Run: 2026-10-09-01M4FXYJBTBME5PJNWXKBDGE2M

The third deadbolt gave with a reluctant clack, and Aurora hauled the door open before her nerve could catch up with her hand. Lucien stood on the landing, one palm resting on the ivory knob of his cane. The stairwell light caught his hair and turned it the colour of old pennies. One eye was amber, one black, and both were fixed on her face with the patience of a man who had expected to wait longer. "Rory," he said. "You can't just turn up here." "I knocked. Twice. You are the one who took her time." Behind her, Ptolemy padded across a stack of Eva's research notes, tail high, and wound around her ankles. The cat stopped, sniffed the air toward the landing, and sat down with the air of a creature who had already decided how this would end. "Eva's not here," Aurora said. "I know. She's in Edinburgh until Thursday, reading something dull about Norse runes." He tilted his head. "I came to see you." "How did you know I'd be here?" "Because you have nowhere else to go that you would admit to, and because Silas told me you stopped sleeping above the bar after the Tuesday fire." His mouth moved into something that was not quite a smile. "He is a terrible liar when he is worried about someone." She should have shut the door. She could feel the weight of the deadbolts in her hand, the cold steel of them, and she did not move. "Silas talks too much." "Silas is a bartender. It is the job." Lucien shifted his weight, and the cane tapped once against the threshold. "May I come in, or do we conduct this conversation through a crack in a door like a pair of Victorian spinsters?" "Say what you came to say first." "I came to say I was wrong." The words landed harder than any of the ones he'd thrown at her six months ago, when he had stood in her kitchen above the bar and told her, very calmly, that the arrangement with the Vauxhall brokers could not be undone. She had asked him to pick a side. He had picked the one that paid his debts. "Wrong about what?" she said. "About letting you walk out of the room." "You didn't let me do anything. You just stopped answering the phone." Something flickered across his face, quick as a blade drawn and sheathed. "Yes. That was the cowardly part." She laughed, short and unhappy. "That's the first honest thing you've said in months." "Then let me say another." He stepped closer, close enough that she could smell him: cedar and cold rain, and underneath that the sharp metallic tang that always clung to half-demons when they were tired. "I have not slept properly since the night I left. Every time I close my eyes I am standing in that hallway with you looking at me like I am a stranger. And I deserved it." Aurora gripped the edge of the door until her knuckles ached. The small crescent scar on her left wrist pressed against her pulse, a reminder she had never asked to be carrying. "You don't get to make me the one who forgives you." "I know." "You don't get to stand there looking like that." "Like what?" "Like you're sorry and still expecting me to fix the lock on your life." He was quiet for a moment. Then, very softly: "Would it help if I said I still want you to?" The honest answer rose up in her throat, bitter and warm at the same time, and she swallowed it down. Ptolemy stretched, yawned, and padded back into the flat, leaving them on the threshold with nothing between them but the open door and the cold draught from the stairwell. "Come in," she said, stepping aside. "But you're making the tea, and you're telling me everything. Every name, every deal, every lie you told Eva about where you were that night." Lucien's eyes, one amber and one black, went dark with something she refused to name. He lifted his cane and crossed the threshold. "Every name," he agreed. "I will start with the one that matters most."