Run: 2026-09-29-01M3P2B5CP3SKEE5XP5STPR0E2

The door opened four inches, the chain still hooked, and Rory looked through the gap at a charcoal lapel. Rain ran off the shoulders of the suit. Her eyes travelled up past the loosened knot of the tie, past the jaw, to platinum hair that had lost its slick and hung in wet commas over his forehead. One amber eye. One black. Both fixed on her. "Rory." "Wrong flat." "I climbed your stairs past a man who was sick in a pint glass. I am certain of the flat." She shut the door. Slid the chain off. Opened it again, wider this time, and leaned on the frame with her arms crossed so her left wrist, with its small pale crescent, pressed against her ribs where he couldn't see it. "Three weeks, Lucien. Not a text. Not a postcard from whatever gutter you crawled into." "I don't send postcards." "Clearly." Below them, the bar throbbed. Someone had fed the jukebox again, and the bass came up through the floorboards and buzzed against her bare feet. Silas's Thursday crowd. Loud enough that the neighbours would never hear a thing. Lucien shifted his weight onto the cane. The ivory handle glinted. He kept his right hand tucked against his side, and when the landing light caught it, she saw the dark stain spreading on the charcoal wool beneath his fingers. "Oh, for God's sake." She grabbed his sleeve and hauled him over the threshold. "Bleeding on my doormat. Of course." "I thought about the pavement. It seemed rude to leave it for the pigeons." "Sit." "I prefer to stand." "Sit, or I'll put you in the chair myself." He lowered himself onto the edge of her sofa, spine straight, cane planted between his knees as if he were waiting to be announced at court. She kicked the door shut behind him and threw all the locks. The delivery bag from the Golden Empress still sat on the counter, a grease spot blooming through its base, her dinner forgotten beside it. She got the first aid tin from under the sink and dropped to her knees in front of him. "Jacket." "Rory—" "Jacket, Lucien." He peeled it off in stages, jaw tight. The shirt beneath had gone the colour of rust from the ribs down. She didn't ask. She unbuttoned it, and her fingers stayed steady until they brushed his skin, warm even through the wet, and then they stopped being steady at all. He watched her hands. "You've cut your hair." "Two weeks ago. Hold still." "It suits you." "Don't." She pressed a wad of gauze to the gash along his side, and he hissed through his teeth. "You don't get to walk in here bleeding and compliment my hair." "Then what do I get to do?" "Shut up and let me stop it leaking." He did. For a full minute the only sounds were the bass below and the rain against the window, and the small wet noise of the gauze coming away red. The wound ran shallow but long, a clean slice. A blade, not a claw. She cleaned it with saline and he stared at the ceiling, and a muscle jumped in his throat each time she touched him. "Who?" she asked. "A man I owed." "Money?" "Something like it." "That's not an answer." "It is the one I have tonight." He turned his head and looked at her, and the amber eye caught the lamp and burned like a struck match. "I came because it was the nearest door I trusted." She stopped with the tape halfway off the roll. "The nearest," she said. "The nearest that would open." "It didn't. I had the chain on." "But you took it off." She tore the tape with her teeth and smoothed it down over the dressing harder than she needed to. "Don't read into it. I'd do the same for a stray dog." "I've been called worse. Rarely by someone so gentle with the dog." "I'm not gentle." "You held a gun on me in a car park in Deptford, and your hands didn't shake once. This—" His good hand lifted and hovered an inch from her wrist, where her fingers had gone still against his ribs. "This shakes." She pulled away and stood. Turned her back. Filled the kettle for something to do with her hands, and slammed it on the hob. "You said you couldn't," she said to the window. "On the arches. I asked you what you wanted, and you said not this. Not me. You said it like you were reading off a menu." Silence behind her. The cane's ferrule scraped on the floorboards. "I said not this," Lucien said. "I did not say not you." "Same thing." "In French they are different words." "We're in Bermondsey." "Rory." The sofa creaked. His shoes crossed the floor, slow, uneven, and stopped close enough that she felt the heat of him against her shoulder blades. "The people I work for do not forgive attachments. They collect them. I have watched what they do with them. I took the coward's road so your name would never reach their table." "And you didn't think to tell me that?" "I thought you would follow me into it." "You thought right." She spun round, and he stood nearer than she'd figured, the ruined shirt hanging open, blood drying at the hem. "I'd have followed you, you arrogant sod. That was my decision to make. Not yours." "Yes." "Yes?" "Yes. It was yours." He inclined his head, a small, formal movement, like a man conceding a duel. "I was wrong. I am not often wrong. I found it disagreeable." A laugh burst out of her, ugly and wet, and she pressed the back of her hand to her mouth to smother it. Behind her the kettle began to tick and mutter. His eyes tracked the movement of her hand, then dropped to her mouth, and stayed there. "Three weeks," she said, quieter. "I checked my phone like an idiot. I walked past your club twice. I let Eva think I was fine, and she knew I wasn't, and she let me lie anyway." "I watched your street every night for nine days." She stared at him. "From the roof of the launderette," he said. "I wanted to see the light in your window. Then a man with a knife saw me, and the arrangement fell apart." "You stalked me from a launderette." "I prefer to think of it as vigilance." "Christ, Lucien." "I know." The kettle screamed. Neither of them moved. Then she reached out, without looking, and shoved it off the heat, and the silence rushed back in, thick with rain and bass and the breath they both held. She lifted her hand and laid it flat against his chest, over the heart, beside the clean edge of the dressing. Beneath her palm his pulse ran fast and hard, quicker than any man's who claimed to feel nothing. "Your heart's going like a rabbit's," she said. "Blood loss." "Liar." His fingers closed around her left wrist, thumb resting on the crescent scar, and he did not let go.