Run: 2026-10-08-01M4DAH6ZVMCVRFMBPJYBDMGY8

The knock came at ten past eleven, three slow raps, unhurried, the way someone knocks when they already know you're awake. Rory stood with her hand on the deadbolt for a long moment before she slid it back. Downstairs, Silas was shouting at someone about a tab, and the bass from the jukebox rattled the floorboards under her bare feet. She opened the door. Lucien Moreau leaned against the frame as if he had been waiting there for hours. The charcoal suit was immaculate, the platinum hair swept back from his forehead with its usual defiance. The ivory-handled cane rested in the crook of his left hand. He looked exactly the same, which somehow felt like an insult. "Aurora," he said. Nobody called her that anymore. Her friends said Rory. Her mother, when she was angry, said Aurora Jennifer, which was a different thing entirely. Lucien had always used the full name, pronouncing it as though it were a word in a language he'd learned for pleasure. "You don't get to say my name like that," she said. "Not after five months of nothing." One amber eye and one black one moved over her face, cataloguing. He took it without flinching. "I did send a message." "You sent a message that said *Don't be angry*. Which is not a message. It's an apology wearing a coat." Something almost like a smile touched his mouth. "May I come in? I'd rather not do this on your doorstep, where Silas can hear. He has very good ears for gossip." She should have said no. Every sensible part of her, the part that had learned to read a room before she entered it, the part that had sat in a Cardiff lecture hall thinking about contract law and wanting to scream, told her to close the door and leave the chain on. Instead she stepped back, and he came in, and the scent of him reached her before he'd fully crossed the threshold: cedar, rain, and something sharper underneath, like struck matches. She hated that she remembered it. The flat was small, and with him in it, smaller. He took in the mismatched armchair, the stack of delivery menus from the Golden Empress, the mug of cold tea on the windowsill. His gaze lingered on the kettle, then on her hands. He noticed the scar on her left wrist, the crescent-shaped one she'd had since she was nine, and she tucked her arm against her side without thinking. "You're thinner," he said. "You're observant. Congratulations." She folded her arms. "Say what you came to say, Luc." He set the cane against the wall with a care that seemed deliberate, as if he were buying himself a moment. When he turned back, the mask had slipped a fraction. She could see the tiredness beneath it. The line between his brows was deeper than it had been. "I left in the night," he said. "I told myself it was for your safety. That I was keeping you out of a war that wasn't yours." "That's a very elegant lie." "It isn't entirely a lie." He held her gaze. "The men who came for my father's ledgers would have come for you next. I didn't want you to be the thing they used against me." "So you decided for me." Her voice came out steadier than she felt. "You decided I couldn't handle the truth, and you took the decision away from me the same way you took the bed away from me, and then you were gone. Do you know what that's like? Waking up and finding the other side of the mattress cold, and knowing nobody's coming back to explain?" For once, he had no quick answer. He looked down at the floorboards, and the silence stretched until the jukebox downstairs cut out and the room was suddenly too quiet to hide in. "Yes," he said quietly. "I know exactly what that's like. I spent my whole childhood in Marseille waiting for a man who never came back to Avaros when he promised he would." It was the first thing he had ever told her about his father that didn't come wrapped in a joke. Rory's throat tightened. She had spent months building walls, and now one of the stones had shifted, and she could feel the whole structure leaning. "Why are you here, Lucien?" He stepped toward her, slowly, the way you approach something skittish. He stopped an arm's length away. Close enough that she could see the faint gold flecks in the amber eye, and the way the black one seemed to drink the lamplight. "Because I'm in trouble," he said, "and because you're the only person I trust to tell me when I'm lying to myself." She laughed, short and bitter. "That's rich." "It's true." His voice dropped. "I don't want you to forgive me. I know I haven't earned it. But I need you to listen, and then, if you still want me gone, I will go, and you'll never have to see me again." The words hung between them. She thought of Eva, who had pulled her out of Cardiff and into this city, who had told her she deserved better than men who vanished. She thought of the crescent scar, the years she'd spent learning to stand on her own. She also thought, unbidden and unwelcome, of the way he used to fall asleep with his hand curled over her hip, as if she might disappear if he let go. Rory reached past him and turned the deadbolt she had forgotten to lock. "Sit down," she said. "And start talking. You've got until the kettle boils."