Run: 2026-09-23-01M37NVENC887K8WZGNJJWGJBJ

The third deadbolt stuck, as it always did, and Rory had to lean her shoulder into the door to coax it free. When she swung it open, the landing light had already given up again. The only glow came from the curry house sign below, bleeding red up the stairwell, and it caught him in pieces. A polished shoe. The ivory knob of a cane. One amber eye. "You've changed the locks." Rory kept her hand on the frame. "Eva's locks. Eva's flat. I'm feeding her cat." "I know." Lucien tipped his head towards the stairs behind him. "Silas told me. He also told me you'd hit me with something heavy, so I've come prepared to be hit." Rain had flattened the careful sweep of his hair, and pale strands hung across his forehead. His charcoal jacket had gone black at the shoulders. He looked like a man who'd walked from Marseille. "Six weeks," she said. "Forty-three days." "Oh, you counted. That's sweet. Did you count them from wherever you were, or did you have someone do it for you?" A muscle jumped in his jaw. He didn't step forward, and Rory hated that she noticed. Hated that some animal part of her wanted him to. Ptolemy slid between her ankles, tail up, and made a low, curious sound at the stranger on the mat. Lucien glanced down at the cat. "He likes me." "He likes the bloke who reads the gas meter. He's not a character reference." "Aurora." He never called her Rory. Not once. Everyone else wore the nickname down to nothing, but Lucien said her full name as if he'd had to pay for it, and the sound of it in that narrow stairwell dragged her straight back to his car, the heater ticking, his thumb on the crescent scar at her wrist while he asked where she'd got it. She'd told him. She never told anyone. The next morning there'd been a note on her door. Four words, in his slanted hand. *Don't look for me.* "You're dripping on Eva's mat," she said. "Then let me in, and I'll drip on Eva's floor instead." She should have shut the door. She had three deadbolts on her side and a perfectly good reason behind each one. Instead she stepped back, and he came in, and the flat shrank around him the way it did for anyone taller than Eva. He had to turn sideways to pass the tower of books by the coat hooks. A scroll case rolled off the arm of the sofa, and he caught it without looking and set it back. Rory threw the bolts. One, two, three. The clack of each felt louder than it should have. When she turned, he was standing in the middle of the room, and she saw what the stairwell had hidden. A cut ran along his cheekbone, clean and shallow, already crusting at the edges. His left hand was wrapped in a handkerchief gone rust-brown. "Christ." She crossed to him before she'd decided to. "What happened?" "A disagreement." "With a blender?" The corner of his mouth moved. It wasn't quite a smile, but it was the closest thing she'd seen on anyone's face in a month and a half that made her chest do something stupid. "With a gentleman who believed I owed him more than I did," Lucien said. "He was wrong. He's since been corrected." "Sit down." "I'm fine." "You're bleeding on a two-hundred-year-old grimoire. Sit." He looked at the book under his hand, then lifted his palm off it as if it had bitten him, and sat on the only clear corner of the sofa. Rory went into the kitchen and came back with Eva's first aid tin, a bowl of warm water, and a tea towel that had *Greetings from Tenby* printed across it. She knelt on the rug in front of him and held out her hand. He didn't give her his. "I didn't come here for this." "Then why did you come?" She kept her hand out. "Because you've made it very clear what you think of me looking for you. I assumed the reverse applied." "The note—" "Was four words, Lucien. I've had longer messages from Yu-Fei about spring rolls." He unwrapped the handkerchief and laid his hand in hers. The cut across his knuckles was deeper than the one on his face, and his skin was warmer than a human's had any right to be, even soaked through. She'd forgotten that. She'd made herself forget it. She dipped the towel and cleaned the blood away and didn't look at his face, because if she looked at his face she'd lose track of how angry she was supposed to be. "There was a man," he said, "who took an interest in you." Her hands stilled. "Not in a way you'd want," he went on. "In a way that concerned me. He'd heard I'd been seen with a woman. A human woman. He wanted to know what you were worth to me, and he was prepared to find out by taking you apart." "So you left." "So I made myself worthless to ask about." His voice stayed level, the same careful register he used on clients, and that made it worse. "If I wasn't near you, you weren't interesting. It was arithmetic." "Arithmetic." She pressed the towel harder than she needed to, and he didn't flinch. "You did sums about me. In your head. And you didn't think to show your working." "If I'd told you, you'd have argued." "Yes! Because it's my life. I get a vote." "You'd have stayed." "You don't know that." "Aurora." He waited until she looked up. Rain had caught in his lashes, and the black eye swallowed the lamplight while the amber one held it. "You'd have stayed out of spite if nothing else. I've met you." She laughed. It came out cracked, and she hated that too. "And the gentleman with opinions about what you owed?" "The same man." "So it's over." "It's over." She peeled a plaster from its backing and smoothed it across his knuckles, then another, overlapping the first. Her fingers lingered on the back of his hand longer than the job required. Neither of them mentioned it. "You could have rung," she said. "After. You could have sent a text. 'Alive, sorry, not a total bastard.' Five words. You'd only have had to go one better than last time." "I wrote it." "The text?" "Many versions." He turned his hand over under hers, so her palm lay against his. "I speak four languages, and I couldn't find a way to say it in any of them that didn't sound like asking you to forgive me." "And that's a problem because?" "Because I hadn't earned it. I still haven't." Ptolemy hopped onto the sofa beside him, kneaded the damp wool of his trousers twice, found it unacceptable, and jumped down again. Neither of them watched him go. Rory sat back on her heels. Her knees ached from the rug. Downstairs, someone shouted an order over the clatter of the kitchen, and the smell of cumin and hot oil crept up through the floorboards, the way it always did in this flat, the way it had the night she'd first moved to London and slept on this same sofa with Eva snoring in the next room and her whole life stuffed into two bin bags. She'd promised herself then that nobody would make her decisions for her again. "I cried," she said. "Did you know that? Not straight away. A week later. I was on a delivery in Whitechapel, and there was a man in a grey coat outside a betting shop, and for about half a second I thought it was you. And then I sat on a bench with somebody's chow mein going cold on my lap and bawled like an idiot." His hand tightened around hers. He said nothing, and she was grateful for it. Any word would have been the wrong one. "I'm not telling you that so you'll feel bad." "I know why you're telling me." "Do you?" "So I understand what it cost." He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, which brought his face level with hers. Close enough that she could see the fine hairline edge of the cut on his cheek, the place where the blood had dried. "I understand. I'd hoped the cost would be mine alone. That was arrogance." "That was cowardice." He took that. She watched it land and watched him not dodge it. "Yes," Lucien said. "That too." She reached up, slowly, and touched the edge of the cut on his cheek with her thumb. He went still under it, the way a man goes still when a blade is at his throat and he's decided to trust the hand holding it. "This needs cleaning," she said. "Then clean it." She didn't move for the towel. Her thumb stayed where it was, and his eyes stayed on hers, and the rain kept hammering the window above Eva's desk.