AI The third deadbolt scraped back and the door jerked against the chain. Rory slid it free and pulled, the frame sticking for half a second before giving all at once.
He stood on the threshold like a bad idea in a good suit. Rain starred his shoulders, a handful of bright drops still clinging to the slicked-back sweep of his hair. One eye met hers amber and burning; the other was an absence, black as a hole in the world. The ivory head of his cane gleamed up at her like a grin.
“Bonsoir,” he said, a little out of breath.
“Lucien.” All the neat lines she’d drawn over the last months blurred along their edges. She didn’t step back. The smell of curry from the shop downstairs drifted up, warm and cumin-rich, and the corridor hummed with a humming lightbulb that had been dying longer than some relationships. His gaze flicked down to her hand on the door, to the white crescent scar on her wrist.
It was stupid, the lurch in her chest. Ever since she’d turned her life into a series of practical decisions, her heart still went and made its own throwing knives.
“You look —” he began.
“Like I’m not inviting you in,” she cut in. Then her eyes adjusted to the corridor’s dim yellow, found the darker stain seeping under his coat at his flank. The rain had speckled him, but that wasn’t rain. “—unless you’re bleeding on Eva’s doormat, in which case she’ll haunt me and she’s not even dead.”
The corner of his mouth ticked. “Only a scratch.”
“You always say that.” She stepped back because of what was darkening the fine fabric of his shirt, because the corridor wasn’t private and also because she hated that she still noticed the exact way he shifted his weight , careful, elegant, hiding pain as if that too was meant to be beautiful. “In. Shoes off.”
He obeyed. That alone told her more than she wanted. He set the cane first inside, then braced one hand on the doorframe, slid out of his polished shoes without wobbling. The ivory handle clicked against the floorboards as he leaned it aside. Ptolemy, Eva’s fat tabby, chose that moment to slink in from the kitchen. He look ed at Lucien, sniffed, then wound a smug loop around his ankles, fur lifting its static on the wet wool of Lucien’s trousers.
“Ah,” Lucien said softly , as if greeting an old friend. “Monsieur Ptolemy.”
“He knows who feeds him,” Rory said. “Sit.” She nodded at the battered armchair by the window, the one whose cushion had a permanent concavity in the shape of Eva’s study habits. Every other surface of the sitting room was colonized by books, shoeboxes of index cards, a scroll pressed under a paperweight fashioned like a brass beetle, the detritus of a mind that liked to pin and name the world. It was a small room, washed in lamplight and the glow of Brick Lane outside. Rain hissed on the sill.
Lucien moved like a fox might move with a snare on its leg, making it look deliberate. He shrugged out of his coat and didn’t grimace, which was how she knew it hurt. Under the coat, his tailored charcoal suit jacket was open, pearl buttons on his shirt undone at the throat. He’d always done quiet excess well. She swallowed, turned away.
“Kitchen’s that way ? Same as before?” he asked.
“It hasn’t grown another wing since you last darkened the place,” she said, already pulling open the cupboard under the sink to extract the box that held Eva’s feeble excuse for a first-aid kit. She could feel his gaze on her spine. It prickled along her shoulders and neck, a sensation she remembered too well. “Your timing’s awful.”
“I know.” His voice had lowered, not apology, not yet. “I wouldn’t have—”
“Don’t,” she said, sharp as a snapped twig. She set the kit on the wobbly coffee table, popped the latches. “Take off the jacket. Shirt too if it’s through.”
He hesitated just long enough to be irritating. Then the rustle of fabric. When she look ed up he’d loosened his cufflinks with his teeth and flicked them into his trouser pocket in two neat movements. His hands weren’t shaking . Of course they weren’t. He shrugged the jacket off, then eased the shirt away from the wound, collar gaping. The white cotton had gone pink and stuck in places. He peeled it free. The cut ran along his ribs, shallow if it had bled this much and he wasn’t keeling over. A blade had kissed him, not an animal.
“Who?” she asked, already dabbing the blood with a clean cloth.
“A collector,” he said. “Displeased with my payment plan.”
