Run: 2026-10-08-01M4DACJQKPYRW8Z67QAP02840

The knock came at ten past two, three measured raps, the kind that belonged to someone who had never once been told to wait outside. Rory was already awake. She had been staring at the ceiling for an hour, listening to the bass thump up through the floorboards from Silas' bar and counting the cracks in the plaster as if they might add up to something. She slid off the bed, dragged her jumper over her head, and crossed the cold boards barefoot. Through the peephole the landing light warped everything, but it couldn't hide the shape of him. Charcoal wool. An ivory-handled cane tucked under one arm. Platinum hair, slicked back as though the night had never laid a finger on it. She didn't open the door. She slid the chain into its track first, then turned both locks. "You've got a nerve," she said through the gap. Lucien tilted his head, and the bulb overhead caught his eyes, one amber, one black as a well at midnight. "I have several. You've only ever met the one that gets me into trouble." "Go away, Luc." "I would, if I had anywhere else to be. The Savoy has stopped answering my calls, and I suspect the night porter has been told what I look like." She looked at him properly then. A split at his lower lip, the scab still glossy. A dark line of dried blood ran from his jaw down into his collar. His right hand held the cane too tightly, knuckles gone pale against the ivory. "Who did that?" "A man who believed I owed him money. I didn't. Not that much, anyway." "You're bleeding on my landing." "Yes. Silas tells me it's a very good carpet." She should have shut the door. Instead she eased the chain free and stepped back, and he took the invitation the way he took everything, without waiting to be sure of it. He ducked under the low beam, his gaze sweeping the room in one practised arc. The kettle. The stack of Golden Empress delivery bags folded over the back of the chair. The bottle of cheap red on the windowsill, opened three nights ago and abandoned halfway down. "Still drinking alone," he said. "Still none of your business." "Sit down, Aurora. You're hovering." "I'm standing in my own flat." He leaned the cane against the table and lowered himself onto the edge of the sofa with the careful economy of a man whose ribs had recently raised objections. She noticed. She noticed too much. She always had, and that had been the trouble from the start. "Fetch the kettle," he said. "Or the bottle. I'm not fussy." "Eva said you'd gone back to Marseille." "I did. Eleven days. Long enough to remember why I left it." He pressed two fingers to the split in his lip and examined the blood on them with mild interest. "Then I came back, and I went looking for you, and a very frightened waiter at Golden Empress informed me you'd swapped your Thursday shift so you wouldn't have to face me." "He's a terrible liar." "He's a terrible waiter. He spilled hoisin on my jacket." She folded her arms. "What do you want, Luc?" "I wanted to see you without a deadline pressing on my neck." He looked up, and for a moment the composure cracked, just a hairline fissure. "I wanted to see whether you still hated me as thoroughly as your note suggested." "It said don't come after me." "Five words. You're bad at counting when you're angry." He tipped his head toward the kitchen. "And I didn't come after you for four months. I think that deserves a medal." "It deserves a bloody great slap, and you know it." "Yes. I rather suspected you'd prefer that to the medal." The kettle hissed on the hob, unwatched. Neither of them moved toward it. "You knew what Vance wanted with me," Rory said. Her voice came out flat, the way it did when she had rehearsed something for months and was finally saying it out loud. "You knew, and you took his money anyway." "I took his money so he wouldn't take you." "You didn't ask me." "No." He didn't look away. She gave him that much. "I never ask. I decide, and then I tell people afterwards, and I think you've never forgiven me for that. I think it's the one thing you can't argue your way around." She wanted to say something cutting. She had a whole list of cutting things, sharpened over four months of sleepless nights and bus rides home from late deliveries. They all stuck somewhere behind her teeth. Lucien rose. It took him a moment, one hand braced on the sofa arm, and when he was upright he didn't come any closer. He simply held out his hand, palm up, the way someone might offer a bird a crumb. She should have ignored it. Her gaze drifted down to his fingers, still streaked with dried blood, and then to the grey light coming through the window, and then back up to his face. He reached for her left wrist instead. Slowly. Giving her time to pull away. She didn't. His thumb found the small crescent scar near the bone, the one she'd got falling off a garden wall at nine years old, and traced its curve with a care that made her throat tighten. "Don't," she said, but it came out quiet, nothing like the warning she'd intended. "I'm not doing anything." "You are. You always are." His thumb stilled against her pulse. Neither of them spoke. Beneath the floor, the bass from Silas' bar cut out, and in the sudden silence she could hear the kettle beginning to rattle on the hob. "Then tell me to go," Lucien said.