Run: 2026-09-03-01M1KZKB6PT2T8HHKRMMXNCGMW

The kettle had boiled when the knock came. Rory stilled, mug halfway to the shelf. Steam curled around her left wrist, and the crescent scar there stood pale against the heat. The smell of cumin and fried onions rose through the floorboards from the curry house below, fighting the old-paper scent of Eva's research notes. Books covered the table, scrolls weighed down the arm of the sofa, and Ptolemy, the tabby, lifted his head from a pile of annotated maps. Three deadbolts held the door. She had thrown all three the moment she let herself in, same as every night since she'd agreed to cat-sit. The knock came again, firmer. Not Eva's tap. Not the takeaway bloke from downstairs. Rory set the mug down. She crossed the cramped hall, dodging a stack of journals, and flipped the first deadbolt. The second. The third resisted; she put her shoulder into it and the metal gave with a clunk. Her delivery bag sat by the wall, soy and garlic clinging to the canvas. She didn't look at it. She opened the door. Lucien Moreau stood in the dim landing, one hand curved around the ivory head of his cane, the other braced on the frame above her. Rain dotted his charcoal suit, darkening the wool at his shoulders. His platinum hair was slicked back, not a strand out of place, and his mismatched eyes—amber and void-black—traveled over her face like a man checking a wound for infection. Her fingers tightened on the door's edge. The scar on her wrist burned. "Rory." The syllable dropped between them, French-edged and careful. He didn't step forward. He waited, the way a man waits at the edge of a cliff. Ptolemy wound around his trouser leg, tail high. Lucien's gaze flicked down, then back up. "You've got a bloody nerve." His mouth curved, but the expression didn't reach his eyes. "I counted three deadbolts and a cat with a vendetta. I assumed you were alone." He glanced at the tea towel on her shoulder. "I should have known you'd open the door armed with nothing but a tea towel and righteous fury." Her free hand found the tea towel slung over her shoulder. She didn't throw it. Yet. "Assume again. Eva's due back Sunday. If you've come to case the place—" He shifted his weight. "I came for you." The words hit the hall harder than the knock. Behind her, the kettle's whistle died to a low rumble. Rory held her ground, shoulder against the doorjamb, and let the silence stretch until it hurt. "The last time we stood like this, you told me to walk away." Her shoulder pressed harder into the wood. "I recall a great deal of shouting." Lucien's cane tapped once against the threshold, a dull sound that matched the pulse in her scar. "You said I used people. You said I'd end up alone in that suit, counting my money in an empty flat." "You did use me." "Yes." The word carried no hesitation. "And you let me. You stood in my office with rain in your hair and told me you could handle the Malphora job alone. You were brilliant. You were also wrong." The alias hit her like a slap. Malphora. The name she'd shed after Cardiff—after Evan—the name Lucien had stitched onto a set of false papers and a real danger. She hadn't heard it spoken aloud in eight months. "Don't." Her voice dropped. "Don't say that name in Eva's flat." He shifted his weight, and the hallway light caught the blade hidden in the cane's shaft; the hint of steel showed at the collar. She had seen it slide free often enough. "It's why I'm here." He shifted his weight again, and the motion drew her eye to the blade's collar. "A contract surfaced in the market last night. Payment in blood-notes, delivery to a collector I've been hunting for a year. The target name was Malphora." She stopped breathing for a beat. Then she forced air past her teeth. "So the Frenchman needs a favour." She kept her tone flat, but her thumb worried the crescent scar. "That's rich. You dump me at a bus stop, vanish for most of a year, and now you're on my friend's doormat because some arsehole wrote my old name on a shopping list." His amber eye narrowed; the black one stayed fathomless. "I did not vanish." "You might as well have. No calls. No messages. Not even a bloody postcard from Marseille." She stepped back and let the door widen, and he didn't move to enter. "You know what the worst part was? I kept checking. Every time I delivered to that stupid Golden Empress office, every time I passed a bloke in a charcoal suit, I looked. Pathetic, right?" Lucien's hand tightened on the cane. "If I had come back—" She cut him off, the tea towel balled in her fist. "You'd have dragged me into another one of your messes. That's your answer for everything. Protection. You think I can't see the difference between shielding someone and shutting them out." He took one step forward, into the flat, close enough that the wet wool of his sleeve brushed her bare arm. "Can you? Tell me, Aurora. When you left, did you leave because I lied? Or because I touched you?" The question landed low in her belly. She hated that he could still do that, hated the way her body remembered the exact pressure of his hand at the small of her back, the scrape of his teeth on her lower lip in the back of a black cab, the taste of him—rain and something like burnt sugar. Her gaze dropped to his mouth. Big mistake. He saw it. His throat worked as he swallowed. "I left because you made me choose." She lifted her chin, pulse jumping under the scar. "And you already knew I'd pick the version where I survive." His free hand lifted, giving her time to stop it, and pushed a strand of black hair behind her ear. The backs of his fingers grazed her cheek. "I never wanted you to survive at the cost of feeling nothing. I wanted you safe. I was wrong about the method." She caught his wrist before he could pull away. His pulse jumped under her thumb, strong and fast, and the contact shot heat up her arm to the scar on her left wrist. His skin was warm, rough from rain-chill, and the urge to step in, to press her mouth to the place where his collar met his throat, hit her hard enough to rock her back a half-step. "Damn you." The words came out thinner than she intended. "You don't get to turn up here, say things like that, and expect me to—" "To what?" Lucien's voice roughened. "Forgive me? Fight me? Let me help you find the person who put a price on a name you begged me to bury?" She held his wrist, trapped between them, and felt the tiny blade hidden in the cane press against her shin. The cat darted past, indignant. Outside, a bus hissed on Brick Lane, and the curry house's extractor fan rattled the floor. "Tell me the truth. All of it. Why now? Why me?" His gaze dropped to her mouth again, lingered. "Because the collector wants you found." He leaned in, the scent of him wrapping around her. "And because there isn't a fixer in this city I trust to keep you alive except me." Her fingers tightened on his wrist. He didn't pull free. If anything, he leaned in, the scent of him wrapping around her, and she knew she should shove him back into the hall, bolt all three locks, and call Eva. She also knew she wouldn't. Not yet. "Then you'd better come in." Her grip on his wrist stayed firm. "But you keep the cane where I can see it." A beat passed. Lucien's mouth curved, real this time, and he stepped fully into the flat, Ptolemy twining around his ankles as if the traitor had been paid in dreamies.