Run: 2026-09-23-01M36VT53SYQMF70BE4K4GXD88

The third deadbolt stuck before it turned. Rory put her shoulder into the door and felt the frame give, and the landing light caught a charcoal sleeve, an ivory cane head, and a face she had scrubbed out of her memory in every way except the important ones. Lucien filled the narrow doorframe of Eva's flat like he owned the corridor behind him. "Before you close it." He raised one hand, palm out, rings catching the light. "Five minutes." "You get two." She kept her hand on the edge of the door. "How did you find this address?" "I find things. It's the whole trade." His eyes moved past her shoulder into the flat — the stacks of books eating the sofa, the scrolls weighted down with mugs, Ptolemy stretched across a pile of research notes like he was guarding state secrets. One amber eye, one black. Both settled back on her. "You cut your hair." "Eva's asleep. Keep your voice down." "Eva is in Prague. She left on the 7:40 from Paddington, standard class, window seat, and she took the Cabal letters with her." Lucien shifted his weight onto the cane. "Which means you are here alone with a cat and three deadbolts that wouldn't stop a determined child." Rory felt the flat behind her change shape. She leaned against the door and studied the way his knuckles sat on the ivory handle — white at the joints, no tremor in him, none at all. "You counted my friend's locks." "I counted everything. Old habit." He smiled with half his mouth. "You look well, Carter." "Don't." "Rory." "You don't get that one either." She held out her hand and caught Ptolemy, who had wound himself around her ankle with a chirp that made Lucien's mouth twitch. She shut the door on that twitch and left it on the latch so Eva's third lock stayed useless. Inside, the curry smell from the shop below had worked itself into the pages again. Lucien stepped in and the flat shrank to a cupboard. He touched nothing. His gaze tracked along the desk — Eva's diagrams, the red string, the photograph of the Marseille waterfront that Rory had turned face-down the week after she met him and had not turned back over. He turned it up with one finger. "I want that flat on the table and nowhere else," she said. "It was a good night." He released the photograph. "You danced with a waiter and told him your real name." "You told me afterwards that he reported to the Congregatio. That you'd known for six weeks." "Four." "Four." She set Ptolemy on the armchair. The cat circled twice and dropped. "You let me walk into a room full of people who wanted to know where the Carter girl had been living, and you watched me hand out my name like sweets." "And I got you out." "After." She pressed her thumb into the crescent scar on her left wrist, the way she did when a room got loud inside her head. "After I had already told them everything except where my parents live. You got me out after you used me to find out who in the Congregatio wanted me, and you didn't tell me until the taxi." Lucien's jaw set. He leaned the cane against the bookshelf and stood without it, both feet flat on Eva's rug, and he looked younger when he did that and she hated that she noticed. "You were bait." He said it the way a man states a price. "Yes. You were the cleanest bait I had, and I took it, and I would do it again because you are breathing and they are not." "You don't get to make that trade for me." "No. I don't." He looked at the desk again, at the notes, and she watched him read them the way other people breathe. "This is why I'm here. The Congregatio lost its file on you in February, and someone picked it up on Tuesday, and by Thursday it had been copied twice. One copy is in this building." The flat went quiet in a new way. Ptolemy's ear rotated toward the window. "You could have sent this." "I sent nothing. I came." "Then you're an idiot." She moved to the window and put the curtain an inch aside. Brick Lane ran wet under the lights, a man in a red jacket walking a dog he didn't have on a leash. "Who has the copy?" "A woman who calls herself Hélène. She works out of a shop on Fashion Street and she owes me money instead of favours, which is worse, because favours expire." Lucien crossed the flat in three steps and stood close enough that she caught his cologne — bergamot, and something underneath it that no human skin made. "She has photographs of you. Cardiff ones. Your mother's car. Your father's chambers." Rory let the curtain fall. Her reflection looked back at her in the dark glass, and behind it Lucien's, and the two of them stood framed together like something she had drawn badly in a notebook at seventeen and burned. "If you're here to trade me again—" "I'm here because I read the file she made and I found your father's address in it." His voice dropped. "And I drove here instead of to Cardiff. Two hours past my exit. My driver has been circling Bethnal Green since half eleven." She turned around. The flat kept its distance, all those books leaning away from them in their towers. "Two hours past your exit," she repeated. "I know what the exit looks like. I take it every month." "You've never taken it." "I have taken it every month since June." He held her gaze and did not blink, and the black eye gave nothing back while the amber one burned. "I sit in the car at the end of your parents' road and I make sure no one sits there longer than I do, and then I go back to London and I do not knock on their door because that is not mine to do." Rory's chest did something she refused to name. She picked up a scroll and put it down again and swept Eva's notes into a stack with the edge of her hand. "You don't get to tell me you were outside my mother's house for eight months and call that—" "It's not a claim on anything." "It's worse than a claim." She looked at him and the words came out thin. "A claim I could have refused." Lucien reached past her and turned the photograph face-down again. His sleeve brushed her wrist, at the scar, and he stopped there with his hand over the picture and did not move it away. "You can still refuse this one." "Which one is that?" He didn't answer. Down on the street, the man with the invisible dog passed the curry house again, the same direction, and Ptolemy stood up on the armchair with his tail thick and low.