Run: 2026-10-08-01M4DAHG9MPFMAXKY6RZGP4YWW

The knock came at a quarter past eleven, three measured raps that didn't match the bass thudding up through the floorboards from Silas' bar. Rory stood in the kitchen with a tea towel in one hand and a bowl in the other. Nobody knocked like that. Nobody who mattered knew this door existed, because it sat at the top of a narrow back staircase that smelled of stale beer and bleach. She set the bowl down without a sound and crossed the flat in her socks, stepping around the unopened post and the stack of Golden Empress containers she still hadn't returned. She put her eye to the spyhole. A slice of platinum hair, slicked back with the sort of precision that took a man twenty minutes in front of a mirror. Charcoal wool. Then the glass bent the hallway light, and one eye caught her own. Amber. She knew the other eye would be black. She didn't need to see it. "You've got the wrong flat," she said through the wood. "I have never once had the wrong flat, Aurora." Hearing her full name in that accent went straight through her ribs, the way it always had. She hated that it still worked. "Go home, Lucien." "I would, if home were still an option. It isn't, as it happens. Someone has been very thorough about making sure of that." She rested her forehead against the door. Cold paint, a faint smell of cumin drifting up from the kitchen downstairs. Two years ago she'd have yanked the door open before he finished the sentence. Two years ago she'd have taken whatever he brought her and called it a favour. She pulled back, unlatched the chain, and turned the deadbolt, because some habits outlasted their reasons. The door swung open, and the stairwell light spilled across the floorboards and onto the toes of his polished oxfords. He looked like himself. That was the worst of it. The suit fit as though it had been stitched onto him that morning, and the ivory-handled cane rested in his right hand, the same way it always did, like a man leaning on nothing at all. There was a cut above his left eyebrow, already crusted, and his knuckles were scraped raw. "You're bleeding on my landing," she said. "Am I? I hadn't noticed." He lifted his gaze from the scrape on his hand to her face and stayed there. "You look well." "You look like you've been dragged behind a van." "A van would have been kinder. It was a hired car with a very persistent driver." His mouth twitched, and then the humour drained out of it. "May I come in, Rory? I wouldn't ask if there were anyone else in London I trusted to keep their mouth shut." "That's a terrible sales pitch." "I'm aware. I'm also out of options." She should have said no. She had a list of reasons, and she could recite them in order, the way she used to recite case law before exams. The night he walked out of the Soho backroom with a bag of money and a sentence he'd never finished. The message he'd sent her three weeks later, which said only *It's better this way*, as if she were a problem he had solved. The fact that she'd told Eva, sobbing into a bottle of cheap red, that she would never speak his name again. She stepped aside anyway. Lucien moved past her slowly, favouring his left side, and the cane tapped twice against the floor before he made it to the middle of the room. He took in the place in one sweep: the sagging sofa, the bookshelf she'd rescued from a skip, the half-finished watercolour of the Thames propped against the wall. His gaze lingered on the watercolour a moment too long. "You kept the window open," he said. "It sticks shut when it rains." "Ah." He turned, and the lamp caught the scar on her left wrist as she crossed her arms. He noticed. She saw him notice, the way his eyes dropped and came back up with something careful in them. "Who did this?" "You're not supposed to be asking questions. You're supposed to be explaining why you're bleeding on my carpet." "Fair." He set the cane against the arm of the sofa and lowered himself onto it with a grimace he tried to hide. "Someone wants a particular book back. The one Eva's been keeping in that flat of hers on Brick Lane. The one with the seal on the spine." Rory's stomach dropped. "She told you where she kept it?" "No. She told nobody. That's the trouble." He pressed two fingers to the cut above his eyebrow and studied the red on them. "They found the flat last night. Took the cat, wrecked the second bedroom, and left the deadbolts hanging by their screws. I came as soon as I heard." "Ptolemy." The name came out cracked. "Is he—" "He's with Eva's neighbour, the one who sells samosas. He bit a man's ankle, I'm told, and sat on the windowsill until they gave up." His voice softened in a way she didn't want to hear. "He is perfectly well. Eva is not, quite. She's furious, and she's asked for you." Rory pressed her palm flat against the back of the armchair, feeling the worn fabric give under her fingers. Eva had always been the one who came running when things broke. Eva had hauled her out of Cardiff with two bin bags of clothes and a train ticket and never once asked what Evan had done to the bathroom door. And now Eva was in trouble, and Lucien was bleeding on her sofa, and the old pull was already tightening behind her sternum. "Why didn't you call?" she asked. Lucien looked at her for a long time. The amber eye and the black one, both steady, both unreadable. "Because you'd have said no," he said quietly. "And I needed you to hear the whole thing before you did."