“You being alive?” She uncapped the antiseptic and poured. He didn’t flinch at the sting, only tipped his head back, exposing the fine line of his throat. The lamplight caught at his jaw, the pale stubble that broke his faultless image. “You shouldn’t be here, Lucien.”
“I didn’t know where else to go.” He said it lightly , like a joke, which is how she knew it wasn’t one.
“You always know where to go.” The cloth came away rosier. She pressed firmer. Ptolemy took advantage of her occupied hands to leap onto the chair arm and sniff Lucien’s hair as if checking its product for authenticity. Lucien’s hand came up without look ing and scratched the cat between the shoulders. The purr came like a motor. Traitor, Rory thought.
“Rory,” he said.
“What.” She set the cloth aside, reached for gauze. His skin was hot, human where it counted. A pulse beat steadily beneath her fingers. Up close, he didn’t smell like brimstone and myth—more clove, citrus, a whisper of smoke, all of it undercut tonight by copper.
“This wasn’t me bringing trouble to your door,” he said, and there was something in his voice she didn’t know how to weaponize against him. “Trouble was making its way regardless.”
She anchored the gauze and began to wrap him, taut but not so tight he couldn’t breathe. “If this is because of last time—”
“The Laytham job?” he asked, glancing down. His mismatched eyes were a study in contrasts. That dead black iris didn’t reflect her in it. It swallowed. “No. And also—je suis désolé for that.”
She said nothing. The Laytham job. In a different room, a different night. Her, standing over an antique map with Eva’s notes fluttering like birds around them. Him, saying they’d misled a man who had already misled a dozen others, the moral calculus in his pocket next to his phone. Her, kissing him anyway in an alley that smelled like spilled beer and wet brick. Him, gone by morning. And then, worse, discovering afterward that he’d had someone watch ing her without her consent.
“Eva would have taken a baseball bat to your kneecaps,” Rory said calmly. “Pity she’s in Oxford this week.”
“I would have deserved it.” He exhaled out, careful, as if his breath could move her hands. “It was not my finest hour.”
“You ghosted me after you used me, then you had me followed,” she said, not look ing up. The calm was a trick. It had to be. “You don’t get to stand there and speak in italics.”
“I had you watch ed because Evan was sniffing around your building,” he said, the name cutting through the air like a thrown bottle. Her hands hesitated. He saw it. Of course he saw it. He saw too much. “You left Cardiff to get away and it is my job to know who is opening what doors. I chose to believe you might be more annoyed by my interference than dead because of my discretion.”
“Your choices are so magnanimous.” She reached for the tape, watch ed her own fingers, the way the blue veins fanned from the thin skin of her wrist to her thumb. The little crescent scar flashed. She had got that by falling off a bike when she was eight, chasing down a kite with a torn tail. Stupid things left marks too. “And you could have told me.”
“I could have,” he said. “I didn’t. That was the mistake.”
She tied off the bandage and sat back on her heels, the carpet imprinting her knees through her jeans. Outside, tyres hissed as a taxi sluiced past. The streetlights cast their sodium halos, softening every thing into honey and shadow. She look ed up at him. He wasn’t watching the window or the book spines with their cracked backs. He was watching her.
“You don't get points for identifying the mistake after the fact,” she said.
“No,” he agreed. Silence sat between them long enough for Ptolemy to fidget and tuck his paw under his chest and for Rory to become uncomfortably aware of the tight circumference of this room and the hum of the world outside it. Long enough for the muscle under her hand to stop its reflexive flinching and go warm, pliant.
His eyes softened on her, the amber one at least. The black one remained that blank coin surface. “Aurora,” he said, and she felt it like a touch on the back of her neck, the use of her full name. He only brought it out when he wanted her to put down the blade in her hand. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. Eva will make me scrub your blood off her rug. That’s on you.” She scooped up the stained cloths and stood, joints stiff, and took them to the sink. He moved behind her like a presence even when he stayed still. She ran water until it went clear.
“You’re still at the Golden Empress?” he asked the tap. “Driving that enormous scooter like it owes you money?”
She snorted before she could stop it. “Delivery riders don’t have scooters. We have beaten-up bicycles and raincoats that I’m pretty sure used to be someone’s shower curtain. But yes. Yu-Fei pays on time.”
