Run: 2026-09-23-01M37QAENQCQ2CAKSWK6WB3556

The third deadbolt stuck, the way it always did, and Rory had to lean her hip into the door to coax it free. Ptolemy wound between her ankles, complaining about the hour. "If you're another bloody Jehovah's Witness," she told the wood, "I've got a cat and no patience." She pulled the door open. Lucien stood on the landing with the curry house steam curling up the stairwell behind him, rain beaded across the shoulders of his charcoal suit. One hand rested on the ivory head of his cane. The other hung at his side, empty, as though he'd rehearsed holding something and then thought better of it. The amber eye found her first. The black one took longer. "Rory." "No." She started to close the door. The tip of his cane slid into the gap. He didn't push. He just left it there, a polished ivory question. "Six weeks, Luc." She stared down at the cane, then up at him. "Six weeks and a note that said *don't look for me*. On the back of a receipt. From Pret." "It was the only paper I had." "You speak four languages and you couldn't find a pen and a napkin?" His mouth twitched. It wasn't a smile. It was the ghost of one, and it made her furious that she still knew the difference. "May I come in?" "This isn't my flat." "I know. It's Eva's. She's in Edinburgh until Sunday, and you've been feeding the cat." He glanced down at Ptolemy, who had planted himself on the threshold and was glaring at the cane with feline contempt. "Hello, Ptolemy." "Don't talk to him. He's on my side." "He usually is." Rory folded her arms. The draught from the stairwell bit through her jumper. Downstairs, someone dropped a tray and a chorus of Bengali swearing floated up with the smell of fenugreek. "How did you know I was here?" "I asked Silas." "Silas wouldn't tell you what day it was." "Silas," Lucien said, "owes me a considerable amount of money." She should have shut the door. She should have kicked his cane out of the way and thrown all three deadbolts and gone back to Eva's lumpy sofa and the reheated korma going cold on the arm. Instead she noticed the cut along his jaw, half-healed, and the way he held his weight off his left leg. "You're hurt." "I'm standing." "That's not an answer." "It's the one I have." He tilted his head toward the flat. "Five minutes. Then, if you want, I'll go, and I won't come back." "You said that last time. In writing. On a sandwich receipt." "I meant it last time." "And now?" He didn't answer. Rain dripped from the hem of his jacket onto Eva's doormat, which read *GO AWAY* in cheerful block letters. Rory had always found it funny. She didn't now. She stepped back. Lucien came in slowly, like a man entering a church he'd once burned down. He had to angle himself sideways to get past the stack of books by the door, a teetering tower of Sumerian grammars and something bound in cracked green leather. His shoulder brushed a sheaf of Eva's notes pinned to the wall and sent two pages fluttering to the floor. He bent for them. His breath hitched. "Leave them." Rory crouched and snatched the pages up before he could. Up close he smelled of rain and cedar and something beneath it, scorched and metallic, like a struck match held too long. "Sit down before you fall down." "I'm not going to—" "Sit." He sat. The sofa groaned. Ptolemy leapt up beside him, sniffed the cane, and settled on the far cushion with his back turned, a small striped statue of disapproval. Rory stayed standing. She kept the coffee table between them, a narrow barricade of teacups and scrolls. "Go on, then. Five minutes." Lucien laid the cane across his knees. His thumb traced the seam where the blade hid inside the shaft, back and forth, back and forth. "The night at the Harrow," he said. "When you asked me who'd hired the men at the docks." "You said you didn't know." "I lied." She'd known. She'd known the moment he said it, the way she'd known with Evan, that particular flatness in the voice that meant a door had closed somewhere behind the eyes. Knowing it hadn't stopped the words from landing like a slap now. "Who was it?" "My father's people." He said *father* the way other men said *cancer*. "They wanted leverage. Something I'd protect. They'd noticed I'd been spending time with a delivery girl from the Golden Empress who asked far too many clever questions." Rory's throat tightened. "So you ran." "So I went to Avaros and made them an offer." He looked up. The black eye swallowed the lamplight. "I bought you out." "Bought me." "Your name. Off their ledger. It's not a metaphor, Rory. There's an actual book." "With what?" His thumb stopped moving on the cane. "Luc. With *what?*" "Six weeks," he said. "Give or take. And a few other things that aren't worth discussing." She stared at the cut on his jaw. At his leg. At the way his hands, always so steady when he poured wine or palmed a card or lied to a room full of people who wanted him dead, weren't quite steady now. "You didn't ask me." "No." "You didn't *ask* me. You decided what I could handle and then you vanished and left me to think—" Her voice cracked and she hated it, hated the heat climbing her neck. "Do you know what I thought? I thought I'd done it again. Picked someone who'd look at me and decide I was something to be managed." Lucien flinched. It was small, a tightening at the corner of the amber eye, but she saw it. "That's not what I—" "It's exactly what you did. You just did it with better tailoring." Silence. The radiator ticked. Downstairs, the kitchen extractor fan roared to life, and the floorboards hummed under her socks. "You're right," he said. It knocked the wind out of her more than any argument could have. She'd built the fight in her head for six weeks, every counterpoint, every cutting line, and he'd just stepped aside and let it fall through empty air. "Don't do that." "Do what?" "Agree with me. You never agree with me." "I've never been this wrong before." He set the cane on the floor and leaned forward, elbows on his knees, closing some of the distance the coffee table kept between them. "I'm not here to be forgiven. I'm here because there was a thing I should have said at the Harrow, and I didn't, and then I spent six weeks in a place where the sky is the colour of a bruise, thinking about the fact that I'd never said it." Rory's pulse thudded in the crescent scar on her wrist. She pressed her thumb over it. "So say it." He opened his mouth. Closed it. For the first time since she'd met him, Lucien Moreau looked like a man who'd run out of languages. Ptolemy chose that moment to stand, stretch, and pad across the sofa into Lucien's lap, where he turned twice and lay down with a heavy, deliberate sigh. Lucien looked down at the cat. Then at her. "Traitor," Rory whispered, and her voice came out wrong, softer than she'd meant. She stepped around the coffee table.