Run: 2026-09-29-01M3P2D9EVX14MPQ6DRM5T6K8C

The third deadbolt always stuck, and Rory had to lean her shoulder into the door to work it free. She'd been braced for the curry house's delivery boy, who had a habit of leaving Eva's naan on the landing. She was not braced for Lucien Moreau. He stood in the narrow hallway with rain dripping from the brim of his hat and the ivory handle of his cane gripped hard enough to whiten his knuckles. The charcoal suit was ruined at the shoulder, the fabric dark and heavy with something that wasn't water. His hair, always slicked back, had come loose on one side and fallen across his forehead. Amber eye, black eye. Both fixed on her. "Rory," he said. She had rehearsed this, in the shower, on the night bus, at three in the morning with her eyes on Eva's cracked ceiling. In every version she was cool and devastating. In none of them did her pulse do this. "You're bleeding on the mat," she said. "It's not your mat." "It's Eva's mat, and she'll make me pay for it." She didn't move out of the doorway. Behind her, Ptolemy the tabby wound through a stack of books and let out a long, interrogative meow. "How did you even find this place?" "I am very good at finding things." A muscle tightened in his jaw. "It is, regrettably, most of what I do." "Regrettably." She folded her arms. The crescent scar on her left wrist itched, the way it did when she was nervous, and she pressed her thumb over it. "Three weeks, Lucien. Not a text. Not a note. And you turn up at a flat you have no business knowing about, dripping on the floor." "You did not answer my messages." "You sent one message. It said *I can explain*." "And I can." He swayed, just slightly, and caught himself on the doorframe with a grace so practiced she almost missed it. "But I would prefer to do it sitting down. If you intend to shut the door in my face, I understand. I would only ask that you do it after I have fallen over, so I do not have to watch." Rory closed her eyes for a second. Then she stepped back. "Don't touch anything," she said. He came in slowly, his cane tapping the floorboards, and the flat seemed to shrink around him. It was a cramped place at the best of times, every surface buried under books and scrolls and Eva's furious handwriting on yellow legal pads. Lucien, in his tailoring and his rain-dark wool, looked like an expensive mistake made in a library. He surveyed the chaos with polite horror. "Your friend is a scholar," he said. "Her friend is a hoarder. Sit." "Where?" She swept a stack of folios off the only armchair and dumped them on the floor. Ptolemy immediately claimed them. Lucien lowered himself into the chair with a hiss he tried to turn into a cough, and Rory locked all three deadbolts behind him, one, two, three, the sound heavy and final. She felt his eyes on her back the whole time. "Take off the jacket," she said, turning. "Rory—" "Or bleed to death in a chair that isn't mine. Your choice." Something flickered across his face, almost a smile. He shrugged out of the jacket, wincing, and then, with the air of a man surrendering a weapon, began on the buttons of his waistcoat. She fetched Eva's first-aid kit from the bathroom, the good one, with the suture kit Eva had bought for reasons Rory had chosen not to ask about. When she came back he had rolled his shirt sleeve to the elbow, and the gash along his upper arm was long and ugly and not entirely the right color at the edges. "That isn't from a knife," she said. "No." "Lucien." "Something from Avaros followed me across." He said it lightly, but he wasn't looking at her. "My father's people are not fond of being refused." The words sat between them. That was where it had all come apart: the name *Avaros*, the bargain she hadn't known he'd made, the ledger with her name in it. She'd stood in his office three weeks ago with the paper in her hand while he told her he'd done it to keep her breathing. And she'd been so angry, not because he'd lied, but because a small, stupid part of her had understood exactly why, and that was worse. She knelt by the chair and tore open an antiseptic wipe. "This will sting." "I have been stung before." She pressed it to the wound. He inhaled through his teeth, and his free hand closed around the arm of the chair. His skin was too warm, warmer than a human's, and she hated that she remembered that. She hated that she remembered the rest, too: his palm at the small of her back in a rainy alley in Soho, his mouth against her temple saying *Laila* in that low, amused voice, because it was the name she'd given him the night they met and he'd never been able to stop using it. "You didn't have the right," she said quietly, working. "To decide that for me." "No." "You just say no? That's it?" "What else is there? You are correct." He was watching her hands now. "I have been a broker of other people's secrets for fifteen years, Rory. I know exactly what it costs to be handled. And I handled you. I told myself it was protection because the alternative was admitting I was afraid." She stopped. Her hands stayed where they were, one flat against his arm, the other holding a square of gauze. "Afraid of what?" "Of watching you walk into that place and not come out." His voice had dropped, stripped of its polish. "I have watched a great many people go into Avaros. It has never once occurred to me to care." The radiator clanked. Rain ticked at the window. Rory realized she was very close to him, close enough to see the gold flecks in the amber eye, the exhausted lines beneath both, and the small tremor in his jaw as he waited for her to decide what to do with him. "You're an idiot," she said. "So I've been told. Usually by better company." "Shut up. I need to stitch this." She threaded the needle with steadier fingers than she felt. He didn't look away as she worked, and neither did she, not once, though it would have been easier. Each pull of the thread drew a small breath out of him. By the fourth stitch his hand had left the chair and settled on her wrist, over the crescent scar, not gripping, just resting there, warm and careful, like a question. She let it stay. "I'm still angry," she said, tying off the last knot. "I would think less of you if you weren't." "I mean it. This doesn't fix anything." "I know." "You don't get to show up bleeding and be forgiven." "I did not come for forgiveness." His thumb moved, barely, across the scar. "I came because it was the only door in London I wanted to knock on. That is a much worse problem, and I have no idea what to do about it." Rory looked at him, at the ruined shirt and the loosened hair and the man who could talk his way out of any room in the city and was now, apparently, out of words. Her anger was still there. It hadn't gone anywhere. But it had company now, and the company was warm and inconvenient and impossible to throw out. Ptolemy jumped onto the arm of the chair, sniffed Lucien's sleeve with great suspicion, and settled in his lap as if he'd been invited. "Traitor," Rory muttered. Lucien laughed, low and startled, and winced at the pull of the stitches. "Then I suppose I have one ally in the house." "Don't get comfortable." She sat back on her heels, her wrist still under his hand, and did not pull it away. "You're going to tell me everything. Start to finish. No handling." "Everything," he agreed. "And then we'll see." "That," said Lucien, softly, "is more than I hoped for." She got up to put the kettle on before he could see her face.