Run: 2026-10-09-01M4G011Y7729BBPP98QC5Z5Y2

The knock came at half eleven, sharp and unhurried, three raps spaced like someone counting. Rory didn't move from the sofa. She had a mug of tea going cold on her knee and a delivery manifest from the Golden Empress spread across the cushion beside her, half-checked. Nobody knocked on the door above Silas' bar. Silas shouted up the stairs, and Eva rang first and then threatened to come over anyway. The knock came again. Two raps this time. Deliberate. She set the mug down, rose, and crossed the bare boards in her socks. Through the spyhole, a distorted fish-eye view showed a charcoal lapel, a silver-tipped cane, and a sliver of platinum hair combed back with more care than the hour deserved. She stood with her palm flat against the wood for three full seconds before she turned the lock. "You've got a nerve," she said. Lucien Moreau leaned on the ivory handle of his cane and looked at her with mismatched eyes, one amber, one black, both steady. "I have a great many things, Aurora. Nerve is the least interesting of them." "Rory. Nobody calls me Aurora unless they want something." "Then I shall try not to want anything." His gaze moved past her shoulder into the flat, lingered on the stacked boxes by the window, and returned to her face. "You've changed the bolts." "Three of them. You remember how many you had to pick last time?" "Two. The third was a courtesy." He tilted his head. "You're still wearing that jumper with the hole in the cuff." She glanced down at her wrist, at the thin crescent scar she'd spent years pretending not to notice, and tugged the sleeve over her knuckles. "It's comfortable." "It's a disgrace." "You've not been here in five months, Lucien. You don't get opinions on my jumpers." Something flickered behind the amber eye. He shifted his weight off the cane and onto the balls of his feet, a movement he had always made right before he decided how much of the truth to spend. "I've been in Paris. Then Lyon. Then a series of unpleasant rooms that do not bear repeating." "And now you're on my doorstep at half eleven." "Yes." "Why?" He didn't answer straight away. Below them, the bar's jukebox thumped through the floorboards, a bass line that rattled the frame. Rory waited. She had learned long ago that Lucien filled silences the way other men filled glasses, and she refused to be the one who poured. "Someone is asking questions about you," he said at last. "Not the usual sort. The sort that come with a price attached to your name." Her stomach went tight and quiet. "What sort of price?" "The kind I refused to pay the last time." "You refused to pay for me." "I refused to let them take you to pay off a debt you didn't owe." His voice stayed level, but the cane's tip tapped once against the threshold, sharp as a full stop. "There is a difference, though I'm told you have never accepted it." "You walked out of the Hollow Court with your coat over your arm and didn't look back. That's what I accepted." "I looked back." He said it quietly, and the words landed heavier than any shout would have. "You weren't looking." She opened her mouth and shut it again. Her heart kicked hard against her ribs, and she hated that he could see it in the flush climbing her throat. "Come in, then," she said, stepping aside. "Before the whole street gets an eyeful and Silas starts charging admission." He didn't move straight away. Instead he reached into his inside pocket and drew out a folded slip of card, thick cream stock, the edges gilded. He held it out between two fingers. "Read it first," he said. "Then decide whether you still want me inside." She took it. The writing was his, precise and looping, a name she didn't recognise, and beneath it a single word she recognised all too well. *Malphora.* Rory's fingers closed around the card. She lifted her eyes to his. "Where did you get this?" "From the same place I got the scar on your name," Lucien said. "Which is why I'm standing in your doorway instead of ringing you from Paris like a sensible man."