Run: 2026-10-08-01M4DACH5752Y5K612K9PDMC16

The knock came at half past eleven, three slow raps that didn't belong to Silas, who hammered the door like he was evicting someone. Rory set down the tea towel, crossed the flat in her socks, and stopped with her palm flat against the wood. She knew the rhythm. She had hated how well she knew it. She opened the door on the chain. Lucien stood on the landing under the bare bulb, one hand resting on the ivory handle of his cane. The charcoal suit was immaculate despite the drizzle that had darkened the shoulders of his coat. His hair had been slicked back by someone with better hands than the rain. Amber on the left, black on the right, and both of them fixed on her face as if she were a contract he needed to read twice. "You could have called," she said. "You changed your number." "Yes. That's generally what the phrase means." She didn't slide the chain off. "How did you find this address?" "Silas." He tilted his head toward the stairwell, where the bar's jukebox thumped faintly through the floorboards. "He was less cooperative than I anticipated. I offered him twenty quid. He asked for forty. I suspect he's already spent it on something terrible." "That's Silas." "Yes." His gaze dropped to the chain, then rose again. "Are you going to let me in, Aurora, or shall we conduct this conversation through a gap the width of a playing card?" She considered slamming the door. She considered the view of him on her landing, which was quite good, and resented that she had considered it at all. She undid the chain. The flat rose around them, small and crooked. Books stacked along the skirting boards. Her delivery jacket hung off the back of a kitchen chair next to a pile of Golden Empress menus she had been meaning to recycle for a month. Lucien stepped inside and paused, and she watched him take it in with the same unhurried attention he gave everything. He noticed the mug on the windowsill. He noticed the second cup on the draining board, unwashed, which she had not bothered to explain to herself. "You've been drinking tea alone," he said. "I've been drinking tea. The alone part is your assumption." "You never drank it alone at Eva's. You always wanted someone to argue with about the milk." "Eva argued with me about the milk. You just stood in the doorway and watched." He set the cane against the wall, carefully, the way a man might set down a loaded thing. "I was watching you. It was not the same." "Wasn't it?" She turned away before he could answer, filled the kettle because her hands needed a job, and heard him stop behind her. The silence stretched long enough that the kettle began to tick as it heated. "Say what you came to say," she said. "I'm not going to pretend I'm not standing here with a tea towel and a grudge." "I came because someone has been asking about you in Whitechapel." His voice had gone flat and careful, the register he used when business was the only safe thing to talk about. "Not the usual sort of asking. Men with questions about where you sleep and who you run with. One of them mentioned Evan's name." The kettle clicked off. Neither of them moved to lift it. Her left wrist throbbed where the small crescent scar sat, a dull memory she had trained herself not to touch. "Evan doesn't know where I live." "Evan has an uncle who owes money to people I used to work for." Lucien's tone didn't soften, but his eyes did something she didn't want to read. "I thought you should hear it from me before you heard it from a man with a knife." She turned around. He had not come closer. He stood by the bookshelf with his hands clasped behind his back, the way he always stood when he was trying not to reach for something that wasn't his. "You left," she said. "Three months ago. You walked out of that bar and didn't look back, and you didn't even bother to tell me why." "I told you I would be gone." "You told me you had business. You didn't say it was a wall between us." "I did not know how to say the rest of it without you hating me for it." He held her gaze, both colours steady. "I still don't. But I would rather you hate me in a room where you are safe than forgive me on a street where you are not." She laughed, short and sharp, and it came out wrong. "Is that supposed to be romantic?" "No," said Lucien. "It's supposed to be true."