AI The third deadbolt always stuck.
Rory had to lean her shoulder into the swollen wood and work the top lock back and forth until the metal surrendered with a dry, grudging click. Behind her, Ptolemy sat on the console by the door and examined the proceedings with bored, imperial eyes. A skinny tabby with a torn ear and delusions of grandeur. The corridor stank faintly of turmeric and fried onions from the curry house downstairs, the smell see ping up through the floorboards along with the throb of late-night traffic off Brick Lane.
She’d lain awake for an hour think ing she’d imagined the knock. Two soft raps, then nothing, as if the night had coughed. She’d waited, breathing, listening to the building hum. Then it came again, not louder, just patient.
Rory twisted the last bolt, tugged the chain, and hauled the door open six inches.
Lucien Moreau looked like the punchline to a joke the city told at two in the morning. Rain had slicked his platinum hair against his skull, striped the lapels of his charcoal suit, and beaded along the bone-white handle of the cane under his hand. The corridor’s lone bulb made his eyes—one amber, one bottomless black—map what she’d become since he’d last see n her: a woman in a ratty T-shirt and leggings, hair in a knot, suspicion drawn tight as a bowstring.
“Bonsoir, Aurora,” he said, soft. As if if he said it loudly, she’d disappear.
Her mouth had a reply ready—rebukes kept fat and waiting like a winter store—but her pulse burst into a pointless sprint, and her tongue tripped on the years between them and collided with the now.
“You are not my idea of a midnight snack.” Not what she meant. The wrong weapon out of the arsenal.
One corner of his mouth lifted. “I would be insulted if I hadn’t heard you were cutting back on demons.”
She huffed through her nose. Rain threaded cold fingers into the hall. He didn’t shiver, but his knuckles were white on the cane. Up close, she saw the rip at his sleeve where somebody’s ring had snagged, a bruise spreading like spilled ink beneath his cheekbone, and a darker patch at his side that could’ve been water and could’ve been something warmer.
She could’ve sent him away. Lock the deadbolts, ignore the bony cat’s complaint, stand very still while he went down the stairs and vanished into London’s midnight machinery.
He lifted his head a fraction. The pupils of the black eye never changed size; the other one tightened. She knew that look . The one he wore when he was choosing between bad and worse and asking if she would hold a door open so worse had to wait.
“Can I come in?” he asked. “I won’t ask for tea.”
“You hate British tea.”
“I think of it as a character test.”
“Failing tests is not your aesthetic.”
Ptolemy meowed, offended at being ignored . Rory stepped back before she could talk herself out of it. Lucien slid inside with the kind of economy that made her think of knives. He didn’t take up space so much as outline it. She shut the door on the corridor’s damp and the city, pushed the deadbolts home one by one. The locks sounded louder with him on the inside.
If Eva were here, she’d have rolled her eyes and grinned wider because of it. But Eva was pulling a shift at the archive, combing through seventeenth-century bookkeeping for patterns only she found thrilling. She had asked Rory to feed the cat and watch the boilers; Rory had agreed because she liked lists and favor chains and because the flat, crowded and bright with paper, felt like a mind turned inside out. Safer than the flat above Silas’ bar tonight. Quieter. She hadn’t given a thought to who else might know that.
Lucien’s gaze slid over the tidy chaos of the room. Every available surface had become a landing pad for books and scrolls, margin notes nestling like roosting birds. A map of East London lay across the coffee table under the stare of three chipped mugs. Ptolemy sprang down and trotted into the kitchen, turned once, and stalked back out again to wind himself, shameless, around Lucien’s shins.
“So you do smell like fish,” Rory said. “Explains your social life.”
Lucien bent, all polished spine and damp suit jacket, and stroked the cat with knuckles that had run laps around too many lies. Ptolemy purred louder than see med possible for a creature that weighed as much as a handbag. The sound vibrated through the room and into Rory’s bones.
He straightened. They looked at each other. He didn’t drop the cane. She saw, belatedly, the way he shifted to keep weight off his left side. The darker patch at his ribs dripped, very slowly , onto Eva’s rug.
“For the love of—” She caught the oath before it left her mouth. “What have you gotten yourself—no. Sit down. There.” She pointed at the kitchen chair nearest the sink. “And if you bleed on Eva’s annotated Ptolemaic alignments, she will find a hex that makes your hair fall out in clumps.”
