Run: 2026-09-23-01M36WZXTJF41P2ZA3SQ9VB467

The three deadbolts clicked into place one at a time, and Rory still checked the chain she'd screwed into the frame herself. Old habits from a life she'd left in Cardiff, reinforced by eight months in London and a door that rattled in its jamb whenever the curry house downstairs fired up its tandoor. Ptolemy wound between her ankles, his tail a metronome against the shin of her jeans. "You're not getting tuna tonight. Eva said you had a pouch this morning." The cat answered with a warble that sounded like complaint, and Rory dropped to one knee to scratch behind his ears. The flat smelled of cardamom rising through the floorboards and old paper — Eva's research notes had colonized every surface, spilling from the desk to the windowsill to the narrow strip of counter where the kettle lived. Rory had learned to navigate around them the way sailors learn a reef. The knock came at nine-seventeen. She knew the time because she glanced at her phone — face-down on the stack of encyclopedias — when the first knuckle hit wood. Three raps. Even pressure. Patient. Not Silas. Silas banged like he was trying to cave the door in. She stood, wiped her palm on her thigh, and pulled the chain free before she thought about it. The second deadbolt followed. On the third, her fingers paused on the cold brass. "Rory." His voice carried through the wood, unhurried, the vowels rounded and softened by Marseille before London took them on. "I can hear you deliberating." She opened the door. Lucien Moreau filled the frame like a photograph cut to fit. Charcoal suit, pressed to a knife's crease, the ivory handle of his cane hooked over one gloveless hand. His platinum hair was slicked back from a forehead unmarked by worry, and his mismatched eyes — amber and black, the pair that had unsettled her the first time she'd looked into them and fascinated her the tenth — held hers without blinking. He'd grown a shadow of stubble along his jaw. It softened him. She hated that she noticed. "You're not welcome here." "I'm aware." He didn't move. The hallway behind him was dark; someone had killed the bulb two weeks ago and nobody had bothered. "May I come in?" "No." His mouth shifted — not quite a smile, more like the memory of one, which was worse. "Then I'll say what I need to say from the corridor, and your neighbours can hear it, and Ptolemy can hear it." "You know the cat's name." "I know most things." He shifted his weight, the cane tapping once against the threshold. "Eva's in Ghent. She left three days ago and didn't tell you, which means she doesn't want you following her, which means she's doing something reckless. I'm here because whatever she's dragging up from the Avaric texts, it's going to open doors she can't close." Rory leaned against the jamb, arms folded. The corridor's single window let in the orange wash of a streetlight, and it caught the amber of his left eye and left the right one a flat, depthless black. She'd forgotten how strange it looked. She hadn't forgotten how it made her feel. "Eva's a big girl." "Eva is brilliant and stubborn and half-convinced she's invincible. You know this. You also know that the last time someone underestimated what lives behind those texts, you ended up in a stairwell in Whitechapel with your wrist bleeding through your sleeve." The crescent scar tingled. She pressed her thumb against it through the denim. "That was your mess, Lucien." "Agreed. Which is why I'm cleaning it up." He took a half-step forward, and she didn't step back, so they stood close enough that she caught the scent of him — bergamot and cold air and something underneath that had no name, something that lived in the space between human and whatever his father had been. "I need the ledger Eva pulled from the Mireille collection. The one with the silver clasp." "She didn't leave it with me." "Then where?" "Around. Hidden. Somewhere you won't find it if I throw you out." A beat. His jaw worked. The cane's ivory handle creaked under his grip. "You haven't asked why I came to you instead of going to the ledger myself." "Because you can't find it. Because Eva trusts me with her hiding spots and she doesn't trust you. Because you burned that bridge the night you chose your client over me in that basement, and you've spent six months pretending the choice was complicated." The words came out level, rehearsed only in the sense that she'd said them to herself enough times that they'd worn smooth. She watched them land. He didn't flinch, but the tendons in his gloved hand tightened, and he transferred the cane to his other grip — a tell she'd catalogued in the early weeks when she'd still been learning the vocabulary of him. "It was complicated." "It was simple. You just didn't like the answer." Silence settled between them, heavy as the curry-house steam that seeped under the door. Ptolemy, unimpressed with the tension, trotted out and wound around Lucien's ankle. The cat had never done that to a stranger. Lucien looked down, and something in his expression cracked — just a fracture, there and gone, the way a hairline runs through glass. "He remembers me." "Cats are stupid like that." "Rory." The use of the nickname stopped her. He'd only ever called her that twice — once in the back of a black cab with her hand wrapped around his forearm, once in his flat in Marylebone when the power had cut and they'd sat in the dark and he'd traced the line of her jaw with one finger and whispered *Rory* like it was a question he didn't want answered. After the basement, he'd reverted to Aurora. Formal. Distant. A wall built from a single syllable. She unfolded her arms. Let her hands hang at her sides. "If I let you in, you take the ledger and you leave. No explanations. No—" She stopped, bit down on the inside of her cheek. "No standing in my kitchen pretending the last six months were a negotiation." "I won't pretend anything." "You never do. That's the problem. You state things like they're verdicts and expect everyone to accept the ruling." His eyes — both of them, amber and void — stayed on her face, reading it the way he read contracts, searching for the clause she'd buried. He had a talent for finding what people tried to hide. It was what made him good at his work and impossible to keep at arm's length. "One hour," he said. "Give me the ledger, and if what's inside it is what I suspect, you'll want to hear it before Eva does whatever she plans to do in Ghent." "You're making it sound urgent so I'll open the door." "I'm making it sound urgent because it is." He straightened, and the streetlight caught the edge of his cane's ferrule, a dull gleam of steel. "But I also want to come in. Those two things can be true." The honesty of it hung in the air, raw and undeserved. She looked past him, at the dark corridor, the dead bulb, the stairwell that led down to Silas' bar where the low murmur of closing time filtered up through the stairwell like distant surf. She stepped back. Lucien crossed the threshold, his shoes quiet on Eva's cluttered floor. He navigated the drifts of paper without disturbing a single page, which meant he'd been here before — probably while she was out on delivery runs, probably while she trusted the three deadbolts to mean something. He stopped in the middle of the room, took in the stacks of scrolls, the tabby twining around his legs for a second time, the kettle and the single mug with a hairline crack running through its glaze. "Homey," he said. "It's not mine." "No." He turned, and the full weight of his gaze settled on her again. "It isn't."