Run: 2026-10-09-01M4G16BMH8NA5EZR48RVKT7XN

The knock came at ten past eleven, three measured raps that didn't belong to anyone who drank at Silas' bar. Rory set down the mug of tea she'd been nursing, wiped her palms on her jeans, and crossed the cramped landing in her socks. Through the spyhole, a slice of platinum hair and a charcoal lapel filled the fish-eye view. She didn't need to see the rest. She knew the cane, too, ivory-handled and tapping once against the doorframe. She opened the door anyway, because pretending otherwise had never worked on him. Lucien Moreau leaned against the frame like he owned the stairwell. Rain beaded on his shoulders and dripped from the tips of his hair, which had been slicked back with considerably less care than usual. One amber eye caught the landing bulb. The other, black as a well, stayed fixed on her face. "You've not been answering your phone," he said. "I've been answering it fine. I just haven't been answering you." "A distinction without a difference, Aurora." "Don't call me that. Not on my landing." Something flickered across his mouth, too quick to be a smile. "Rory, then. Forgive me. I've had a long night and a longer drive, and the stairs in this building are an insult to anyone with a bad hip." "You don't have a bad hip." "I have an excellent hip, which is why I'm standing here instead of sprawled on your carpet." He shifted his weight onto the cane. Only then did she notice the tremor in his left hand, the faint dark stain across his cuff that the charcoal wool was meant to hide. "May I come in?" She should have said no. Every sensible voice in her head, the one her mum had trained with decades of Sunday lectures, said to close the door and call Eva. Instead she stepped back and let the door swing wide. He came in slowly, favouring the right side, and paused just inside to take in the flat. The mismatched armchair. The stack of Pre-Law textbooks she had never quite sold back. The window that looked down onto Silas' bar and the rain-slick street beyond. He looked at everything except the sofa, which was a deliberate choice, because it still held the blanket she'd wrapped herself in three nights ago when she couldn't sleep and had cried over something stupid on the telly. "You're bleeding," she said. "I'm aware." "Sit down before you fall down." "I am rarely so accommodating." "Lucien." He sat. She heard the breath go out of him when he did, a short hiss he tried to swallow. She crossed to the kitchen, filled the kettle without thinking, then stopped with her hand on the tap and stared at the cupboard doors for a moment too long. Her wrist ached where the old crescent scar pulled, the way it always did when she was about to make a decision she'd regret. "Whose blood is it?" she asked. "Mine, mostly." He unbuttoned his waistcoat with one hand. "The rest belongs to a man in Limehouse who thought a cane was a walking stick. He will think twice next time." "Do you need a doctor?" "I need a towel and an argument I am fairly certain I will lose." She turned around. He had shrugged out of his jacket and was working on the shirt beneath it, and the lamplight caught the dark stripe along his ribs where the fabric had torn. Her throat did something complicated. She looked at the kettle instead. "You left," she said. "You asked me to." "I asked you to stop lying to me. That's not the same thing." "No," he agreed quietly. "It is not. But I was not sure you would still hear the difference by the time I finished explaining myself, so I chose the easier path." "Easier for who?" He didn't answer straight away. The kettle began to tick and hum on the counter. When she glanced back, he was watching her with both eyes, the amber one warm and the black one unreadable, and something in his face had gone unguarded. "For you," he said. "I told myself that was why." She pulled a towel from the drawer, the blue one she'd bought in a rush from the chemist, and crossed the room. She didn't hand it to him. She knelt on the rug instead, close enough to smell rain and smoke and the sharp bite of his cologne underneath. "Show me," she said.