“Yu-Fei pays better if you smile,” he said absent-mindedly, as if taste-testing the words. “You shouldn’t have to.”
“We all do things we shouldn’t have to.” She turned, propped a hip against the counter. He’d leaned back in the chair now, head tilted to one side. His skin was a shade paler than earlier. He needed sugar, salt, heat. She hooked a finger toward the kettle. “Tea.”
“I wouldn’t dare say no.”
She put water on. The whirr and click of cheap appliance filled the room. Ptolemy decided gravity existed again, leapt down, trilled a question at Rory and then became very interested in the floor around Lucien’s discarded shoes. He batted one shoelace, the neat bow coming apart in a flicker of delighted claws.
“You’re bleeding less,” she said after a moment.
“It already look s less dramatic from here,” he said wryly, fingering the edge of the bandage. She slapped his hand away without thinking. His mouth did that not-smile again. “Right. Don’t touch.”
“You can stay.” The words came out before she’d fully assembled them, but she didn’t take them back. He stilled, listening with his whole body the way he always had, like language was a key you might be hiding behind your teeth. She folded her arms. “On the couch. One night. You don’t open the door to anyone. You don’t call anyone here. You don’t make choices on my behalf. You don’t—” she searched for the last one, found it, “—you don’t say my name like that again.”
His eyes flickered , some private amusement, some relief. “What if I think it.”
“You can think whatever you want.” The kettle clicked off. She poured into two mismatched mugs, the cracked blue one with a seahorse and the white one that said Oxford in faded letters. “You always do.”
He didn’t argue. That, more than anything, made her wary. She handed him the seahorse mug, because it was more precarious and she trusted him to pay attention to precarious things. He cradled it in both hands, inhaled the steam. The lamplight found the planes of his face, turning his cheekbones into something sculptural. He had faint varnish-smelling scars along his knuckles, old as time. He took a cautious sip, eyes closing, lashes making nice work of being eyelashes. The gesture was unbearably human.
“You should eat,” she said, fighting the impulse to catalog him further. She made lists; it made her feel in control. “There’s leftover daal. Possibly two days old. Eva probably wrote an essay on it.”
“I am scandalized,” he murmured. “You know how to look after a man.”
She tilted her head, unamused. “I know how to keep my flat-mate from coming home to a corpse. Don’t confuse the two.”
His laugh was short. “Noted.”
The chair creaked when he shifted. He held the mug steady against a wave of dizziness he covered by glancing at the window. “It’s raining like Marseille in February,” he observed, as if the sky’s tantrum had something to do with being born by the Mediterranean. He always slotted in these stray miracles of himself without warning. “Brick Lane look s better slick.”
“It smells better too. Less bin.” She blew on her tea, sipped. Let the heat move through her. It took the edge off the knotted thing living under her ribs. She leaned her shoulder against the plaster, which was cold where the damp came through, and watch ed him watch the street. Somewhere below, someone laughed too loudly and oil hissed in a pan. Life went on cooking its onions.
He set the mug down, just so, no trace in the ring of damp left on the table. “I didn’t just come because of the collector,” he said without look ing at her.
“Of course you didn’t.” She kept her voice dry, resigned to his love of two-part announcements. “You never get mugged without a subtext.”
“That would be uncivilized,” he said, and finally look ed at her, just full-on, not a glance but a intent. “There are rumours. About your friend Eva’s latest obsession. Certain books changing hands. Certain people asking the wrong kind of questions.”
“Eva’s always asking the wrong kind of questions. It’s her brand.” Rory set her mug down too, between someone else’s notes on binding rituals and a receipt for coriander. “What are you angling for, Lucien? Because if this is your version of olive branch—”
“I wanted to warn you.” His mouth flattened. “And to ask you to let me be the one to deal with them.”
There he was. There it was, the tilt of his world. He made offers like loaded dice. “By deal you mean you get paid and I get to be grateful?”
“By deal I mean I get to make sure you don’t end up catching bullets meant for antique paper.” He look ed almost angry, that fine, rare flare. It made him look suddenly younger. “Tu comprends? I am not good at saying please.”
