Run: 2026-09-02-01M1H5GGSGBF8RBPA5BB3C59B7

Three deadbolts. Rory had flipped all three the moment she'd heard the footsteps pause outside her door — slow, measured, weighted by something heavier than shoes. Nobody in East London climbed to the second floor of a curry house with that kind of patience unless they wanted something. She opened the door anyway. Lucien Moreau stood in the yellow light of the stairwell, charcoal suit immaculate despite the drizzle, one hand resting on the ivory head of his cane. Rain had darkened the shoulders of his coat. His mismatched eyes — one amber, one black — found hers and stayed there. "You changed the number." "You noticed." "I notice everything about you, Rory. It's a professional affliction." She should have shut the door. Her hand was on the wood, ready to do it, and yet her feet stayed planted on the lino. Ptolemy wound between her ankles and bolted past him into the hall, tail high, the little traitor. "Eva's not here." "I know. I watched her leave an hour ago. Blue coat, umbrella she didn't open." He tilted his head. "You're house-sitting. Books everywhere, kettle still warm, and you've made no attempt to tidy. You never tidy for yourself." "Don't profile me at midnight, Luc." "Then invite me in and I'll stop talking in a doorway." She stepped back. He crossed the threshold the way he crossed every room — as if the room should be grateful — and leaned the cane against the bookshelf, settling onto Eva's sagging sofa like it was a throne in Marseille. The hem of his coat dripped onto a stack of manuscripts on Sumerian binding rites. He moved them without looking, careful, and something in the smallness of the gesture cracked her chest open an inch. "Wine?" she said, because offering him tea felt like surrender. "You're angry." "I'm making conversation." She pulled Eva's cheap merlot from the cupboard and poured one glass, then, after a pause that lasted too long, a second. "You disappeared. Eight months. I sat across from you in that bar and told you—" The words snagged. She drank instead. "Told me you didn't do this. That whatever I was, whatever you were becoming because of me, you couldn't afford it." He accepted the glass, fingers brushing hers, deliberate. "I have the speech memorised. I replayed it in three languages." "That's not funny." "I wasn't joking. French makes it sound less pathetic. Care to hear?" "Lucien." He set the glass down untouched. The amber eye caught the lamplight; the black one swallowed it. "You asked me to go. So I went. Avaros keeps me busy, and busy is what I asked for. But then the Cheung job crossed my desk this week, and the name Carter was on it, and I discovered that eight months of an entire demonic realm's bureaucracy had not managed to kill a particular habit." "Which habit?" "Checking whether you were alive." The radiator clanked. Ptolemy jumped onto the sofa and claimed Lucien's lap with the shamelessness of his species, and Lucien — demon-blooded fixer, dealer in secrets, man who charged five hundred quid for a rumour — stroked the cat's ears like it was the most natural thing in the world. "You could have called," she said. Quieter now. "Could I have? You made it very clear, Rory. You were still bleeding from the last man who got close. I was the worst possible thing I could be — interested. So I gave you the space you were too proud to ask for." He looked up. "Tell me I miscalculated. Lie to me if you have to. It would make this easier." Her scar itched — the crescent on her wrist, the one from the bad summer, the one Evan had never asked about and Lucien had kissed once, wordless, in the back of a black cab on the Embankment. She curled her fingers around it. "You didn't miscalculate. That's the problem. You were right about everything, and I hated you for it." "I know." A ghost of a smile. "It's why I stayed away. Hating me keeps people safe. Ask anyone." "Anyone in Avaros, maybe." "Anyone, everywhere. You especially." She crossed the room and sat beside him — not close, one cushion of distance, Ptolemy sprawled between them like a fuzzy demilitarised zone. The rain ticked against the window. Downstairs, the curry house exhaust fan rattled its familiar rhythm, and somehow that ordinary sound made the whole night more unreal. "The Cheung job," she said. "Is that the only reason you came?" "No." He said it fast, before she could turn it into a joke. "The Cheung job is the reason I had an excuse. I've drafted forty-one messages to you. I deleted them. Tonight I threw my phone in the Thames and took a cab." "You threw your phone in the Thames." "A replacement is already being couriered. That's not the point." "The point being?" "The point being that I have spent three decades being a man people hire and nobody keeps, and the first time in my life I wanted to be kept, I was standing in a bar watching you convince yourself you were a liability to me." His hand stilled on Ptolemy's back. "So. I am here, uninvited, at midnight, soaked through, and I would like to know if I am wasting the trip." The wine sat cold in her stomach, sweet and unhelpful. She looked at him — at the rain-damp platinum hair, the careful hands, the eyes that never matched and never lied, not to her, not once. "If I say yes," she said, "things change. I'm not doing the orbiting thing again. No disappearing realms, no eight-month silences, no pretending we're acquaintances when everyone in this city knows better." "That sounds like terms." "Negotiable ones. I learned from the best." He set the cat aside and turned to face her fully, and for the first time since she'd known him, Lucien Moreau looked uncertain — a small, astonishing crack in all that tailored armour. "Then I accept your terms," he said, "with one amendment." "Which is?" "That you stop hiding at Eva's when things get hard, and come home. To the flat above the bar. Where your things already are, because I never had the heart to move the coat on the hook." Her breath caught. She looked at the door, at the three deadbolts she'd locked against the world, and then back at the man sitting in Eva's shabby sofa as if he'd been waiting eight months to be let in. "The coat's still there?" "Every day. I check." His voice dropped. "It's a professional affliction."