Run: 2026-10-08-01M4DAMAXNXCT65EGAKBC254R1

The third deadbolt took longer than the first two. Rory stood on the landing above the curry house, listening to the hiss of the extractor fan through the floorboards, and counted the clicks the way she used to count stairs in the dark. One. Two. Three. Then the chain, and the door swung inward on a slice of warm yellow light. Lucien stood in the gap with one hand on the frame. He wore shirtsleeves, the cuffs turned back twice, and a pair of reading glasses she had never seen before sat low on his nose. Behind him, the flat looked exactly as she remembered: books stacked on every chair, scrolls wedged into the bookcase like rolled-up rugs, paper drifting across the coffee table in careful, overlapping layers. Eva's chaos, preserved in amber. His eyes moved over her in one swift pass. The amber one, then the black one. Neither gave anything away, which was the most infuriating thing about him. "Aurora," he said. "Hello, Lucien." "You didn't telephone." "I didn't want you to find an excuse." "I have never once needed an excuse to refuse you." He pulled the glasses off and folded them into his breast pocket. "That is rather the problem, isn't it?" Rory's throat tightened. She had rehearsed this on the Overground, between Shoreditch and Whitechapel, and every version had started with composure. None of them had included the way the light caught his platinum hair, or the faint scent of cedar and something sharper beneath it, or the fact that he was standing in her best friend's doorway looking at her as though she were a bill he'd been expecting for months. "Eva said you'd be looking after Ptolemy," she said. "Eva said a great many things before she boarded that plane." He stepped back, just far enough. "Come in before the neighbours start charging admission." She went in. The door closed behind her, and she heard the first deadbolt slide home, then the second, then the third, slow and deliberate. Her pulse stuttered at the sound. He noticed. Of course he noticed. A tabby cat slunk out from under the sofa, took one look at her, and flowed back into hiding with an air of profound disapproval. "He's never liked you," Lucien said. "He's never liked anyone." "That's not true. He tolerates me." A faint curve touched his mouth. "Barely." She moved to the window because it gave her somewhere to put her hands. Brick Lane glittered below, wet from an earlier rain, people spilling out of the bars with their coats open. She had lived in London for two years and still found it strange that she could stand in a room this close to the street and feel so far from everything she'd left behind. "You look tired," he said quietly. "I'm fine." "You're thinner." "I've been working doubles at Golden Empress. Yu-Fei pays in dumplings and complaints." She turned around, and that was a mistake, because he was closer than she'd expected, one shoulder against the bookcase, the cane resting against his leg with its ivory handle catching the lamplight. "Why are you still here, Luc? Eva's been gone three weeks." "Eva asked me to see to her affairs. The cat. The rent. The research." He paused. "You." "I don't need minding." "No. You never did." His voice dropped. "You needed someone to stop you from walking out in the middle of a conversation and pretending it hadn't happened." The words landed squarely, the way he always aimed, and for a moment she was back in the stairwell of the old Canary Wharf building, his hand fisted against the wall, her own voice saying *I can't do this with you, not with what you are*. She had meant it. She had also meant none of it, and they had both known it, and that had been the cruellest part. "You didn't stop me," she said. "You let me go." "You asked me to." "I asked you to make it hurt less." Her voice wavered and she hated it. "You didn't do that either." He was silent. The fridge hummed. Ptolemy yowled once from somewhere under the bed. "I thought distance would be kinder," he said finally. "I was wrong about that." "You were wrong about a lot of things." "Yes." He straightened from the bookcase, and the space between them shrank to nothing but the faint sound of his breathing. "Tell me what you came here to say, Aurora. Don't make me guess." Her mouth opened. Every careful sentence she had prepared deserted her at once, and what came out instead was smaller and more honest than she wanted. "I miss the way you used to say my name," she whispered. "Like it was a secret you'd decided to keep." His amber eye darkened. The black one did not change at all, but his hand lifted, hovered near her cheek without touching, a question and a surrender at once. "Rory," he said softly, and the sound of it, in that cramped room full of paper and old promises, was almost enough to undo her entirely.