Run: 2026-09-23-01M37P1EQR5BDQ86ST6R0D3H7M

The third deadbolt jammed the way it always did, and Rory wrestled it open with the heel of her hand before pulling the door wide. Lucien Moreau stood in the stairwell with rain sheeting off his shoulders, his platinum hair plastered against his temple in a way she'd never seen before. No polish. No smirk. Water pooled around the ferrule of his ivory-handled cane on Eva's doormat. "Rory." She started pushing the door shut. The cane's tip shot out and wedged against the frame, and for a moment they were both just leaning — her weight against the wood, his against the brass-handled stick between them. "Three months, Lucien. Three months of nothing, and you show up at eleven at night on a Thursday?" "Three nights ago, a man named Evan Whitmore bought a tracking charm from a broker in Whitechapel." The name hit her like cold water down the collar. Her grip on the door loosened. Not enough to let him in. Enough that he noticed. "Your ex has been asking questions in the wrong places," he went on, and his voice — that low Marseille drawl she'd taught herself to stop hearing in her sleep — stayed level, almost gentle. "The kind of places where the answers come with teeth. He has your photograph. He has your old name. He does not, yet, have your address, because I have been making certain of it." "You've been — what?" She stepped back before she could stop herself, and he crossed the threshold like he'd been invited, shaking rain off his coat onto Eva's stacks of research notes. "You've been watching him? For three months? While you couldn't spare me so much as a text?" "You were safer not knowing." Ptolemy appeared from behind a fortress of folklore textbooks, took one look at the half-demon in the doorway, and wound around his ankles purring like a hair dryer. Traitor. Rory scooped the cat up and held him against her chest like a shield. "You don't get to decide what keeps me safe. That's not — you don't get to do that." "I'm aware." Something in his jaw shifted. "May I sit? It's something of a long story." "You can stand in the rain on the landing, where you've apparently been living." He exhaled through his nose — the closest thing to a laugh she'd gotten out of him in half a year — and moved toward the sofa anyway, and that was when she saw it. The dark stain spreading along his left side, charcoal fabric hiding most of it but not the way he carried the ribs above it, stiff, like the muscles there had turned to poured concrete. "You're bleeding." "It's a scratch." "Lucien." She dumped Ptolemy onto the cushions, grabbed his sleeve, and pulled the jacket open before he could object. The shirt beneath was soaked through, and not with rain. A gash sat just above his hip, shallow but long, the kind a knife makes when someone twists it on the way out. "A scratch. From what?" "From a broker in Whitechapel who felt the price of my questions was insufficient." He lowered himself onto the sofa with a grace that fooled nobody. "His associate disagreed with my exit. Loudly." She was already moving — Eva's bathroom, the first aid kit under the sink, because of course Eva had a proper one, suture thread and iodine and everything, because Rory's life had taught her that every flat she loved came stocked for emergencies. She came back with the kit and a kitchen chair and pointed at the chair. "Shirt off. Sit." "How commanding. The barrister's daughter emerges." "The delivery driver with a needle emerges. Shirt. Off." He undid his buttons one by one, and she busied herself threading the suture while he did it, because watching was not an option. But then the shirt came off and she had to look, had to map the terrain of him — the old scar below his collarbone from the night he'd stepped between her and a man with a gun, the lean muscle of his stomach, the fresh wound weeping red down toward his waistband. "You taught me these stitches," she said, kneeling beside the chair, pressing gauze to the gash. He hissed through his teeth. "On an orange, in the back room of that club in Soho. You said, a person who can sew is never helpless." "I remember." "You said a lot of things that night." She worked the needle through his skin. He didn't flinch, but his hand found the arm of the chair and gripped it until his knuckles went the colour of his hair. "You said you'd teach me how to disappear properly. You said you'd come back the next evening with papers. You said —" she pulled the thread taut, a little tighter than the wound strictly required — "you said you'd be there when I woke up." "Rory." "I made two cups of coffee, Lucien. I drank both of them. It was the worst coffee I've ever had, because Eva's machine is a war crime, and I drank both cups because you were supposed to be in the second one." His free hand came up and closed over hers — over the needle, over the wound, over all of it — and his skin was fever-warm and his mismatched eyes, one amber and one void-black, held hers with a steadiness that made her chest ache. "I watched you sleep," he said. "The last morning. You were on your side, and your hair was across the pillow, and I thought — my father's people found my mother when I was four years old. They found her because someone who loved her got careless. I stood in that doorway and I understood that the most dangerous thing in your life wasn't Evan. It was me, wanting to stay." "So you left." "So I left. I told myself it was noble." His thumb moved across her knuckles, a stroke so light she might have imagined it. "It was cowardice wearing noble's coat." The rain hammered the window. Ptolemy had claimed the far end of the sofa and was watching them with the smug indifference of a creature who had never once been stupid about another person. Rory looked down at their hands, at the needle still pinched between her fingers, at the blood on her glove. "Finish the stitches," she said. "Then you're going to tell me everything about Evan. The broker, the charm, all of it. And then —" her voice cracked, and she hated it, and she pushed through it — "then you're going to say the thing you didn't say that morning. Because I've spent three months building a life around the silence where it should have been, and I'm done furnishing it." He was quiet for a long moment. Then he lifted her hand — the one with the needle, the one with the blood, the one with the little crescent scar on the wrist — and pressed his lips to her knuckles. "Finish sewing me up, Rory," he murmured against her skin, "and I'll say it until you believe me."