Run: 2026-09-10-01M25DDPNE6VMSFD6HK88Q2TT8

The third deadbolt stuck the way it always did. Rory braced a heel against the frame, dragged it back with both hands, then pulled the door open six inches and stopped. Rain lashed the stairwell window. Downstairs, the curry house extractor fan rattled through the floorboards like a bad tooth. Ptolemy slid out from behind the radiator, wound himself between her ankles, and purred at a volume that seemed to insult the whole building. Lucien Moreau stood on the landing in a charcoal suit that had surrendered to the weather somewhere around Aldgate. Water ran off the brim of a hat she had never once seen him wear. His cane rested against the wall beside him, ivory handle catching the corridor bulb, and his eyes did what they always did — one amber, one black, both of them fixed on her like she was a page he hadn't finished reading. "You're dripping on Eva's mat." "Your mat, I think. You sleep here." "I feed the cat." Ptolemy deserted her without a backward glance and shoved his face into Lucien's shin. Lucien looked down at him the way a man might look at a lawyer who'd just changed sides. "Et tu." "He has no loyalty. It's the coat. It smells expensive." Rory kept her hand flat on the door and her shoulder against the jamb. Her left wrist caught the light, the small crescent scar pale against the rain-grey air. "Eva's not in." "I know. I watched her leave forty minutes ago. Grey coat, took the wrong umbrella." "You watched her leave." "I waited until it was only you." The extractor fan rattled. Water dripped off his hat onto the mat in a slow, patient rhythm. Rory leaned her forehead against the door edge. "You've got a phone." "I have four. You've blocked all of them and the landline at Golden Empress, which was genuinely impressive." "Yu-Fei gave you the number?" "Yu-Fei gave me a six-minute lecture about the Fourteen Koans of the Hungry Ghost and then the number. I'd have preferred the koans." "You're soaked." "I'm aware." She didn't move. Six weeks sat in the gap between them, filling it up like rising water — the club in Soho, the stairs, the fire door, his voice flat and deliberate, a liability with a pretty face, get out of my way. She'd got out of his way. She'd been two streets south when the windows went. He'd known they would. "I'm not letting you in." "Then I'll stand here and you can watch me ruin a two-thousand-pound suit." "That's a two-thousand-pound suit?" "Two thousand four hundred. There's a woman in Savile Row who despises me." Rory folded her arms. The rain kept on. Below them a delivery moped coughed and died and started again. "You could have told me," she said. "Yes." "Two words. That's all it would have taken. There's a bomb, Rory, or there's a woman upstairs with a sigil in her hand and no reason to like us, or — anything. Anything at all." "I know." "You said I was a liability." "I said a great many things with the specific intention of making you leave the building." He rotated the cane under his palm, slow, the way he did when he wanted a cigarette and had given them up for the fourth time. "It worked. I've been trying to decide ever since whether that makes me clever or unforgivable." "Where's the middle?" "There isn't one. I looked." Ptolemy had given up on the shin and gone back to the radiator, tail flicking. Rory watched him rather than Lucien, because looking at Lucien had a cost and she'd already paid it once, in instalments, for six weeks. "You could have called," she said. "After. To say you'd got out." "I did call. Twice. The first time you were in the shower. The second time you were standing in my kitchen." She looked up. "I've never stood in your kitchen." "You stood in the hallway of my building for nineteen minutes and then went home. Silas told me. He was extremely smug about it." "That man is a menace." "He's a publican. It's the same profession with better lighting." Rory laughed before she could stop it, one short breath, and hated herself for it immediately. Lucien's mouth moved, barely, the way it did when he decided not to smile because he thought it would cost him something. "Nine minutes," she said. "Nineteen." "Nine. I counted." "You counted to nine and then walked home six blocks in the wrong direction." He tipped the hat back an inch, water running off the brim. "I know, because I was at the window." The stairwell light buzzed. Somewhere down Brick Lane a siren wound up and unwound and went away. Rory pressed the back of her hand to her mouth. "Why the hat?" she said finally. "You don't wear hats." "It's raining." "You own an umbrella. I've seen the umbrella. It has a duck on the handle." "Eva gave me that umbrella. I've never forgiven her." He let the cane settle and looked at the six inches of open door, and his voice came down a register. "May I come in, Aurora. I would like to explain myself while dry. And then you can throw me out, and I'll go, and I won't come back unless you ask me to." "Unless I ask." "Yes." "That's very fair of you." "It's the least fair thing I've ever done. I'm counting on the gesture." Rory stood in the door with the rain and the smell of curry and the cat and the six weeks of it, and her hand flat on the wood, and the small scar on her wrist going white where she pressed it. "Take the hat off first," she said. "It's a nice hat. I don't want it dripping on the scrolls." Lucien removed the hat, held it out, and waited. Rory stepped back. The door swung wide, and the flat opened up behind her — every surface buried in Eva's books and scrolls and research notes, a mug of cold tea on the almanac, Ptolemy already padding across the carpet to reclaim his spot on the windowsill. "Not one word about the mess," she said. "I was raised in Marseille. I've seen worse." "You've never seen worse." "I've seen worse and I've charged people for it." He stepped in, set the hat on the coat rack's empty hook as if he'd lived there all along, and paused just past the threshold, close enough that she could smell rain and cedar and something underneath that she had spent six weeks not thinking about. "Rory." "Don't." "I haven't said anything yet." "You were going to say it with the face."