Run: 2026-10-08-01M4DA53P8KC6F2B20DENF59QZ

The chain was still on. Rory had slid the bolt back and eased the door open only as far as the brass hook would allow, and through the gap she saw him standing on the landing as though he had paid for it. Rain darkened the shoulders of his charcoal suit. His platinum hair stayed slicked back, though a few strands had come loose and clung to his forehead. He leaned on the ivory-handled cane with his weight on one hip, and his mismatched eyes, amber and black, took her in with the same unhurried attention he gave to everything. "You kept the chain," Lucien said. "Silas installed it. The man has opinions about the people who climb his stairs after midnight." She kept her hand on the edge of the door. "You're not on his list of approved visitors, so I'd guess you came up the back way." "The back way is quicker." "It's also how the rats get in." Something flickered at the corner of his mouth. It wasn't a smile. He had never been generous with those. "I'd rather not discuss the rats." Below them, the bar's jukebox thumped through the floorboards, some old Stone Roses track Silas insisted on playing every Thursday. The stairwell smelled of spilled lager and the bleach Silas used on the landing every Sunday. Rory had lived with that smell for six months, and it had become the closest thing she had to a home. "It's gone eleven, Lucien." "I'm aware of the hour. I had the misfortune of watching the clock from a bench outside your building for forty minutes before I decided to knock." He shifted the cane to his other hand. "I'm told you don't answer your phone anymore." "I changed the number." "Yes. I found that out from Eva, who was not pleased to be asked." Rory breathed out through her nose. Eva would be pleased with herself, telling Lucien where to find her and making him wait for the privilege. Eva had always enjoyed being the one who held the keys. "Say what you came to say," Rory said. "I'm not making tea for a man who won't come in." He looked past her shoulder, into the narrow hallway with its coat hook and the bag of yesterday's delivery receipts she hadn't yet sorted. Then his gaze came back to her wrist, to the thin crescent scar she had always covered with a band or sleeve in his presence, and she realised she had drawn her hand against her chest without meaning to. "Three nights ago," he said quietly, "a courier went into the Caldwell warehouse in Hackney. He didn't come out. The Avaros envoy has taken an interest in the parcel he was carrying, and the envoy does not take interest in things he means to leave alone." "And you're telling me this because?" "Because the parcel was addressed to a Dorothea Ellis, and the return name on the label was yours." The jukebox dropped to silence below them. In the gap between songs, Rory heard her own pulse. "That's not possible," she said. "I haven't sent anything through Caldwell's since—" "Since the night you walked out of the Vauxhall safe house and told me to stop following you." Lucien's voice stayed level, but his black eye narrowed a fraction. "Yes. I remember the night. I remember it with more clarity than I would like." She had told herself she was past the point of letting his memory sting. Eleven months, a new flat, new deliveries for Yu-Fei's restaurant, a job that let her be invisible. And here he was on her landing, dragging the whole thing up the stairs with him like wet coat. "You chose the council," she said. "You stood in that room with the envoy's people and you chose the council over me. Don't pretend the choice was ever complicated for you." "It was never complicated," Lucien said. "That was the problem. I had no idea what I was choosing until you were already out the door." The words landed harder than she expected, and she hated that they did. She saw him register it, saw him decide not to press, and that restraint irritated her more than any argument would have. "You could have sent a message," she said. "I did send a message. Three of them. Each one returned to me unopened, which I suppose is its own answer." He glanced down at the cane, then back up. "So I'm standing here instead, like an idiot in the rain, because I need you to look at a parcel that has your name on it, Aurora, and I need you to tell me why." He almost never used her full name. Rory felt it settle somewhere beneath her ribs, a weight she had no place to put down. She slid the chain free. The door swung inward, and she stepped back to let him see the length of the hallway, the cramped kitchen beyond it, the single lamp burning on the sill. "Wipe your feet," she said. "And if you've brought the envoy's people up my stairs, I'll push you back down them myself." Lucien crossed the threshold with the careful grace of a man who had been turned away from many doors and had learned not to expect a welcome. He paused on the mat, rain running from the ends of his hair onto the floorboards. "I didn't bring them," he said. "They're already on the street."