Run: 2026-09-02-01M1GV4JS1T4G35X4BJK46VJ96

The chain held the door to a hand's width, so Rory got him in pieces: a shoulder dark with rain, the ivory head of a cane, a tie the colour of wet slate. Below, the curry house vent steamed into the night, and Brick Lane hissed with taxis. "Evening, Aurora." Six days of silence from Lucien Moreau, and here he stood on Eva's landing, elegant despite the drowning, rain coming off the gutter above him in ropes. "Eva's not home." "Whitby. The coven retreat runs through Thursday." The amber eye and the black one found her through the gap. "You're house-sitting. The cat's bowl is full, and the books are alphabetised. Eva has never alphabetised anything in her life." "That's an awful deduction." "It's a Tuesday habit of yours. You tidy other people's chaos when your own won't sit still." Rain ticked off the rail between them. "Your flat above the bar has been dark since Tuesday. May I come in? I've been in this weather since Bloomsbury, and London rain has never once done me a kindness." Her thumb rested on the chain. Every sensible thing she owned told her to leave it right where it was. She slid it free and stepped back. He came in dripping. He leaned the cane against the coat hooks, and Ptolemy emerged from behind a tower of scrolls, crossed the hall, and flattened himself against Lucien's shin with a purr like a small engine. "He doesn't do that for anyone." "Hell runs warm. Cats appreciate a radiator." Lucien glanced down at the tabby. "Traitor. I fed you sardines once." Rory shut the door and shot the bottom bolt out of habit. Her hand hovered at the middle one, then took it. The top one she threw with a click that beat the weather. His gaze moved over the flat — her holdall by the sofa, a blanket folded into a square, Eva's scrolls pushed into a wall to make room. "You've been sleeping on her sofa." "Eva's sofa and I have reached terms." "You left the lamp on the timer." "You taught me the timer." "I did." He set his shoulders back. "I've hated it every night since." She pulled the tea towel off the rail and threw it at his chest. He caught it one-handed and dragged it back through his hair, and the rain-slicked order of it gave up, white-blond falling loose across his brow, and she hated that she noticed. Her delivery jacket hung off the back of a chair, the gold lettering of the Golden Empress facing the room like an accusation. "You kept the delivery work." "It's the only honest job I've got." "It's the only job you have that I couldn't corrupt." The hall light caught his hand as he lowered the towel. Palm split in a clean line from heel to fingers, blood thinned pink by rain, dripping onto Eva's floorboards. "You're bleeding on the research." "Minor." "Chair. Now." The kitchen was four steps and a bookshelf away. She swept Eva's grimoires onto the floor, hauled the first aid kit out from under the sink — Eva kept it beside the fire blanket, which explained Eva — and dragged his hand under the light above the hob. Antiseptic foamed pink. She worked it into the cut with her thumb braced on his wrist, and under her grip his pulse ran slow and even while hers kept stumbling. "Who cut you?" "Coram's safe had opinions." "Of course it did." The gash was straight, surgical, the work of a very thin blade, and she didn't ask what it had met, because she knew what lived inside the cane by the coat hooks. "Hold still." "I am still." "You're vibrating with commentary." "I'm saving it up." "The last time I stitched you, it was a knife in Bermondsey, and you bought me dinner after." "You ate like a negotiator." "I'd earned it." The bandage went around twice. She pulled the second knot tight enough to make a point, and his face gave her nothing, which made her angrier. "Six days." "You asked for six days." "I said I never wanted to see you again. You heard six days." "You'll notice I struggle with the larger numbers." She tied it off and reached past him to fill the kettle, because her hands wanted a job that wasn't hitting him. "The Wapping job." She kept her eyes on the tap. "The parcel. Tell me it was a coincidence that Evan's people were the ones who opened it." The rain and Ptolemy's scratching under the table had the room to themselves for a moment. "Coram keeps a ledger." His voice flattened into the register he used for invoices. "Names. What people paid for names. Evan sold him a page of it three weeks ago. Yours was on it." The kettle clicked on. She faced him. "Say the rest." "Coram buys names the way other men buy stamps. I took the job to burn the book. But to get it out of his safe I needed a courier his watchers would stop and search — a courier worth following. It had to be someone Evan's people would recognise on sight." His jaw worked once. "It had to be you." "Three years I've known you. Three years of your rules. Never ask a source twice. Never drink on a job. Never let anyone learn your face." Her thumb pressed the edge of the bandage flat. "And the whole time, you were writing my name into a trap." "The alternative was your name travelling without you." "You watched me walk out of your office, and you didn't call." "Chasing you felt like collecting you." "And the job?" "I put two of Silas' cars behind you and my driver on the corner. The exchange lasted four minutes. The book is ash." "And Evan?" "Is learning that Marseille has a long memory." A beat. "He won't look at a photograph of you again." A laugh came out of her with nothing kind in it. "You put my name in a room with his people and timed it." "Aurora—" "You don't get to decide what I survive." The words came out loud enough to send Ptolemy for the bedroom. Lucien didn't move. Water dripped off his sleeve onto Eva's lino, regular as a clock. "No." He rose from the chair, and the small kitchen filled with him. "I learned that at eleven, in Marseille, watching my father's people negotiate my mother's life like a line item. I have never decided for anyone. I built an entire profession on never deciding for anyone. Then there was a page with your name on it, and I burned every rule I own before lunch." "So you used me as bait." "So I used you as bait." The black eye and the amber one held hers. "And I would do it again, and I will hate myself for it with great efficiency, and none of that is what I came here to say." The kettle began its climb toward a whistle. "The night the generator died in your office." Her voice came out lower than she wanted. "You stood up. The phone rang. You sat back down." "I remember the night." "So do I." "Then hear the part I swallowed." The bandaged hand flexed at his side. "I trade in information. It's the only inheritance my father's side ever gave me — every truth in this city has a price, and I know all of them. And the one fact I have never put on a page, for any buyer, at any price, is that it's you. It has been you since the second week, when you argued with me about oysters in front of the whole table and won, and I sat there recalculating every contract I have ever written. I priced it once, out of curiosity. There isn't a number." The kettle screamed. She crossed the four steps and kissed him, one hand fisted in the wet lapel of a very expensive suit, and he made a sound low in his chest, like a man setting down something heavy he'd carried up six flights of stairs. His good hand came to her jaw. The bandaged one stayed at his side, careful, as though she were the one who'd been cut. She broke off an inch. "You're bleeding on me now." "I'm aware." "You're staying for tea." She reached behind her and shut off the hob. "And then you're going to tell me the whole ledger, page by page, every name. I decide what I survive from now on. That's the only deal on the table." "Agreed." He tucked a wet strand of black hair off her cheek, his thumb pausing over the crescent scar at her wrist without asking what it was. "All of it. Even Marseille." "Even Marseille." She took down two of Eva's mugs — one chipped, one printed with a sun Eva never used — and set them on the counter. Ptolemy stalked back in and wound around their ankles, and behind them the door held all three deadbolts against the rain.