Run: 2026-10-08-01M4DA9TX019AYXH7STGPEEYZM

The first deadbolt gave with a dry click, then the second, then the third, and Rory stood in the narrow hallway with her hand on the chain and her heart doing something she did not give it permission to do. Nobody knocked on Eva's door at eleven at night. Eva was in Edinburgh until Sunday, and the only people who had a reason to climb the stairs above the curry house on Brick Lane were the ones who already knew about the deadbolts. Rory had been the one to tell Eva to install them. Eva had said it was overkill. Rory had said that was the point. She didn't open the chain. She looked through the gap instead. Lucien Moreau stood on the landing under the bare bulb, one gloved hand resting on the ivory head of his cane. His charcoal suit was immaculate, as if the rain outside had been too polite to touch him. Platinum hair, slicked back from a face that could have been carved for a museum. One eye was amber, one was black, and both were fixed on her with the careful stillness of a man who had rehearsed this moment and was now discovering the rehearsal had been useless. "Hello, Aurora," he said. Nobody called her that anymore. Not even her mother, who had settled on Rory years ago, and not Eva, who used Laila when she wanted to needle her. Lucien had never called her anything else. "You have a nerve," she said. "So I've been told." His accent turned the words soft at the edges. "May I come in? It is raining, and I have not been invited, and I am aware that is a difficult thing to forgive. I would still like to be inside when I say what I came to say." "No." "Rory." She hated that he could still do that with her name, drop it into the space between them like a stone into still water. She unhooked the chain. Ptolemy appeared at her ankles the moment the door swung wide, a tabby with a torn ear and the disdain of a minor aristocrat, and wound himself around her calves before stalking toward Lucien. The cat sniffed the hem of the charcoal trousers, then sat down squarely on the threshold, as if he had made a ruling. "Traitor," Rory muttered. "He has always had excellent judgment," Lucien said, and stepped carefully over the cat. The flat seemed to shrink around him. It had always been too small for two people who wanted different things, and now the books stacked on every surface, the scrolls wedged into the bookcase, the research notes pinned in careful columns along the walls, all seemed to lean in and listen. Lucien's gaze moved over it without judgment, taking inventory the way he took everything. He stopped at the kitchen table where a mug of cold tea sat beside an open grimoire, its margins crowded with her handwriting. "You're staying here," he said. It wasn't a question. "Eva's away. I'm keeping an eye on things." She folded her arms. "What do you want, Lucien?" He turned, and the amber eye caught the lamplight. "Three months ago you asked me to choose." "I know what I asked." "You asked me to choose between the contract with the Avaros envoy and walking out of Silas' bar with you. I chose the contract." His voice didn't waver, which somehow made it worse. "I told myself it was the only choice that kept you out of their reach. I told myself a great many things, most of them to keep from having to say that I was afraid of what you would become if I stayed." Rory's throat tightened. She turned away and busied herself with the kettle, because her hands needed something to do and because she didn't trust her face. "That's a very elegant way of saying you picked a deal over me." "Yes." He said it simply. "It is also true." The water began to tick and hiss in the old pot. Below them, someone was carrying crates down the back stairs of the curry house, and the smell of cumin and charred onion rose through the floorboards. "You could have called," she said. "You changed your number." A pause. "And I did not think you would answer." "You're right. I wouldn't have." "I know." He moved closer, not touching her, and she felt the heat of him at her back. "I came because the envoy has broken the terms. They are looking for you, Rory. Not for what you did at Silas', but for what you saw in the vault. Your name is on a list I was ordered to hand over." His breath was quiet. "I did not hand it over." She turned around. He was closer than she'd expected, close enough that she could see the thin silver line of old scar tissue along his jaw, close enough to remember exactly how that jaw had felt beneath her palm the last night they'd spoken. "Why would you risk that?" Lucien studied her face for a long moment, as if reading a text written in a language only he could read. "Because I have spent three months learning how to live without you," he said, "and I am very, very bad at it." Ptolemy yowled from the doorway. Neither of them looked away.