Run: 2026-10-20-01M5C6PGC0QJD58ZTRVTNK9EGS

Rain drummed on the window above the curry house and the flat smelled of turmeric and old paper. Rory sat cross-legged on the floor with a stack of Eva's scrolls fanned around her knees, Ptolemy asleep in the empty fruit bowl, when the knock came: three flat raps, spaced and unhurried. She set the scroll down and went still. Nobody knocked on that door that way. Eva used a key and swore at the top deadbolt. Yu-Fei sent texts. The landlord came on Tuesdays with a clipboard and a grudge. Rory rose, crossed the room, and put her eye to the peephole. Charcoal shoulders. Platinum hair, wet at the temples. A cane held level with the floor. She unlocked the top bolt, the middle one, and the bottom, and pulled the door back six inches. Lucien Moreau stood there with rain running off his coat collar and no umbrella, as though the weather were beneath his notice. "You're dripping on the stairs," Rory said. "Good evening to you too, Aurora." His amber eye caught the corridor bulb; the black one swallowed it. "May I come in?" "Depends." "On?" "What you want." He shifted his grip on the ivory handle of the cane. "Your phone has been off for four days." "So you walked here." "So I walked here." Rory leaned against the door jamb and folded her arms. "Brick Lane's a fair walk from wherever it is you sleep." "Shoreditch. Forty minutes. I counted the puddles." He tilted his head. "You look well." "Don't." "Don't what?" "Don't start with that. That voice you use on clients." She nodded at the stairwell. "You want to talk, you do it in here, and you leave your manners outside with the umbrella you didn't bring." A corner of his mouth moved. "Charming as ever." "You've got three minutes." He stepped past her, close enough that his wet sleeve brushed her arm, and the door clicked shut behind him. Ptolemy woke, stretched, and dropped out of the fruit bowl to wind himself around Lucien's ankles as though the man were a regular visitor. Lucien crouched, set his cane flat across his knees, and scratched the tabby behind both ears. "Traitor," Rory told the cat. "He has judgement." "He has fleas." Rory took the armchair, the good one with the stuffing still inside it, and left him the crate by the bookshelf. He didn't sit. He stood with his back to the window, water beading on the sill behind him, and scanned the room: the scrolls, the maps, the pins and red thread across Eva's wall. "You've been busy," he said. "You've been noticing." "Your girl Eva has been asking around my people for something she shouldn't. Three separate brokers in two weeks. She's drawing attention she doesn't want and you know it, because you're the one who wrote the questions." Rory's jaw tightened. "Eva's not my girl. Eva's a grown woman with a library card and a stubborn streak." "And you're her errand runner now?" "I'm her friend." She pulled her sleeve down over the crescent scar on her wrist, an old habit. "That's a thing people are, Lucien. Friends. They call. They worry. Some of them even stay in the same postcode on purpose." His fingers stilled on the cane. "Ah," he said. "Ah what?" "There it is." "There it isn't. I'm not doing this." Rory stood, crossed to the door, and pulled the top bolt. "You've had your three minutes. Go home and tell your brokers to stop answering their phones to strangers." He didn't move. "It was Limehouse," he said. Rory's hand stayed on the bolt. "Nine weeks ago. The warehouse off Narrow Street." He turned the cane slowly, once, in his fingers. "You asked me at the time why I put the cuffs on you. I gave you an answer. You didn't like it." "You gave me a line about keeping me out of the way." "I gave you a line." He nodded. "It was a line." "Then say the truth, or get out of my flat." "There were four of them in that room and two of them had your name in their mouths before I ever walked in. Paid for. A contract on a delivery girl with black hair and a Cardiff accent, because somebody in the south had worked out which restaurant she ran errands for." His voice stayed flat. "So I cuffed you to a radiator and I went in alone and I made sure nobody in that room ever wrote another name down. And then I stayed away, because a man who's seen my face in a room like that tends to come looking for the woman who made him look." Rory's breath went out of her. "You could have told me that." "I could have." "You—" She turned from the door and pressed her back to it. "You let me think you were just clearing the street. I sat on a cold floor for four hours. I sat there and I imagined you dead and then I imagined you laughing at me, and I didn't know which one was worse." "I know." "Don't say 'I know' to me." "I know." He set the cane against the wall, straightened, and spread his hands, empty. "I'm not good at this part." "What part?" "The part where I explain myself." His black eye caught the light and gave nothing back. "You asked me once — on the roof at the Golden Empress, before any of it — why I kept turning up where you were. I walked off the edge of that question. I've walked off the edge of it every night since." Rory pushed away from the door. "You kissed me," she said. "I did." "And then you looked at me like I'd handed you a bill." "You kissed me back." His amber eye came up, steady. "That was the trouble, Aurora. I had a plan for how that night went and it didn't include you kissing me back, so I left before I did something that would have got one of us hurt, and then — " he lifted one shoulder, " — and then I put a pair of handcuffs on you in a warehouse and called it protection." The rain filled the silence. Downstairs, someone laughed in the curry house kitchen and a pan hit a burner. Rory rubbed her thumb across the scar on her wrist. "Six weeks," she said. "Six weeks what?" "Six weeks I've been sleeping with my phone on the pillow. Not because I was scared. Because I was angry and I wanted to be angry at you and you wouldn't come and let me." She laughed, one short unwise sound. "And now you're here about Eva's questions." "Yes." "Just that." "No." Lucien took a step. Then another, and the puddle beneath him spread across Eva's warped floorboards. "I'd have come whether she was asking questions or not. The questions gave me an excuse to knock politely." "You don't do anything politely." "You're right." He was close enough now that she could see the rain in his hairline, the small nick where he'd cut himself shaving. "So stop me." Rory didn't move. He raised one hand and stopped it an inch from her jaw, hovering there, letting her see it coming the way you'd show a nervous horse your palms. "Stop me," he said again, quieter. "I'm thinking about it." "Think faster." Rory reached up and closed her hand around his wrist, over the cuff and the cold skin beneath, and held it there — not pulling, not pushing. Her fingers found the shape of his bones. "I'm still angry," she said. "That's fine." "I'm going to be angry tomorrow." "I'd think less of you." "And you're going to sit down and tell me everything about that room, and the contract, and whatever it is you've decided I can't know, and you're going to do it without walking off any edges. Because if you go out that door tonight before you've finished, I'll put your cane somewhere you'll need a surgeon to find it." The amber eye creased. "Yes, Aurora." She let go of his wrist and stepped back, and the back of her knee found the armchair, and she sat down hard. "Take your coat off," she said. "You're making a mess of Eva's floor."