“You’re excellent at asking for the impossible, though.” Her heartbeat had picked up without consulting her. She smiled without humor. “I already told you—no choices on my behalf.”
He subsided, heat ebbing. There it was again, that look that seduced and apologized and promised he’d step on his own tongue for you if you asked nicely. It was a problem and always had been. “Then let me help you make yours,” he said. Soft. Almost reasonable.
She breathed out. The cat hopped onto the sofa behind him and pawed at a blanket as though preparing him a nest. Hilariously domestic. She wanted to either laugh or throw something. Instead she nodded at the couch. “Finish your tea. Then sleep.”
He stared at the blanket Ptolemy was trying to tug over his thigh. “Am I being tucked in by a cat?”
“Consider it rent.” She moved past him, and something in the movement pulled her closer than she intended. His knee brushed the outside of her calf. Static jumped skin to skin. The sensation shot up her leg like someone striking a singing bowl.
He had always had a particular gravity. She could pretend it didn’t pull. She could build moats. But this close the filament between them hummed, some ridiculous physics experiment about magnetism and bad decisions. She smelled his cologne a second time and realized under it he still smelled faintly of what she could only think of as winter—cold air and metal and the last hour before dawn.
His head tipped, that subtle apology in the angle of it. “I missed you,” he said, low, the words like a confession he couldn’t help.
She went still. The words cracked something between her shoulder blades and warm spread from there, treacherous. She look ed at his eyes because their difference kept her honest. The amber one wanted. The black one swallowed.
She could match him and damn herself. She could give him a line and haul them both back to safety.
“Hold still,” she said, and reached—tucked his shirt properly around the bandage, smoothing it firm, professional, as if that was all she’d been meaning to do. Her hand trembled once and stopped. “If you pop a stitch I’m making you pay Eva for a new rug.”
His mouth curved, but it wasn’t triumph. More like it hurt a little to feel relief. “Yes, ma’am.”
She stepped away, pretended not to see his hand flex on the mug like he was remembering the shape of holding. The rain picked up, drumming a steady, hard beat on the sash window. A scooter’s horn beeped twice in the street and was swallowed by weather.
She went to the light switch and dimmed the lamps. The room softened without losing any of its hard truths. She opened the linen cupboard and took out a spare duvet that was only a little musty. Ptolemy made a delighted sound and butted his forehead against Lucien’s arm, then sprawled full-length like ownership had been transferred .
Rory spread the duvet over him with more briskness than he deserved. “Sleep.”
He tilted his face up to hers. In that slicked hair and that neat mouth and that mismatched gaze were all the choices he made and some he never would. “If I dream, it won’t be of debt collectors,” he said.
“Dream of tax auditors then.” She angled toward her own room, the narrow doorway a black mouth. Then she paused. The part of her that moved first—usually away—felt heavy as a packed suitcase.
He was already half closing his eyes. “Fearsome,” he murmured, and she couldn’t tell if he meant the auditors or her.
“Don’t call anyone. Don’t leave,” she said, because it was easier than go to sleep well, than I’m glad you’re not dying here, than the worst one, the one he didn’t get to hear yet.
“No,” he said softly , obedient for once. “I’ll be right here.”
She nodded to the wall more than to him and went through to Eva’s too-small bedroom. The room smelled like paper and campus cafes. She sat on the edge of the bed and put her face in her hands and breathed until her ribs unclenched. Through the thin wall she could hear the rise and fall of Brick Lane, the muffled slither of cushions as he settled, Ptolemy’s loud, satisfied purr.
Her heart made its stupid knife and threw it. It stuck in the doorframe instead of her. That counted as growth. She let herself picture him on the sofa, pale and alive under a cheap duvet, hair tamed by a cat, hand loose enough around a mug that he might sleep. The picture did something gummy with her insides.
She lay back and stared at the ceiling, cracked paint mapping out constellations that weren’t. Her chest was a weather system. The last thing she did before her eyes shut was reach out and set her palm on the wall that separated them, cool plaster against skin, like touching the idea of him without giving him the satisfaction.
In the sitting room, the streetlights buzzed their long, insect hymn. She heard him sigh once, a tired, human sound. The rain held its steady tempo. And for now, for tonight, that was enough.