AI The last deadbolt gave with a stubborn scrape and the door swung inward on a breath of East London night—wet rain, hot coriander from the curry house downstairs, exhaust ghosts curling up the stairwell. He was there on the dingy doormat, framed by the orange glow of the street, rain pearling on his slicked-back hair and the black wool of his overcoat. Lucien Moreau didn’t look like the kind of man who haunted stairwells; he look ed like he’d stepped out of some expensive photograph, all narrow lines and a charcoal suit pressed so sharp you could cut yourself on the crease. The ivory handle of his cane made a pale comma against his gloved hand.
Rory’s fingers stayed on the chain though it dangled useless between door and jamb. Her name—Aurora; he had always drawn it out—hovered there between them without him saying a word. He had those mismatched eyes fixed on her, one clear amber like tea held up to light, the other a coal-dark disc. You could pretend not to notice the wrongness of it until he let the brim of himself tip and you felt the slide of some other gravity in the room.
“Bit late for company,” Rory said. She hear d her own voice and admired its evenness. In her peripheral vision, a tabby tail flicked ; Ptolemy prowled forward, sniffed the night, and decide d Lucien’s trousers smelled like something worth owning. Cat logic. Rory wished she could be as simple.
“It’s a bad hour to be kept in the rain,” he replied, English precise but worn at the edges with an old Marseille burr. He tilted his head a fraction. Raindrops fell in twos from the ivory handle to the rubber doormat. “May I come in, Laila?”
The alias landed like the softest coin hitting the table. She didn’t flinch, but she did hate the way her chest remembered the first time he’d said it—low and amused and too close in a car that had smelled like leather and blood and his cologne. She pushed the door wider and stepped back into Eva’s narrow hall.
“Don’t drip on the scrolls,” she said, because Eva would come back and kill them both if her research drowned.
He cocked a brow at the archipelago of books and paper that had overtaken the flat since Christmas and slipped inside without jostling anything, the way he slipped anywhere. Rory shot the bolts home out of habit. Three solid thunks between them and Brick Lane.
“You aren’t supposed to be here,” she told him, turning toward the little kitchen because it gave her a task—because a kettle to fill and click on was better than standing in the stale heat of history. She felt his gaze follow her through the cramped sitting room, over the chaos that passed for Eva’s filing system: annotated grimoires splayed open like dead birds, a map of the city speared with colored pins, an open take-away container congealing into an oil painting of red and orange.
“I like what you’ve done with the place,” he said dryly. His cane made a discreet sound as he settled it against the umbrella stand. Without the overcoat and the armor of slicked hair, he was just a man beneath it—too pale from winter, a new cut on the ridge of his knuckles, the smallest tiredness sitting at the edges of his mouth.
Rory set water in the kettle and clicked it on. The hum filled the silence. Ptolemy headbutted Lucien’s calf and was rewarded with a glance that would have withered a less self-assured creature. The cat purred as if he’d found a radiator.
“You knew where to find me,” she said, opening the cupboard, pretending not to note each tiny domestic movement as if it were a message. “I’m flattered.”
“You’re still on Eva’s rotation for feeding the Pharaoh,” he answered, nodding to the cat, who rolled and displayed his stomach shamelessly. “It didn’t take a soothsayer.” The corner of his mouth lifted as she set out two mugs. “Earl Grey? Or have you finally let the city ruin you with coffee?”
“Tea. Don’t deflect.” She pulled a tin down and made herself look at him. “You don’t come here because of a cat.”
“No. I don’t.” He leaned one shoulder against the doorframe to the kitchen. The house was small; even the gesture closed the space a little more around them. He was close enough that the scent of him reached her—bergamot and something dark that wasn’t cologne and wasn’t quite human. “I owe you an apology.”
The kettle clicked as if it were his cue. She didn’t move to pour. For a second she only hear d the street through the windows—the rhythm of rickety buses, laughter slicing upward like bottle glass. She cracked the kettle and steam rose.
“You don’t like giving those,” she said to the water. It was gentler than she’d meant it to be.
“I don’t like needing to.” There was no charm slicking it. He sounded like a man picking his way through a field of glass. “May I try anyway?”
Rory handed him a mug so she wouldn’t have to answer. His glove was off; the back of his hand brushed her fingers unexpectedly, cool skin and a scratch of callus catching on her knuckle. Heat arrowed up her wrist, traitor-fast. She pulled back and busied with milk, then set both mugs on the tiny table by the window where Eva liked to read her runes with tea rings marking constellations on the wood.
Lucien didn’t sit. He watched the tea steam as if he could scry what to say. Rain trickled its fingers along the glass. Ptolemy leapt onto a stack of hardbacks and look ed pleased with his altitude.
“I didn’t tell you Evan had been in touch with me,” Lucien said finally, eyes on his reflection in the tea, not quite look ing at her. “I thought—” He stopped, lips shaping the ghost of a French word she didn’t know. “I thought if you knew, you might go to him.”
