Run: 2026-09-23-01M37P69SY8GQZ5VW38RJGVYX0

The third deadbolt stuck, the way it always did, and Rory had to lean her hip into the door and wrench it sideways before it gave. She had the chain still on. Eva had drilled that into her the first week. Chain on, always, until you've seen a face. She saw a face. Lucien stood on the landing with rain dripping off the brim of nothing, because Lucien didn't own a hat, only that slicked-back blond hair gone dark and flat against his skull. His charcoal suit had soaked through at the shoulders. Steam and cumin climbed the stairwell behind him from the curry house kitchen, and the bare bulb above his head buzzed and flickered, lighting one eye amber and leaving the other a pit. "Eva isn't here." "I know." He shifted his weight onto the ivory-handled cane. "I didn't come for Eva." Rory kept her hand on the door. The chain sat between them, a thin gold line at the height of his collarbone. "Six weeks, Lucien." "Forty-three days." "Oh, you counted. Brilliant. That makes it loads better." He didn't smile. He usually smiled, that crooked, bored half-thing he wore like a pocket square, and the absence of it did something unpleasant to her stomach. Water ran off his cuff and pooled on the floorboards. "May I come in?" "You didn't ask last time. You didn't ask anything. You left a note on my pillow, Luc. A note. Four languages and you managed eleven words in one of them." "Twelve." "I'm not counting the signature." Something moved at her ankles. Ptolemy wound between her feet and thrust his striped head through the gap, sniffing at Lucien's wet shoes with the grave attention of a customs officer. Lucien looked down at the cat. The cat looked up at him. Ptolemy chirped, then sat down on the threshold and started licking his own shoulder, as if he'd reached a verdict and couldn't be bothered to announce it. "He likes me." "He likes the bloke who reads the gas meter. He's got no standards." "And you?" She shut the door in his face. For three seconds she stood with her forehead against the painted wood, listening to her own pulse and the extractor fan rattling downstairs. Then she slid the chain free and opened it again, because leaving him out there dripping felt petty, and she had decided somewhere around day twenty that she would not let him make her petty. "Shoes off. Eva will murder you if you track rain onto her notes." He stepped past her. He brought the cold in with him, the wet-slate smell of the street and under it something warmer, cloves and struck matches, the scent she'd once caught on her own jumper for two days after he'd lent it back. The flat swallowed him. There wasn't room in it for a man who carried himself the way Lucien did, all long lines and tailoring. He had to turn sideways to clear the stack of bound manuscripts by the coat hooks, and his elbow brushed a tower of index cards that swayed and settled. Rory shot the three bolts home. One, two, three. The third stuck again. "Let me." "Touch that lock and I'll feed you to the cat." His hand stopped an inch from hers. She could feel the heat off his skin. She shoved the bolt across on her own and turned around, and he was close, closer than the hallway had any right to make him, and she had to tip her chin to meet his eyes. "Why are you here?" "You changed your number." "I got a new phone." "You changed your number, and you told Yu-Fei that if a Frenchman came into the Golden Empress asking for you, she should tell him you'd moved to Leeds." "She wasn't supposed to tell you that." "She didn't. She told me you'd moved to Leeds. With a face like she'd swallowed a wasp." He set the cane against the wall, carefully, between a box of scrolls and a dead spider plant. "Nobody moves to Leeds, Aurora." Hearing her full name in his mouth hurt more than it should have. He rounded the vowels the way no one in Cardiff ever had. "Plenty of people move to Leeds." "Not you." She walked past him into the main room because she needed somewhere to put her hands. The kettle sat on the hot plate next to a stack of Eva's journals on Akkadian binding circles. She filled it. She didn't offer him tea. She got two mugs down anyway. He stayed in the doorway, rain still beading on the shoulders of his jacket. He didn't take it off. Lucien always took his jacket off; he treated wet fabric like a personal insult. "You're hurt." "I'm damp." "You're holding your left side like it owes you money." A pause. Then, quietly, "It's nothing that won't close." She put the mug down hard enough that tea sloshed onto a page of Eva's handwriting. She swore, grabbed a tea towel, blotted. "Is that why you left? Somebody opened you up and you didn't want me watching you bleed?" "No." "Then why?" He crossed the room. Three steps did it; the flat allowed nothing more. He took the tea towel out of her hand, folded it, set it on the counter, and she let him, because her fingers had started to shake, and she hated that. "Because the night on Silas' roof, you asked me what I was more afraid of. Do you remember?" She remembered. The bar noise leaking up through the tar. The gas holders black against an orange sky. Her shoulder touching his, and neither of them moving it away. "You didn't answer." "I didn't answer because the true answer was you." He said it flat, the way he quoted prices to clients, and it landed harder for it. "And the next morning, a man I owe a very old debt sent word that he wanted your name. Not mine. Yours. He'd seen us together. He'd seen that I cared." Rory stared at him. "So you ran." "So I went to Marseille and I paid what I owed with things I will not describe in your friend's kitchen, and I made him forget he'd ever heard it." His mismatched eyes held hers. "I didn't write more than twelve words because anything longer would have been a lie or a confession, and I couldn't afford either." "You could've told me." "You'd have come." "Yeah." Her throat had gone tight. "I would've. That's the bloody point, Luc. You don't get to decide what I'm allowed to risk." "I know that now." "Now." "Forty-three days is a long time to sit with being wrong." Ptolemy leapt onto the counter between them, scattering index cards, and planted himself on the open journal. Neither of them moved him. Rory reached out and pulled the lapel of his jacket aside. He let her. The white shirt underneath had a rust-coloured bloom spreading below his ribs, fresh enough to shine. Her thumb grazed the edge of it and he inhaled through his teeth, and she felt the breath move through him. "Nothing that won't close." "It's closing." "It's leaking on Eva's floor." "Then I'll buy her a new floor." She almost laughed. It came out wrong, cracked in the middle, and she pressed her lips together to stop it becoming anything else. His hand came up. He didn't touch her face. He turned her left wrist over instead, gently, and ran the pad of his thumb along the small pale crescent there, the scar she'd got falling off the garden wall at seven, the one he'd asked about on the roof and she'd told him the whole stupid story, and he'd listened like it was state secrets. "I thought about this," he murmured. "Of all the things. This." "My scar." "The way you laughed telling me about it." She should have pulled her hand back. She knew the exact second she should have pulled it back, and she watched it go past. "Take the jacket off," she told him. "Sit down. Eva's got a first-aid kit under the Sumerian tablets, and if you bleed on those, not even I can save you." He didn't let go of her wrist. "Rory." "I'm still angry." "Good." "I mean it. I'm going to be angry for a while." "I'll wait." His thumb stilled on the scar. "I'm told I count well."