Run: 2026-10-09-01M4G08GJR8SA6MAERWQ66FYSB

The knock came twice, then a pause, then a third time, slower, as if whoever stood on the landing had counted the seconds between each one. Rory set down the mug of tea she'd been nursing, wiped her palm on her jeans, and crossed the flat in her socks. Below her, Silas was shouting at someone about a tab. The bass from the jukebox rattled the floorboards under the rug. She didn't look through the peephole. She already knew the shape of him. She turned the bolt and pulled the door open. Lucien Moreau stood on the landing under the single bulb that had buzzed for a month without anyone bothering to replace it. Rain had darkened the shoulders of his charcoal suit and flattened his platinum hair against his skull. The ivory-handled cane hung from his left hand, its tip angled toward the floor. His mismatched eyes, one amber and one black, moved over her face, then over the doorframe, then back to her face again, cataloguing and discarding in the space of a breath. "You look well," he said. "You don't get to say that." Rory kept one hand on the door. "You don't get to show up at my flat at eleven at night without a text. Who gave you the address?" "Nobody gave it to me. I found it." He shifted his weight onto the cane. "Your landlord has a loose mouth when he's been drinking, and Silas has been drinking since the nineteenth century." "Silas will hear about this." "Silas already knows I'm here. He told me to use the side stairs so I wouldn't frighten the customers." A faint curve touched his mouth and vanished. "I did not use the side stairs." She should close the door. Her hand didn't move. Six months ago she had stood in a different doorway, on Brick Lane, in front of a different set of deadbolts, and watched him walk away down the stairwell without turning around. He had said something about the Ashgrove contract, something about a debt that couldn't be paid with money, and she had said something worse. She remembered every word of her side of it. She had spent a long time trying to forget his. "Say what you came to say," she said, "and then go." "I came to ask for something." "Of course you did." "Eva's flat has been broken into." The words landed somewhere under her ribs and stayed there. Rory let go of the door. "Is she hurt?" "No. Ptolemy bit the man in the hallway and then sat on his chest until he stopped struggling. Eva is with the cat's supervisor, who is apparently a nineteen-year-old from Hackney with a crossbow. She is fine. The flat is not." He turned the cane a quarter turn in his grip. "They took the scrolls from the back cabinet. The ones she wouldn't let you read." "She said they were nothing." "She lied to you. She lies to everyone when she's frightened." His voice didn't soften, but something behind it did. "Whoever took them knew which cabinet to open. They didn't touch the cash in the tea tin, or the laptop, or the silver candlesticks by the window. They wanted paper, and they wanted it specifically." Rory folded her arms. The scar on her left wrist pulled tight in the cold air leaking up the stairwell, the way it always did when she was thinking too hard. "And you came to me. Not to the Council. Not to whichever fixer you've been sleeping with this season." "I came to you." "Why?" He looked at her for a long moment, and for the first time since he'd arrived, he did not have a ready answer. The stairwell hummed. Someone downstairs laughed too loudly at something that wasn't funny. "Because you are the only person in London who has ever been able to read what I was hiding in those scrolls," he said at last, "and because you are the only person I trust to find the thief before they realise what they have." "You don't trust anyone." "No," he said. "I trusted you. That was the problem." It came out flat, without any performance in it, and Rory felt it go through her like cold water. She opened her mouth to answer, then closed it. Behind her, the kettle in the flat clicked off as it cooled. Somewhere in the building a pipe knocked twice and went quiet. "Come in," she said. "You're dripping on my welcome mat, and I'm not having that on top of everything else tonight." He stepped over the threshold, and the small hallway suddenly seemed much smaller. He smelled of rain and the cedar cologne he'd worn in Marseille, the one she'd complained about and then quietly stolen a bottle of when he wasn't looking. She shut the door and slid the bolt home. "Two deadbolts," he said, glancing at it. "Your landlord was lazy." "My landlord is Silas." "Ah." He tilted his head toward the sitting room. "Then it's the kind of lazy that can be fixed. Shall we start with the scrolls? Or with the part where you tell me why you still have the chain on the door?" Rory reached over and pushed the chain off its track with one finger. It rattled against the wood. "The scrolls," she said. "Sit down. And don't touch anything you can't pay for."