Run: 2026-10-08-01M4DAF2TJR879PMV5EABC59DX

The bar's bass thudded through the floorboards, the same four bars on repeat, and Rory had given up trying to ignore it an hour ago. She had a mug of tea going cold on the windowsill and a delivery manifest half-filled in on her knee when the knock came. Three knocks. Evenly spaced. Nobody who lived in this building knocked like that. She didn't get up right away. She let the silence stretch until the second round came, softer, almost polite. Rory crossed the room in her socks and put her eye to the peephole. The hallway bulb had burned out weeks ago, so she saw only a slice of charcoal wool, a sweep of platinum hair under the landing light, and the dull gleam of ivory on a black cane. She knew who it was before she opened the door. That was the problem. She undid the first chain, then the deadbolt, then the second. She left the third sliding in its track. Lucien Moreau stood on the threshold with rain beading on his shoulders. He hadn't bothered with an umbrella, and his hair, which had been slicked back so precisely the last time she'd seen it, had come loose on one side and fell across his forehead. One eye was amber in the weak light. The other was black, the pupil and iris merged into something that didn't reflect anything at all. "You've been crying," he said. "I've been drinking tea." Rory folded her arms over the front of her jumper. "You've been standing on my landing for thirty seconds without ringing the bell, so I'm guessing you've been working up to something. Go on. Get it over with." His gaze dropped to her left wrist, to the thin crescent scar she'd spent years pretending not to notice, then lifted back to her face. "I wasn't working up to anything. I was deciding whether you'd shut the door before I finished the sentence." "Eight months, Lucien." "Eight months and six days." He shifted his weight onto the cane. The blade inside it was a secret everyone in London's underworld knew about and nobody mentioned. "I've been counting too. It's not a flattering habit." "Then why are you here?" "Because someone is looking for you." He said it quietly, as if the hallway might be listening. "Not the sort of someone who sends flowers. The sort who sends men with a photograph and a grudge. I found out before they did, which I suppose makes me the only useful person you've spoken to in months." Rory's jaw tightened. "Evan." "Not Evan." Lucien's mouth flattened. "Evan doesn't have the patience to hire anyone. This is a man named Dragomir, and he's owed a favour he believes you owe him, which is a more interesting problem than your ex-boyfriend, though I'm sure you'd disagree." "I'd disagree with the way you said 'ex-boyfriend' like it was a minor inconvenience." "I didn't say it like anything. I said it like a fact." He took a breath that seemed to cost him. "You left without a word. You left the flat above the Golden Empress. You didn't answer the phone, and when I came by Eva's, she shut the door in my face with all three deadbolts. Do you have any idea how hard it is to be shut out by a woman who keeps a cat named Ptolemy?" A laugh escaped her before she could stop it, sharp and humourless. "You deserved the deadbolts." "I did." He didn't argue. That was worse. "I know exactly what I did." The bass downstairs cut out. In the sudden hush, Rory heard the rain against the skylight and the tick of the radiator and her own pulse, too fast in her ears. "Say it, then," she said. "The thing you didn't say at the Bishopsgate car park. The thing you walked away from." Lucien's black eye held hers. The amber one flickered toward the stairwell, the street, the dark beyond the window, anywhere but her face. "If I say it," he said, "you will not like hearing it, and I will not be able to take it back." "Good," Rory said. "I've had enough of things nobody can take back."