic. "How did you find me?" "Eva didn't sell you out, if that's the next question. I bought the CCTV from the curry house downstairs. You come out every Tuesday at seven with naan." "That's either romantic or alarming." "It's expensive." He lifted a hand from the cane. In it sat a folder, edges softened from handling, swollen with paper. "I brought you something. Then I'll go." She should have shut the door. She looked at the folder instead, at a photograph gone grey at the corner where it had been thumbed too many times, and stepped back into the flat. He followed, ducking under the low beam, and did the thing he always did in other people's rooms — lifted a stack of Eva's scrolls, read the top one upside down in a second, set them back exactly as they'd lain. Rain ticked off his hem onto the floorboards. The smell of cumin and fried onions rose through the boards themselves, the whole building breathing curry. "Say it fast." She kept the kitchen counter between them. "Whatever this is, say it and leave." "You asked me a question the night you walked out." He planted the cane and leaned on it. "I gave you four seconds of silence. I've replayed those four seconds every day since, and I've come to tell you the answer, because you earned it and I was a coward." "You had a file on me." Her voice came out flat, which took work. "Photographs. Me at twelve outside my father's chambers in Cardiff. My mum's family tree. Pages in a script I couldn't read with a word written all over them — Malphora. And in your handwriting, one word. Located. Like I was a parcel you'd signed for." "Yes." "So don't stand there and call yourself a coward like it's modesty. You hunted me." "I did." He set the folder on the table, careful of the ink-stained wood, and straightened it so its edges ran parallel to the table's. "A client came to me six years ago hunting a name out of an old story. A name that isn't yours — it's the word people use when they're looking for you. I took the retainer. I did the work. I found you." His jaw moved. "And then I sat in my office for one entire night with your photograph in my hand, and I understood what delivering you would mean, and I burned the contract instead. It cost me the retainer, two alliances, and a knife I still itch from. Then I kept the only copy of that file, because the safest place for it was in the hands of a man who would never sell it." The floorboard by the cooker creaked. Ptolemy, back inside, wound around her ankles, and she gripped the counter because the alternative was gripping something breakable. "Then tell me why." Her wrist ached where she leaned on it, the old crescent scar white against the wood. "You could've burned the file too. One more match. Instead you kept a folder full of me in your desk like — like stock." "Because if I held it, no one else could." He spoke four languages; she had watched him switch between them like a man changing coats. Now he stumbled in all of them. "And because the woman in that folder is Aurora Carter. The woman I know short-changes me on biscuits, argues about cricket with my contacts, threatens my clients with a bicycle pump. I wasn't going to hand you the other name on top of everything else. Every day you didn't know was a day it couldn't touch you." "You decided that for me." "Yes." No flinch. "And I'd decide it again, which is why the silence was the honest answer, and why it was unforgivable. Both true. I'm not asking you to like the arithmetic." "Was I a job?" It came out smaller than she wanted. "All of it. The dinners. The — you. Was that surveillance with better lighting?" He crossed the room. She let him, which felt like unbuckling something. "You were the one thing in six years that wasn't for sale." He stopped close enough that rain still hung on his collar. "I kept the folder to keep you, and I lost you by keeping it. There's the whole account. No reserves." She looked at the table. The folder sat there, fat with her own history, and she found she didn't want to touch it. "Burn it yourself. I don't want to know what's in it if you're standing here instead of it." "That's not an answer I expected." "Nothing about you is what I expected. That's the entire problem." Her hand came up before she'd authorized it and closed on his lapel, wet wool under her fingers. "You had four languages and six years and you couldn't manage one sentence." "I'm managing it now." His free hand covered hers. "Rory." She kissed him. He tasted like rain and the end of a long argument, and the cane clattered against the bookshelf as he let it fall, both hands finding her face, careful even now, careful the way nobody had ever been careful with her. Ptolemy complained from the floor about dinner. The folder sat on the table with everything Rory had ever been inside it, and neither of them looked at it once.