Run: 2026-10-08-01M4DA06WG3SD7FXAXCX278NC6

The knock came at half past eleven, three slow raps that rattled the glass in the frame. Rory knew the rhythm before she reached the hallway. Nobody who climbed the stairs above Silas' bar knocked like that, except one person who had never once asked permission to be somewhere. She slid the chain free and opened the door a hand's width. Bass from downstairs crawled up through the floorboards, a heartbeat under everything. Lucien stood on the landing with one hand resting on the ivory handle of his cane. Charcoal suit, not a crease out of place, platinum hair combed back as if the wind had never dared touch it. One amber eye and one black one regarded her with the calm of a man who had already decided how this would go. "You're not supposed to be here," she said. "Good evening to you, too, Aurora." "Rory. And it's not evening, it's the middle of the night, and you don't get to use my full name on my own stairs." "Your stairs." He glanced at the peeling paint along the banister. "Silas charges you rent for this?" "Silas charges me in favours, which is worse. What do you want, Luc?" He didn't answer straight away. He looked past her shoulder into the narrow hall, at the coat hooks and the stack of unopened post, and something tightened at the corner of his mouth. Then his gaze came back to her face and stayed there. "I need you to come with me." "No." "You haven't heard what it is." "I don't need to. The last time you showed up needing me to come along, I ended up sewing a man's ear back on in a cellar in Hackney." "He lived." "He lived with one ear, Lucien." The corner of his mouth moved again, not quite a smile. "He was the one who sold you out to the Sable Court, if I recall. Half an ear seemed a fair trade." She tightened her grip on the door. The old brass handle bit into her palm, the same way it had the night she'd told him to get out of her life and he had actually done it, without a single argument. That was the part that still got under her skin. Not the leaving. The lack of a fight. "Is this about Eva?" she asked. Something shifted behind his eyes, quick as a fish turning under dark water. "It is about a woman who was on Brick Lane tonight, asking questions about a grimoire she had no business knowing existed. Eva was there, Rory. She went in alone." Rory's stomach dropped through the floor, through the bar, and out somewhere on Redchurch Street. "Where is she?" "That is what I intend to find out, and I cannot do it without you." "You could have said that without the theatre. You could have called." "You changed your number." "Because you kept calling." He inclined his head, accepting the hit without flinching. He had always been good at that. Taking a blow and standing straighter for it, as if pain were a tax he had already budgeted for. "I did," he said quietly. "Yes." For a second neither of them moved. The bass downstairs dropped out for the length of a breath, then thundered back in. She could smell his cologne, cedar and something sharper underneath, and it pulled at a memory she had spent eight months trying to bury under double shifts and cheap wine and Yu-Fei's endless dumplings. A rooftop in Shoreditch. His hand on the small crescent scar at her wrist, tracing it like a question he already knew the answer to. "You should have come to the door in daylight," she said. "Like a normal person." "I have never been normal. You were never once bored by that." "I was bored by the lying." "I stopped lying to you." "You stopped telling me the truth. That isn't the same thing." His jaw worked. The black eye seemed to darken further in the dim landing light, and the amber one caught the glow from the streetlamp below. "Then let me tell you the truth now," he said. "Eva is in danger. Whatever happened between us is secondary to that, and you know it, or you would have shut the door already." She hated him a little for being right. She hated herself a little more for the way her fingers had gone to the chain and stopped there, hovering. "Give me two minutes," she said, and started to close the door. His cane tapped once against the threshold, stopping it dead. "Rory." She looked back at him through the narrow gap. "Bring your knife," Lucien said. "The one you pretend you no longer carry."