The name hit her like opening a freezer. Old meltwater under her kneecaps, old air locked in. Her palm found the edge of Eva’s table and held on. He would say Evan like they were talking about a weather pattern. He hadn’t been there for the slow shrinks of Rory’s world—pockets searched, friends culled with a handful of lies, the escalation from charming to cruel so neatly timed it had felt like her fault. Lucien had only stepped in at the end, after Eva, after the night with police lights and paperwork. Lucien with his clean suits and unclean secrets; the man who had called her Laila in a nightclub lined with mirrors and had been the first to look at her like she was a sum of choices instead of a wound.
“I’m not stupid,” she said. She kept her voice from wobbling by focusing on his tie. It was thread spun charcoal, a knot so precise it could have been measured with calipers. “And I don’t chase ghosts.”
“I know.” The dark eye met her gaze like the flat of a blade. “I also know want, and what want will do in the dark.”
It made her angrier than any smooth lie would have. “So you lied to me for my own good.”
“I omitted,” he said with a little flutter of one hand. She almost smiled at the lawyerly hedging and didn’t. “And for once, I did it without an ulterior motive that paid me. Put it on my list of poor financial decisions.”
“You should have told me,” she said. It was absurd, the steadiness in her tone, how polite you could make the worst parts of your hear t. “You don’t get to decide what I can take.”
“No.” He bowed his head as if he were at confession. The rain obligingly accented it with a patter. “No, I don’t.”
Silence made a third person in the room and stood with them. It had shoulders. It had teeth.
He set his mug down untouched. “There is more,” he said. “I came because I didn’t like the last words between us to be—” He searched, found the exact cut. “Transactional.”
You could hide a smile in the line of your hand. Rory lifted her mug and the steam made her eyes smart. “Lucien Moreau with a conscience. And here I thought the apocalypse would be noisier.”
He glanced up through lashes too thick for decency. “It makes little noise, I have found,” he said. “The world only tilts. Then you notice your cup won’t stay on the table.”
Ptolemy, sensing human grief in the air, ambled to Lucien and butted his head into patting range. Lucien obliged. It was stupid, that such long, elegant fingers could be gentle. Rory concentrated on the little ash-white whorl of hair behind the cat’s ear and not the way it felt to watch his hands.
“I kept something of yours,” he added, as casually as if he were offering a receipt. “I thought perhaps that was a sin as well.”
He reached into the inner pocket of his coat and drew out a folded thing, wrapped in tissue gone soft with time. He put it on the table and didn’t touch it again.
Rory stared at the parcel and knew what it was before she lifted the paper. Not because she had a gift for divination like Eva, but because the ache of it had made a nest somewhere behind her lungs. Blue silk , light as breath, patterned with fat gold bees. She had wound it warm around her throat last winter when the wind off the river made knives of your collarbones. She had taken it off in Lucien’s car on a night that had gone wrong. She hadn’t gone back for it when she walked out. You learned to abandon things gracefully.
“You could have sent it,” she said, threading the edge through her fingers. It left a soft line across her skin.
“I tried to,” he said, mouth crooked. “Each time, the envelope came back. It appears I have a curse.”
“What kind?” She look ed up before she could help herself.
“A very domestic one,” he said. “If I try to post you things, the city misplaces them and they end up at my door again like stray cats. I choose to interpret this as providence. Or an insult.”
She couldn’t stop the warmth building at the base of her throat. She hated that he was funny. She hated that he knew how to aim it so it didn’t hurt.
“You could have called,” she said.
“And you might not have answered,” he said. No pity in it. Just the fact of the thing, put on the table between the tea rings and the scarf. “I am not here to take something back. I wanted to put it in your hands.”
He meant the scarf. He didn’t. Rory touched the bees and thought of summer hives in some memory that didn’t belong to her life. Her wrist itched suddenly . She rubbed the tiny crescent scar, felt the smooth ridge, old bicycle meet pavement, her mother’s hands and a plaster. She had loved a boy once who look ed like a man and had learned that loving knives out pieces of you you can’t glue in again without leaving seams. She had not meant to love the Frenchman with the demon eyes and perfect suits. But love and mean lived far apart and didn’t speak.
“Why now?” she asked.
His gaze flicked to the window; the streetlight made a wheel of wet on the glass. “Because I had business on Brick Lane and a gap in my evening,” he said, which was a lie so old it had gone threadbare. The truth followed belatedly, a step behind. “Because you have been very loud in the part of my head where quiet should be. And because I am well-versed in regret, Aurora, and I prefer not to add to it when it is within my power to do otherwise.”
She should have laughed. Instead, she hear d her own breath like it belonged to someone who had climbed a long way and only now noticed. “Don’t use my full name like that,” she said. “You make it sound like fate.”
“Fate is not so handsome,” he said, with a flourished little apology for himself afterward, a shrug of hands, as if to say: what can I do, I am awful. The honesty of it undid her more than the charm ever had.
The flat felt even smaller. Or maybe it was only her, the world bending a fraction.
