Run: 2026-09-29-01M3P2BREXBP2Y4674VYJJD7F8

The first deadbolt slid back with a clack. The second stuck, as it always did, until Rory thumped the door with the heel of her hand. The third gave way, and she pulled the door open on its chain. Lucien Moreau stood on the landing with rain beading on the shoulders of his charcoal suit. The stairwell bulb buzzed above him and turned his platinum hair the colour of old piano keys. He leaned on the ivory-handled cane with both hands. One amber eye and one black eye met hers and held. "You look terrible," she said. "And you have three locks on a door that any child could kick in." He glanced at the deadbolts. "Yet I counted them all the same. Bonsoir, Aurora." "Don't Aurora me." She kept the chain on. The smell of turmeric and frying onions drifted up from the curry house below and wrapped around them both. "How did you find this place?" "I find things. It's the whole of my profession." "It's also how we ended up not speaking." She set her shoulder against the doorframe. "Three weeks, Luc. Not a call. Not a card. Then you turn up on Eva's landing like a bailiff." "You told me not to call." "I told you not to *follow* me. There's a difference, and you know it." His jaw shifted. Water ran from the brim of nothing, because he wore no hat, and dripped from a curl of hair onto his collar. He didn't wipe it away. "May I come in? The man in the flat across the hall has been watching me through his peephole since I climbed the stairs. I would rather he didn't hear this." "Hear what?" "Whatever it is that I came to say." "You don't know what you came to say." Rory laughed, short and dry. "That's the first time I've ever seen you without a script." "Then let me stand in your doorway without one." Something small and warm nudged her ankle. Ptolemy slid past her shin, tail high, and squeezed his tabby bulk through the gap under the chain. He sat on the landing, looked up at Lucien, and let out a rusty croak of a meow. "Traitor," Rory muttered. Lucien lowered himself with care, one hand on the cane, and offered his knuckles. Ptolemy butted them hard enough to rock the man's wrist. "He has better manners than his mistress." "He's not mine. He's Eva's. And he likes anyone who smells like they own a fishmonger." "I do not smell like fish." "You smell like rain and cedar and that cologne that costs more than my rent." She heard her own voice soften and hated it. She shut the door, slid the chain free, and opened it again, wide. "Ten minutes. Then you go." "Understood." "I mean it." "I know that you do." He stepped over the threshold and stopped. Eva's flat swallowed the space around him. Stacks of books leaned against the sofa. Scrolls poked from an umbrella stand. Index cards covered the wall above the kettle, strung together with red wool, and a mug of cold tea sat on a paperback of Sumerian incantations. Lucien turned a slow circle. The cane tapped once on the floorboards. "This is a nest," he said. "A scholar's nest." "It's a fire hazard. Mind the pile by your foot." He shifted his foot. "You are sleeping here?" "On the sofa. Eva's away." She scooped Ptolemy off the landing, kicked the door shut with her heel, and threw all three bolts. Each clack landed loud in the small room. When she turned, Lucien was watching her hands. "What?" "You lock them in order. Top, middle, bottom. Like a ritual." "It's called being careful." "It's called being afraid, *chérie*. I don't say it as an insult." The word *chérie* went through her like a splinter. She dropped Ptolemy on the armchair, where he glared and started to wash. "Don't do that." "Do what?" "Pick at me. Find the soft spot and press on it, like you do with your clients." "You are not a client." "No. Clients get an invoice." She crossed her arms. "What did I get? A man in a Vauxhall Astra outside my window for four nights. Silas thought he was a copper. I knew better, because coppers don't tip their hats to me." A muscle jumped in his cheek. "I hired him because Malcolm Reyes had put your name on a list." "You could have *told* me that." "You would have run." "I ran anyway!" The shout bounced off the shelves. Upstairs, a floorboard creaked. Rory dragged in a breath and pinched the bridge of her nose. When she spoke again, she kept her voice low. "I left one man who decided what I needed to know. I didn't leave Cardiff and his fists and his *concern* to end up with another one in a better coat." Lucien said nothing. The cane's ivory handle turned slowly under his palm. Rain ticked at the window over the sink. "That," he said at last, "is fair." "I don't need fair. I need to know why you're here." "To apologise." He said it flat, as a man reads a verdict. "I have practised the sentence in three languages. It sounds no better in any of them." "Try it in English." "I am sorry. I watched you when I should have asked you. I treated your life as a problem I could solve quietly, and I have never been more ashamed of a solution." He drew a breath. "There. That is all of it. You may put me out." Rory stared at him. The rain had darkened his lapels almost to black, and a tremor ran through the hand on the cane, too fine for anyone but her to notice. She noticed. She always did. "That's not all of it," she said. "No?" "You'd have sent a text for that. Wine. Flowers, if you were feeling theatrical. You wouldn't have climbed four flights with a bad leg in a downpour." She nodded at the cane. "You're favouring the left." "The stairs were steep." "Luc." He looked at the floor, then at the index cards on the wall, then at her. "Every night in my office I hear you close the door. Not slam it. Close it. Quietly. As if you had already decided I was not worth the noise." The kettle sat cold on its ring. Rory reached past him, filled it at the tap, and clicked it on, because her hands needed something to do. The old element ticked and began to hum. "That night," she said, with her back to him, "I wanted you to ask me to stay." "I wanted to ask." "Then why didn't you?" "Because you were already at the door, and I thought a man like me had no right to call you back." "A man like you." She turned. "What's that, exactly?" "Half of something you would not care to meet in a dark street." "I've met worse in well-lit ones." She pushed off the counter and stopped a pace from him. Close enough to see the tiny scar through his left eyebrow. Close enough to feel the damp radiating from his coat. "I don't scare easy, Moreau. I thought you knew that." "I know it." His voice roughened. "It's the reason I am frightened." The kettle rumbled. Ptolemy stopped washing to watch them. Lucien lifted his free hand, slowly, as if he were approaching a skittish animal, and let it hover beside her wrist. The left one, where the small crescent scar pale against her skin. He didn't touch it. "May I?" She held out her arm. His fingertips found the scar and traced the curve of it once, barely there. Her pulse jumped under his thumb, and she knew he felt it, because his amber eye flicked up to hers and stayed. "Ten minutes," she whispered. "I have used six." "Then sit down before I change my mind about the other four." She tilted her chin at the sofa. "Mind the cat. He bites." "I would expect nothing less of this household." He sat. The cane rested across his knees. Rory took two mugs from the drying rack, wiped out Eva's cold tea, and dropped in the bags while the kettle clicked off behind her.