Run: 2026-10-13-01M4TBE9DDS76KX54YT0HEBENF

The third deadbolt scraped back and Rory opened the door, and the hall light caught platinum hair gone dark with rain. Lucien Moreau stood on the welcome mat like a man who'd lost an argument with a knife. His charcoal suit — pressed, always, to a blade's edge — hung torn at one shoulder. Blood ran in a thin line down his collar into the ruin of his shirt. Only the ivory-handled cane looked the way she remembered, and it was the only thing holding him upright. "Rory." One amber eye, one black, both fixed on her. "You look well." She slammed the door. The cane's tip caught it. Lacquered wood, scuffed now, wedged into the gap an inch from her knuckles. "Five minutes." "Four months." She put her shoulder to the door. "Thirty seconds a month. You've had two." "Some of it isn't mine to explain." "Whose is it?" Rain on the stairwell window. Then, in the voice he kept for business and had never once used on her: "Yours. Partly." Something grey wound around her ankles. Ptolemy pushed his head into the gap, sniffed the cane, and — traitor — began to purr. "You're bleeding on the landing," she said. "The deposit's in Eva's name." She opened the door. He crossed the threshold the way he did everything, as though invited, and stopped, because there was nowhere to stand. Eva's flat had shrunk since spring. Books rose in towers off every surface. Scrolls sat rubber-banded in a wine rack. A skull did duty as a paperweight on a stack of photocopied parish records, and the curry house below had soaked the whole place in cumin and old frying oil. "She's cataloguing the apocalypse." "She's in Edinburgh. Sit down before you fall down. It'll save me a mop." He lowered himself onto the arm of the sofa, the only surface not holding paper, and laid the cane across his knees. Ptolemy leapt up beside him and commenced an inspection. "If you draw that pig-sticker in here," she said, "I'll bill you for the upholstery." "It stays sheathed. The sofa's safe." A glance at the window. "The curtains, I promise nothing for. They look cursed." "They are. Don't touch them." Rory dug the first-aid tin from behind the herbalism shelf. When she came back he'd loosened his tie, and the ruin underneath ran worse than the collar had promised: a gash along his ribs, seeping through fabric she'd once watched him get fitted for in a shop off Savile Row, while he'd stood on a little pedestal and complained about the pins. "Jacket off." "You'll ruin my reputation." "Your reputation's bleeding through a four-hundred-quid suit." "It's Avarosian work, the knife. Poisoned, possibly. We'll find out together." "Not funny." "It wasn't meant to be." She pressed gauze to his side. His jaw tightened; nothing else moved. Up close he smelled of rain and copper and the vetiver she'd spent four months forgetting. Her sleeve rode up as she worked, and she caught his gaze dropping to the crescent scar at her wrist — the one he'd traced with his thumb in the alley behind Silas' bar, the same night he'd kissed her like a man defusing something, then ceased to exist. "How did you know I'd be here?" "Your boiler died Tuesday. You wouldn't pay Silas' locksmith's rates, and Eva leaves you the spare key under the—" "You've been watching me." "I've been keeping you off a list. The work requires knowing where you sleep." Her hands stopped. The gauze came away red. "Who opened you up, Lucien?" "Does it matter?" "I like to know whose blood I'm keeping out of a security deposit." The amber eye — the one that lied least — held hers. "People who wanted your address. They were under the impression I'd sell it." The flat went very quiet. Downstairs, the curry house extractor fan hummed its one note. "You vanished," she said, "to protect me." "I vanished because your name is on a list, and I'm the reason, and every day I spent near you wrote it in darker ink." "You could have told me." "You'd have argued." "Damn right I'd have argued." She pressed harder than the wound required. He declined to give her the wince. "You don't get to decide what costs me. That's what Evan did. Decided things. For my own good." The stillness that came over him then had nothing human in it. The lamplight found the black eye and lost itself there. "Do not put me in that sentence." "Then stop acting like the sentence fits." Ptolemy's purr filled the silence, obscene and content. Outside, a siren passed on Brick Lane and thought better of stopping. "Je sais," he said at last. French. The tell. The polish only ever cracked in one direction. "Tu crois que je ne le sais pas?" "English." "I know." A breath, shallow because of the ribs. "I know what it cost. I counted the days, Rory. There were a hundred and thirty-one." She became aware of several things at once. Her hand flat against his side. His hand at her waist, though she couldn't have said when it arrived. The width of air left between them, which was no width at all. His eyes dropped to her mouth, and four months collapsed into a single breath held by two people who'd built entire personalities out of not needing anyone. She stepped back. "No." "No," he agreed, and his hand didn't leave the air where she'd been until she was clear of it. "You don't get to come back bleeding and have it be the alley again. You want back in, you come back whole, in daylight, with an explanation that's all yours." "And if I'd come whole, in daylight?" "You didn't." She threw a blanket at him. It landed over his head, which improved him enormously. "Sofa. Eva's grimoires are off-limits — she'll curse you, and I mean that as a factual statement. There's paracetamol in the tin, if the poisoning's going to be boring about it." He freed his face from the blanket. Some of the grey had left it, or the lamp was kind. "You're letting me stay." "I'm letting you not die on a curry-house landing. There's a difference, and you're a man who appreciates fine distinctions." Ptolemy, his inspection complete, settled onto Lucien's chest and began kneading the ruined suit into a nest. Lucien looked down at him with the worn bewilderment of a man outmanoeuvred by smaller forces. "His name's Ptolemy," she said from the bedroom doorway. "He bites everyone." "He hasn't bitten me." "No." She took in the pair of them, the monster and the cat, and resented the whole arrangement of the universe. "He never did have any sense." She left the door open a crack. Not an invitation. A gap in the evidence.