Run: 2026-09-23-01M37PMH2H9FZ9S6YFCT35R2CV

The third deadbolt stuck, the way it always did in the damp, and Rory had to lean her hip into the door before it gave. She expected Mrs Begum from the curry house with another complaint about Ptolemy pissing in the bins. She got Lucien Moreau instead, dripping on Eva's mat. Rain had flattened his hair out of its usual slick and plastered two pale strands across his forehead. His charcoal jacket had gone black at the shoulders. He held the ivory-handled cane against his thigh instead of leaning on it, like a man who wanted both hands free and hadn't decided for what. "You changed the locks." "Eva changed the locks. Eva isn't here." Rory kept her hand on the edge of the door. "And you don't get to open with that." "No." The amber eye caught the landing bulb; the black one swallowed it. "I suppose I don't." Behind her, the kettle began its low, rising complaint. Ptolemy wound through her ankles and stopped to glare at the visitor, tail twitching. "Three weeks, Luc." "Twenty-three days." "Oh, you counted. Brilliant. That makes it loads better." He flinched, a small tightening at the corner of his mouth she'd never have spotted a year ago. Rain ticked off the hem of his coat onto the lino. Somewhere below, a pan hit a burner and the smell of cumin and burnt onion climbed the stairwell. "May I come in?" "Why? So you can leave again? I've already seen that bit. Good performance. Very French. No note, no text, just a cold kettle and your side of the bed not even warm." "There was a note." "'Don't look for me' isn't a note. It's a ransom demand without the ransom." That landed. He looked down at the mat, which read *GO AWAY* in cheerful block capitals, a joke gift from Eva's sister. His lips twitched. "Appropriate." "Don't." Rory heard her voice crack on the single syllable and hated it. "Don't do the charming thing. I'm not in the mood for the charming thing." The kettle screamed. She turned from the door out of pure reflex, and when she'd snapped it off and swung back round, he was standing inside the flat with the door shut behind him. He hadn't touched a deadbolt. He had the grace to look apologetic about it. "You're dripping on Eva's notes." He stepped sideways off a stack of photocopied Sumerian tablets and onto the one bare patch of floorboard, between a crate of scrolls and a leaning tower of library books eleven months overdue. The flat had never had room for two people and a cat. It had even less for him. He filled it the way smoke fills a jar. "Tea?" "Please." "I wasn't offering. I was asking if you'd come here to drink my tea, because if so, you can bugger off back to Marseille." "I came here because you weren't at Silas's, and Silas threatened to put my head through his dartboard." "Good for Silas." "He was very sincere about it." Rory pulled down two mugs anyway, because her hands needed occupying and because her mother had raised her in a house where you made the tea even for people you wanted to throttle. She kept her back to him. It was easier to talk to the window, where rain slid down in crooked rivulets over the neon smear of the takeaway sign across the road. "Where were you?" "Avaros." The spoon stopped against the rim of the mug. "You said you'd never go back." "I said a great many things." Floorboards creaked as he shifted his weight. "Most of them were true when I said them." "That's a lawyer's answer. My dad would be proud of you." She dropped the teabags in hard enough to splash. "Why?" "Because of what happened at Southwark." She turned. He'd taken off his gloves and was holding them in one fist, kneading the leather with his thumb. She remembered that habit. She remembered a lot of his habits, which was the whole bloody problem. "I was there, Luc. I know what happened at Southwark. I'm the one who got thrown through a window." "You were the one who stopped breathing." He said it flat, like reading a figure off a ledger. "For forty seconds. I counted those as well." The kitchen went quiet except for the rain and Ptolemy's claws on the floorboards. Rory's thumb found the crescent scar on her left wrist and pressed. "And that sent you running home to Daddy." "It sent me to find out why a creature that had no quarrel with me or with you knew your name. Your *other* name." He paused. "Malphora." Something cold moved under her ribs. She set the mug down before she dropped it. "You could've told me that. You could've said, 'Rory, I'm off to hell to ask awkward questions, back soon, don't wait up.' I'd have been furious. But I'd have known." "You'd have followed me." "Obviously I'd have followed you." "*Voilà*." He spread his hands, gloves dangling. "That is why there was no note worth the name." "So you decided for me." "I decided I would rather you hated me in London than loved me in Avaros." The words came out rough, as though they'd cost him skin. His jaw worked. "I did not account for the fact that you would do both." Rory stared at him. The bulb over the sink buzzed. A drop of water rolled from his hair, down his temple, and caught on the sharp line of his cheekbone before it fell. "Who said anything about love?" "No one. That is rather the difficulty." She laughed, a short ugly bark she didn't mean, and pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. When she dropped them, he'd come two steps closer. Close enough that she could smell him under the rain: cedar, gun oil, and something scorched and mineral she had never been able to name and now suspected came from the other side. "You look terrible." "Thank you." "I mean it. You're grey. Did they hurt you?" "My father's court is not known for its hospitality." He tried for a smile and missed. "I have been hurt worse. I have rarely been so bored while it happened." "Take the coat off." "Rory—" "Take it off, or I'll take it off you, and I promise you'll enjoy that a lot less than you're imagining right now." His eyebrow rose. He shrugged out of the coat. Beneath it, the white of his shirt had gone rust-brown in a long diagonal stripe from his left shoulder to the bottom of his ribs. "Jesus Christ, Lucien." "He was not involved." "Sit down. Sit *down*." She shoved a pile of Eva's notebooks off the one kitchen chair, sending Ptolemy bolting for the bedroom, and pushed him onto it with a hand flat on his sternum. His heart hammered under her palm, much faster than his face let on. She left her hand there a second longer than she needed to. So did he. Neither of them mentioned it. She dug through the cupboard under the sink until she found Eva's first aid tin, a battered Quality Street box full of gauze, antiseptic and, for reasons Rory had never asked about, a small silver knife. "You walked across London like this." "I took a cab. The driver was very concerned about his upholstery." "I bet he was." She started on his buttons. Her fingers were steady for the first three and then stopped being steady. "Twenty-three days. You could have come back two weeks ago bleeding and I'd have still let you in." "Would you?" "No." She peeled the shirt back from the wound. It was long, clean-edged, knitting in a way no human cut should. "Yes. I don't know. I spent the first week thinking you were dead and the second thinking you'd got bored of me." He caught her wrist. Gently, his thumb resting over the scar. "I have never once been bored of you." "That's the charming thing again." "It is the true thing. They occasionally overlap." His mismatched eyes held hers, and for once there was nothing performed in them at all. "I am sorry, *chérie*. Not for going. I would go again. For leaving you to guess why." Rory didn't pull her wrist away. She soaked a square of gauze in antiseptic with her free hand and pressed it to the wound, hard. He hissed through his teeth. His grip on her didn't loosen. "That," she said, "is for the note."