Run: 2026-09-29-01M3P2EZAB9Q9XNPAT006XD9F5

The third deadbolt slid back, and Rory opened the door. Lucien stood on the landing with rain beading on the shoulders of his charcoal suit. Both hands rested on the ivory handle of his cane. Cumin and frying onions drifted up the stairwell from the curry house below, and under it ran the smell of wet wool and his cologne, something with cedar in it. She had spent three weeks trying to forget that smell. "You've got three locks," he said. "I counted the clicks. It took you eleven seconds." "Eleven seconds is how long I gave you to leave." Rory kept her hand on the door. "Eva isn't here." "I know. She's in Prague, arguing with a man about a scroll." One corner of his mouth lifted. It didn't reach the amber eye. "I came for you." "How did you find me?" "It's what I do, chérie. It's the only thing I do, in fact, if you believe what you've heard." "I don't believe anything I've heard." She heard the edge in her own voice and left it there. "That's the problem, isn't it?" Something soft brushed her ankle. Ptolemy slid past her, all striped fur and bad manners, and wound a figure eight around Lucien's polished shoe. He tilted his head down. The cat pushed his skull into the cane. "Traitor," Rory muttered. "He has taste." Lucien didn't move his foot. "May I come in? The landlord downstairs has been watching me through the beads since I arrived, and I think he wants to sell me a korma." "He'll want to sell you a lamb bhuna. The korma's for tourists." She stepped back, and the door swung wider. She let it. "Wipe your feet. Eva will kill me if you drip on the Sumerian stuff." He crossed the threshold with the care of a man entering a church. His gaze went over the flat: books stacked in leaning towers along the wall, scrolls jammed into the umbrella stand, a corkboard so thick with notes and red string that it looked like it had been assaulted. A kettle sat on the two-ring hob, and Rory's boots lay on their sides beside the sofa where she'd kicked them off. "You're sleeping here," he said. "I'm feeding her cat." "You're sleeping here." He nodded at the blanket bunched on the sofa arm, the mug of cold tea on a first edition of something Latin. "The flat above Silas's bar isn't safe anymore, then." "The flat above Silas's bar is fine." She shut the door and turned the deadbolts, one, two, three, and the clacks filled the small room. "I just like the company. Ptolemy doesn't lie to me." That landed. She watched it land. His jaw tightened, and he lifted his cane and set the tip on the floorboards with a small, precise tap. "That was fair," he said. "It wasn't meant to be fair." "No." He looked at her then, fully, the amber eye bright as a coin in the lamplight and the black one swallowing it. "I would have thought less of you if it were." Rory crossed her arms. Her left wrist pressed against her ribs, and the old crescent scar throbbed the way it did when her pulse ran hot. "You've got about two minutes before I put the kettle on and start being polite. Say what you came to say." "Two minutes." He almost laughed. "I've rehearsed this for three weeks, and you give me two minutes." "You rehearsed?" "In four languages. I hoped one would sound better than the others." He shrugged out of his coat, folded it over the back of Eva's desk chair, and stayed in his waistcoat and shirtsleeves. The gesture made him look younger and less armoured. She hated that it worked. "None of them did." "Try English." "Very well." He drew a breath. "I took the job. The one from the man in Southwark. Eleven months ago, before I knew your name, he paid me to watch a girl who'd just come up from Cardiff. Find out who she spoke to. Where she ran. What she carried." His fingers flexed around the cane. "I told myself it was nothing. Watching is my trade." "And then?" "And then you threw a full portion of egg fried rice at a man who tried to steal your scooter, and I stopped writing reports." Rory's mouth twitched. She flattened it. "That's not an apology." "No. It's an explanation. The apology is harder." He stepped closer, and the floorboards creaked under him. Ptolemy stalked off to the windowsill in disgust. "I should have told you that night in the rain. Before you kissed me. Before I let you." "You let me." "I wanted to, God help me. I wanted it so badly that I lied by keeping quiet, and I called that mercy." The kettle ticked on the hob, cooling. Down below, someone dropped a tray, and a cook swore in Bengali. Rory stared at the buttons of his waistcoat because looking at his face was too much. "I found the file," she said. "Eva pulled it out of a drawer in your office. Did you know that? Your handwriting. *Subject leaves the restaurant at 9:40. Subject takes the long way home.*" Her voice cracked on *home*, and she hauled it level. "You knew where I lived, Lucien. You knew which stair creaked. I stood in your bar and you poured me a drink and you knew." "I did." "I spent two years with a man who tracked my phone. Who timed my walks to the shop." She unfolded her arms and pressed both palms flat on the desk, because they were shaking. "You *watched* me, and I let you in anyway. What does that make me?" "Braver than me." "Don't." "It's true." He didn't reach for her. His hands stayed on the cane, knuckles pale. "I can't undo the file. I burned my copy and the man in Southwark has been informed that his patronage is no longer required. But that isn't why I'm here." "Then why?" "Because you left your scarf at my place." She blinked. "My scarf." "The green one. It's been on my sofa for a month. I kept meaning to send it round with a boy on a bicycle." He reached into the inner pocket of the coat behind him and drew out a length of wool the colour of moss. It looked absurd in his long, ringed fingers. "Each time I picked up the phone, I found I wanted to hand it over myself. I wanted to see your face when I did." Rory looked at the scarf. Then she looked at him. "That's the worst line I've ever heard," she said. "It's the only one I have left." "You could have posted it." "I could have." He held it out, and the silence stretched thin between them. "Take it, Aurora. Or throw it at my head. I'd understand either." She took it. Her fingers brushed his, and the contact ran up her arm like a struck match. He went still. Neither of them pulled away. His thumb found the inside of her wrist, exactly where the crescent scar sat, and rested there, feather-light, on the pulse. "It's racing," he said quietly. "It's been racing since you knocked." "Is that anger?" "Some." She swallowed. "Not all." His eyes closed for a moment, and when they opened the black one had gone even darker, the way it did when the demon in him leaned close to the surface. She'd seen it twice before. Once in a fight. Once in the rain. "I don't want to lie to you again," he said. "So I'll tell you what I want, and you can slam the door. I want to stay. Not for a job, and not for a file. For the ordinary things. Bad tea, and your terrible taste in films, and that dreadful scooter." "My scooter is fine." "Your scooter is a war crime." A laugh escaped her, short and helpless, and she hated it and was glad of it in the same breath. She pulled her wrist free, slowly, and wound the scarf twice around her fist. "You don't get to stroll back in here with wool and charm and think that's it," she said. "I don't." "I'm still angry." "Good. Stay angry. I'll earn my way past it." He tilted his head, and a lock of platinum hair fell loose from its slick. "But I'd like to do it somewhere with a kettle that works." Rory looked at the hob, at the cat glaring from the sill, at the tall, rain-damp man standing in a room built for books and not for the two of them. She thought of the three deadbolts she had just locked. "Sit," she said. "Not on the Sumerian stuff."