Run: 2026-09-29-01M3P2KXQ9PWASE0RJQ7WHVG0G

Rory worked the three deadbolts in the order Eva had drilled into her, bottom, top, middle, and swung the door open with the poker from the fireplace held low against her thigh. Lucien Moreau stood on the landing under the flickering bulb, one gloved hand braced on the doorframe, the other wrapped around the ivory handle of his cane. The charcoal suit was still immaculate everywhere except the left side, where the jacket had darkened and gone glossy. "Bonsoir, Aurora." "No." She started to close the door. His cane slid into the gap. It was a graceful movement, almost lazy, and it stopped her more effectively than a boot would have. "I would not ask if there were another door in London I trusted to be this ugly and this well locked." "That's your opening? Insulting my friend's flat?" "It is a compliment. Three deadbolts." He tried a smile and didn't quite manage it. "Please. I will say what I came to say, and if you still wish me gone, I will bleed elsewhere." She should have shut the door. She'd had three weeks of practice at not thinking about him, and she'd gotten good at it, right up until she smelled copper over the drifting cumin and fried onion from the curry house downstairs. "Christ," she said, and stepped back. He came in slowly, like a man carrying something that might spill. Behind her, Ptolemy the tabby lifted his head from a stack of Sumerian glossaries and regarded the visitor with flat yellow contempt. "Sit," Rory said. "Not on the scrolls. Eva will actually kill you." "I have been threatened by worse." "You haven't met Eva." He lowered himself onto the arm of the sofa, since every other surface was buried in books, and set the cane across his knees. In the lamplight his eyes looked more mismatched than she remembered, one amber as whisky held to a flame, the other so dark the pupil disappeared. She'd spent a lot of that last night staring into them. She made herself look at the jacket instead. "Take it off." One platinum eyebrow lifted. "Rory. So soon." "Don't." It came out sharper than she'd meant. "You don't get to do that. Not tonight." The eyebrow came down. Something in his face went quiet, and he began working the buttons of the jacket without another word. His fingers weren't steady. That frightened her more than the blood did. In all the weeks she'd known him, Lucien had never once looked like something could happen to him. The shirt beneath was ruined. A long, ugly gash ran along his ribs, shallow at one end and deep at the other, its edges weirdly dark, almost sooty. She fetched Eva's first-aid kit from under the sink and a bottle of vodka from behind the reference books on Akkadian, and knelt in front of him on the rug. "This will sting." "I am half demon, chérie. I have a high tolerance for—" He hissed through his teeth as the vodka hit. "For humiliation, apparently." "Hold still." She worked in silence for a while. It was easier than talking. The wound was clean enough once she'd cleared it, though the sooty edges wouldn't wipe away. Her knuckles brushed his skin and she felt the heat under it, too warm, like a stove that had just been turned off. He watched her hands. She felt it as clearly as she felt the cold seeping through the knees of her jeans. "You have a new bruise," he said quietly. "On your jaw." "Delivery bike. A man in a Range Rover decided the lane was his." She taped the gauze down harder than necessary. "You've got some nerve, noticing my face." "I noticed it every day for three weeks. It was a very unproductive time." Her hands stopped. "That's not fair," she said. "No." He looked down at her, and the polish had gone out of him entirely. "I know." She sat back on her heels. The whole speech she'd rehearsed on the night bus, in the shower, over the sink of dishes at three in the morning, rose in her throat and jammed there. *You used me as bait. You let me walk into that warehouse thinking I was just carrying a package. You looked me in the eye and said trust me, and I have heard that sentence before from a man who broke my wrist.* She had not told him about the wrist. Not the whole thing. But he'd seen her flinch when he grabbed her arm in that warehouse, and afterward she'd watched him understand it. That had been almost worse than the lie. "You could have told me," she said. Her voice came out smaller than she wanted. "That's all. Not that it was dangerous. I can do dangerous. I've done dangerous. You could have said *this is what I need you for* and let me choose. You decided for me." "Yes." "You don't get to just say yes." "What else is there? It is true." He turned the cane over in his hands. "I had eleven hours to find a man who wanted to kill a great many people, and you were the only one he would open the door to. I told myself you would forgive the method once you saw the result. It was the reasoning of a man who has spent so long in the dark he forgets other people need to see where they are walking." He exhaled. "I have thought of nothing else since you left. I did not come here because of the wound. The wound only gave me the courage." "That's a terrible line." "It is a terrible truth. I have never been good at those." Despite herself, a laugh escaped her, short and cracked. Ptolemy stalked across the coffee table, stepped onto Lucien's thigh with grave deliberation, and curled up on the good side of his lap as if the two of them had discussed it. "Traitor," Rory muttered. "He has excellent judgment." "He once ate a whole bag of catnip and fell off the fridge." Lucien laughed, a low, surprised sound that seemed to hurt him, and pressed a hand to his ribs. She was on her feet before she knew she'd moved, reaching for his shoulder to steady him. His hand closed over hers, and his thumb slid across the small crescent scar on the inside of her left wrist. Neither of them moved. "You never asked how I got that," she said. "I was waiting until you wished to tell me." That was the trouble with him. That patience, when she'd braced for the opposite. She had run three weeks and four hundred kilometres of London streets to get away from the way he looked at her, and it had followed her up three flights of stairs, bleeding on its own good suit. "I was seven," she said. "Garden wall. I wanted to see if I could jump from the top. It's not a good story." "It is a very good story." His voice had gone rough. "You wanted to see if you could." "Still do, apparently." His thumb stayed where it was, resting against her pulse. She didn't pull away. She was angry, and she was frightened, and under both of those she was so relieved to see him alive that her knees felt loose. "I'm not forgiving you tonight," she said. "I did not ask you to." "I might not tomorrow, either." "Then I will ask again the day after." A ghost of the old smile touched his mouth. "I am, as you know, extremely persistent." She should have taken her hand back. Instead she sat down beside him on the arm of the sofa, close enough that the heat of him reached through her shirt, and let the silence stretch. Downstairs, someone dropped a tray of dishes and shouted cheerfully in Bengali. Ptolemy purred like a small engine. "You're staying till it stops bleeding," she said at last. "Then we talk. The whole thing. Every detail, no editing." "Every detail." He bowed his head, and for a moment his forehead nearly touched her shoulder before he caught himself and straightened. "Thank you, Rory." "Don't thank me yet," she said, and reached over to lock the deadbolts with her free hand, one, two, three, while he watched her do it as though she had just handed him something priceless.