Run: 2026-10-08-01M4DACHFM18MY3KGGQZF75C2D

The knock came at a quarter to eleven, three slow raps spaced like someone counting. Rory knew before she reached the door that only one person in London knocked like that. Ptolemy lifted his head from a stack of Eva's annotated grimoires and regarded her with open disdain. "Don't look at me," she murmured. "I didn't invite him." She stood with her palm flat against the wood. Below, the extractor fan at the curry house roared, clicked off, and the smell of ghee and cardamom crept up through the floorboards. She drew back the top bolt, then the middle, then the bottom. Each one sounded louder than the last in the sleeping flat. Then she opened the door. Lucien Moreau stood on the landing as though someone had placed him there for effect. Charcoal suit, not a thread out of line. Platinum hair combed back from a face that had no business looking so tired. His ivory-handled cane rested against his shoulder like a rifle. And his eyes, one amber and one black, travelled over her with a patience that made her want to shut the door again. "Aurora," he said. "Rory." She didn't step aside. "Nobody calls me Aurora except my mother and people who want something." "Then I am in trouble, because I want something." "Of course you do." She leaned one shoulder against the frame. "It's eleven at night, Lucien. You don't call. You don't write. You vanish for four months and then turn up on Brick Lane like weather. Eva isn't here." "I know. I came to see you." The words slid in under her ribs, exactly where he had always known how to reach, and she resented them for it. Her left hand drifted to her wrist of its own accord, thumb tracing the small crescent scar she'd carried since she was seven. A habit she had never managed to break. He noticed. He always noticed. "How did you find me?" "Eva mentioned you were minding the cat." "Eva is a traitor." "Eva is worried about you." A pause, measured and deliberate. "So am I." "Don't." It came out sharper than she intended. She softened her voice, though not by much. "Don't do that. You forfeited the right to be worried about me the night you walked out of my flat and let me find out what you were from a stranger in a pub." He flinched, barely. In four years she had never seen Lucien flinch at anything, and she wished she hadn't seen it now. "I was going to tell you," he said quietly. "When? After the contract was signed? After the blood bond? After you'd decided whether I could handle the truth about your father?" She heard her own breath coming fast and made herself slow it. "I didn't need you to protect me, Lucien. I needed you to trust me." "I did trust you." His mismatched gaze held hers without wavering. "That was the problem. Everyone I trust ends up in the crossfire of Avaros, and I had already watched it happen once. I thought if I kept you out, you would stay whole." "Well." Her laugh was thin. "Look how that turned out." Ptolemy padded to the doorway, sniffed the air at Lucien's shoes, and sat down with an air of pronounced judgment. Lucien glanced down at the cat, and something in his expression eased, just for a moment, and it was that more than anything that unsettled her. "You still have him," Lucien said. "Eva left him with me. Three weeks. She said he would keep me honest." She swallowed. "He's not very good at it." "He never was." A ghost of a smile touched Lucien's mouth and vanished. "May I come in, Rory? Just for ten minutes. I'll say what I came to say, and then you can lock all three of those bolts behind me, and I will not argue." She should say no. Every sensible part of her, the part that had built a life from the rubble of Evan and Cardiff and everything before London, said no and shut the door. Instead she stood there with the cold air moving between them, the cane tapping once against the landing, the cardamom rising from below, and she thought about how many nights she had lain awake wondering what he might have said if she had only waited, if she had only asked one more question before she told him to leave. "Ten minutes," she said, and stepped back. He ducked under the lintel and came in, and the flat, which had always felt too small, suddenly felt much smaller.