Run: 2026-10-13-01M4TC64QF2SHBQXQQ9N0TY9MY

The third deadbolt slid back, and Rory opened the door on eight months of silence wearing a charcoal suit. Lucien Moreau stood on the landing with the rain still on him, platinum hair come loose from its usual severity, one strand fallen across the amber eye. The black eye caught the hall light and gave nothing back, as it never did. He was hatless. He was leaning on the ivory-handled cane in a way that had nothing to do with elegance. And there was blood at his cuff, dark against white linen — a detail so wrong on him that her brain snagged on it before anything else. "Hello, Aurora." She moved to close the door. The cane's ivory head hooked over its edge, gentle as a handshake, and held. "You have ten seconds," she said. "Evan is in London." The landing tilted. Somewhere below, the curry house's extractor fan roared on, and the stairwell smelled of turmeric and rain, and Rory Carter, who did not freeze, who had not frozen the night she'd packed a single bag and left Cardiff forever, stood frozen with her hand on the door. "Nine," she managed. "A skip tracer came through my network three days ago. Asking questions in Cardiff first, then here. Good questions. Expensive ones." His voice was as she remembered — low, unhurried, French underneath the English like gravel under silk. "I bought the contract. The men who'd taken it objected to losing the money." He glanced down at his cuff, mildly, as though the blood belonged to someone else. "We discussed it." "Is that your blood or theirs?" "Yes." Ptolemy chose that moment to arrive, the tabby weaving out of the dark of the flat and straight to Lucien's ankles, purring like an engine. Traitor. Cats were supposed to know what he was. Ptolemy had never once cared. "You could have sent a note," Rory said. "You'd have burned it." "I'm burning this. Whatever this is." But she looked at the blood again, and at the way he held himself — that fractional guarding along his left side that no one else would have caught, that she caught because she had once spent three months learning him the way other people learn languages — and she stepped back from the door. "Come in before you drip on Eva's carpet. She'll kill you, and then I'll have to explain the body." He crossed the threshold the way he did everything, as if he'd been invited a long time ago and had simply been polite about waiting. The flat swallowed him the way it swallowed everything: books to the ceiling, scrolls in umbrella stands, Eva's research notes fanned across every surface like a paper flood. Rory had been sleeping here a fortnight — her own flat above Silas' bar was a swamp courtesy of a burst pipe — and she still couldn't find the kettle half the mornings. Lucien took it in with one slow turn of his mismatched eyes and said only, "Eva's well?" "Edinburgh. Arguing about pottery." She locked the door behind him. All three deadbolts. Habit. "Sit down before you fall down." "I don't fall down." "Sit down, Lucien." He sat, on the arm of the settee because the seat itself was occupied by a thesis, and let her take the cane from his hand. She set it within his reach. She knew what lived inside that ivory handle; she'd seen it once, a thin bright sliver of it, in an alley behind a club in Soho, and the memory of that night threaded through everything that came after. She found Eva's first-aid kit in a biscuit tin labeled in Eva's furious handwriting and came back to find he'd already shrugged out of his jacket, already working his cufflinks loose with the wrong kind of care. The shirt beneath was ruined. Under that, along his ribs, a gash — shallow, but long, the length of a forearm, still seeping. "Lucien." "It's a scratch." "It's a foot long." "A long scratch." She sat beside him and pressed gauze to it, and he hissed through his teeth — counted, she realized, in French, un, deux, trois, a habit she had forgotten until this exact moment, when it hit her behind the ribs like a fist. Eight months. Eight months of telling herself that the fixer with the demon's eyes had been a fever she'd sweated out, and here was his blood on her hands, literally, warm and red and ordinary, and she wanted to shake him until his teeth rattled. "Who did this?" she asked. "Men who