“I can’t promise you anything,” she said, keeping her hands engaged in folding the scarf on a line the bees would like, so she wouldn’t do something foolish like reach out and find out if his coat lapel was as smooth as it look ed. “Not friendship. Not forgiveness.”
“I didn’t come for promises,” Lucien said. He stepped off the doorframe and his cane clicked softly as he moved to the table. He didn’t touch her. He stood close enough that the air changed temperature on her skin. “I came to tell you that I am sorry. And that I hope, in some future, when we are less foolish and less proud, you might be able to ask me for something without first deciding how I will betray you.”
She huffed. It wasn’t quite a laugh. “You make me sound very dramatic.”
“I make you sound like who you are.” He watched her mouth as he said it. That was an old habit of his; it had once annoyed her. Now it thawed some old chunk of fear in her gut and let it slide loose and sink away. “You are very ... thorough.”
“You’re not helping,” she said, but the heat in her cheeks betrayed her. She set the scarf down as if it were evidence and straightened a stack of books that didn’t need straightening. When she look ed up, he was still there, still impossibly himself, still the storm she hadn’t planned for. Her hear t did a small illogical thing and knocked against its bars.
“You should go,” she said. She didn’t move.
“Yes,” he said. He didn’t move either.
Ptolemy sneezed on a grimoire.
It broke something. Lucien’s mouth—that mouth she had not meant to think about—ticked into a helpless smile. Rory felt her own do the same before she could stop it. He glanced down, as if embarrassed by the proof of his own humanity.
“Do you remember the night after the Vasuki job?” he asked, soft.
She made a face. “We got paid in cursed rubies and adrenaline.”
“You fell asleep in my car,” he said. “You let yourself.”
“That wasn’t for you,” she said. “That was because your car was warm.”
“And the world was cold.” His voice had gone thinner, like wire. He reached out halfway and then, gentleman that the word was, stopped . She watched his hand hovering in the air between them, felt the weightless drag of its orbit.
Rory took his wrist where it hung, because she had grown bone-tired of being the thing that flinched. His skin was cooler than hers. The pulse was there, steady. A man who pretended at monsters, a monster who pretended at men; she could decide later which he was. Now, she traced with her thumb, without deciding to, the white seam of a cut on his knuckles.
He breathed in, slow. He didn’t move to close the space, didn’t turn that held breath into a power play. She hated him a little for not taking even now, for making her do the arithmetic herself. He was learning ; she was doomed .
“I’m not a safe person,” she said. She found his eyes, the good one and the bad one, and held them both. “I don’t forgive easily. I don’t forget.”
“I am neither asking you to be safe nor to be forgetful,” he said. His hand shifted in hers, careful. “I am only asking—” He swallowed. “For the door to not be locked.”
The words found the bolts in her own ribs and lifted them one by one. She let go of him and then, because momentum had to go somewhere, stepped into his space. The scent of him closed around her. He went very still. She watched the muscles in his jaw protest at the effort it took not to meet her, to let her decide .
“Kiss me,” she said softly . “And if you lie to me again after tonight, I’ll break your cane over your head.”
The sound he made could have been a laugh and could have been a prayer. His mouth came down to hers without any of its usual theater. No bow, no flourish. He kissed her like a man in London rain who had waited at a locked door a very long time and had been let in.
Heat rose up from somewhere enormous and old—the city, the stove, her own center. She met him halfway and then more than halfway, let herself remember the shape of his lower lip, how it pressed sweetly cruel when you caught it between your teeth, the sure way he adjusted so he didn’t crowd her until she backed him into the table. Ptolemy leapt with indignation from his pile. The tea cooled, ignored.
Lucien’s palm found her jaw, his thumb a light bracket at her cheekbone. She closed her hand in his lapel and felt under the expensive cloth the regularity of his breath. That small, simple, mortal thing humbled her more than any apology.
She broke the kiss because she wanted to see his face. He let her, stepped back half a pace, eyes blown wide and black uneven now with their dilation, his tidy hair slightly undone as if a human had happened to him. He look ed not victorious but grateful, and she hated him for that for a beat, because gratitude was not a language she knew how to speak in this room.
“Don’t make me regret it,” she said. She hear d the wobble, decide d to let him hear it too.
“I will devote my considerable talents to ensuring you don’t,” he said, and then, as if he couldn’t help himself, added, “Laila.”
She rolled her eyes. “Aurora,” she corrected. “If we’re using real names.”
He bowed because he had to. “Aurora,” he conceded, and made it sound, damn him, like fate again.
Ptolemy twined himself around their ankles and cried for dinner. Rain worried the windowpanes. The flat was the same mess it had been an hour ago, but the air had changed. Rory exhaled and reached for the cat food and did not ask him to leave. He took up his cane and did not make for the door.
On Brick Lane, a bus hissed a complaint at the stop and lumbered on. The world tilted a fraction and found a new balance. Rory glanced over her shoulder at the man in her kitchen, the demon-eyed fixer who carried apologies like contraband, and thought: all right. This time, then. We’ll see.