Run: 2026-10-08-01M4DA78TFMWWEDT0AGTR0K4WF

The knock came at half eleven, three sharp raps that didn't belong to anyone who lived in this building. Rory set the chipped mug down on the windowsill, wiped her palms on her jeans, and pulled the door open before she could talk herself out of it. Lucien Moreau stood on the landing under the buzzing bulb, one hand resting on the ivory head of his cane. Charcoal wool, a shirt the colour of fresh cream, and not a single platinum strand out of place, despite the rain that had clearly caught him somewhere between Shoreditch and here. One eye caught the light and held it amber. The other swallowed it whole. "You're not dead," she said. "Not yet." His mouth shifted into something that wasn't quite a smile. "You've lost weight." "And you've lost your manners. Nobody knocks at this hour unless they're the police or a bad idea." She kept one hand on the door. "Which are you?" "Both, on occasion." His gaze dropped to her left wrist, to the thin crescent scar she had never once bothered to hide, then lifted again. "Might I come in, or shall we conduct our business here, where Silas's regulars can hear every word through the floorboards?" "Silas's regulars can hear everything through the floorboards. That's the whole point of this building." She didn't step aside. "What business? You walked out of my life in March with a bag over your shoulder and a line about it being safer for me. I didn't ask for safer. I asked for an explanation." "You got a very eloquent speech about the Vane contract." "I got a speech about the Vane contract that didn't mention you'd signed it." Something flickered behind his eyes, too quick for her to name. He shifted his weight onto the cane. "I didn't sign it, Aurora. I bought the debt it was attached to. There's a difference, though I grant you it was a poor one to hide behind." "Don't call me that." "Your mother calls you that." "My mother has the right. You gave up yours the night you left." The words came out colder than she had planned, and she didn't take them back. She watched them land. His jaw tightened, that small, controlled movement she remembered from a dozen tense dinners in the back booth of a bar in Soho, and then it smoothed out again. "Fair," he said quietly. "Entirely fair." Behind her, the flat seemed to lean in and listen. Rory felt the heat of the radiator at her back and the draught from the stairwell at her ankles. Three empty cartons from the Golden Empress sat stacked by the sink, Yu-Fei's red dragon printed on each lid, and her laptop glowed on the sofa beside a pile of unopened post. None of it looked like the life she had built on purpose. It looked like the life of someone who had been waiting. "Say what you came to say," she said. "Then go." Lucien glanced past her shoulder, taking in the stacks of Golden Empress cartons, the threadbare rug, the window with its crooked blind. He noted everything, the way he always had, cataloguing exits and weak points before he sat down. When his gaze came back to her, it had lost some of its polish. "Someone is looking for Eva," he said. Rory's hand tightened on the door. The name landed harder than any of his barbs. "Eva's been gone six weeks. She left me a voicemail and a cat sitter's number." "She didn't leave the country. She left the city, and then she left the trail she was following, and whoever is hunting her has started asking questions in places where I have friends." He paused. "Some of those friends are now dead." "That's not my problem." "It became your problem the moment she sent you a key to Brick Lane and you kept it." His voice dropped, a rasp she recognised from late nights and low light. "And it became mine the moment I found out who is paying for the search." She should have shut the door. Every sensible part of her was already reaching for the handle, already drafting the sentence that would send him back down the stairs into the rain. Instead she heard herself ask the question that mattered. "Who?" Lucien leaned the cane against the frame, slow and deliberate, and reached into his inside pocket. He didn't pull out a card or a phone. He pulled out a folded sheet of thick paper, creased and soft from handling, and held it between two long fingers without offering it to her. "Before I show you this," he said, "I need you to promise you won't slam that door in my face until you've read every word."