He made a soft appreciative noise and limped across the room with a politeness that infuriated her. He set the cane within reach and eased into the chair like a gentleman being welcomed to supper. Rory yanked a tea towel off the oven handle—it was printed with laughing lemons and had lived four too many lives—and ran it under the tap.
“You don’t have to—” he began.
“Let me guess,” she snapped, crisp with anger that had been hanging like laundry since last winter. “You can handle it. You don’t bleed like we do. Your pain threshold is enviable. You planned for this by wearing your second-best suit.”
His smile, brief and rueful, cut her clean. “You remember me.”
“Like athlete’s foot.”
She crossed to him. At the edge of his knee, she stopped and told herself to be clinical. Treat the wound. Don’t breathe too deeply. Don’t catalog the way he smelled—smoke and vetiver and something old and not of here that shadowed his cologne and the rain. Her own wrist ached where the small crescent scar tugged over tendon. Old pain waking to greet the new.
“You’re going to lift your arm,” she said. “If you can’t, tell me before you fall on my foot and give me a story I don’t want to explain to Eva.”
He obeyed. Under the torn wool there was a gash that could have been made by broken glass or claw. It had clotted at the edges and reopened where he’d moved; blood slicked his skin and marred the gray with little half-moons, like fingerprints. The sight made something small and furious and protective flare in her chest. She tamped it down, set the wet towel against him, and his breath left him in a neat line. Not a flinch. He never flinched. It was one of the things she used to admire and now held against him.
“Who?” she asked. “And why here?”
“Because,” he said lightly , “your friend has three deadbolts.”
“You know the code to every private club in Mayfair,” she said. “And you’re terrible at answering the first question first.”
The black eye held her. The amber one slid away to the window, which showed only their warped reflections fighting in the glass. “Avaran debt collectors,” he said finally, as if they were loan sharks from Tottenham. He gave the realm a French softness—Avaros melted into Avaran like chocolate into milk. “My father’s kind have taken an interest in my punctuality.”
“You’re being very …elliptical.” She dabbed at the skin above the wound, swallowing around a throatful of spice and worry. “And honest, for you.”
“I’m on a schedule.”
“And you came to me.” The sentence cost less than it should have. “You didn’t think I would pass you on to someone useful?”
His mouth softened. “My instincts regarding you are historically unreliable.”
Ptolemy jumped up and landed on Lucien’s thigh. He settled there, purring thunder, pleased with the warmth and impervious to the wince it drew out of Lucien like a fish pulled by a whisper on a line. Rory wanted to snap at the cat and at him and at herself for wanting to move his hair off his forehead with the backs of her fingers.
She plugged the kettle in and yanked Eva’s first aid kit down from behind the good olive oil. “This is above tea,” she said, peeling a sterile pad with hands that had changed tyres in the rain and found back entrances in Chinatown where the lights were always too bright and the conversation always too low. “Hold still.”
He did. She taped the bandage with efficient, angry strips and listened to him breathe. The silence around his breath had a weight that wasn’t the room’s. It wasn’t fear. He wore fear lightly , like a morning suit. This was something closer to fatigue, and fatigue on him read like sacrilege.
“You left without saying goodbye,” she said. It was a poor time to pick a fight. She picked it all the same. She’d been hoarding the sentence like a coin. “You let me be bait and then you left.”
“Ah.” He sighed as if a chair had been pulled out from under him and he’d known it would be. “The witch in Soho, and her ledger.”
“And the collector in the alley,” Rory said. “And the night behind Silas’ when you said—” She stopped. He looked at her hands, where her thumb pushed to smooth a corner of tape more than needed smoothing. “When you said we shouldn’t.”
His eyes were dangerous then, not because they promised anything, but because this time they promised very little and even that felt like drowning. “I said we couldn’t. I believed we shouldn’t, for your sake.”
“For my sake,” she repeated. The words had spines.
“I am not the thing you bring home to Cardiff, Aurora.”
“I’m not bringing home anyone to Cardiff.” The click of the kettle boiling startled both of them. She turned to pour without looking, steady as if the whole scene weren’t listing . Steam haloed her hands. “You don’t get to decide my sake.”
“In my experience, men who do not decide for themselves get decided for,” he said. “I have never pretended otherwise.”
“I didn’t ask you to pretend.” She handed him a mug without the bag, just hot water like he liked it when he made jokes about how English people tortured leaves. It warmed his hands anyway. She set her own tea down, and the peppermint rose into the space between them and stung. “I asked you to stay.”
Ptolemy tired of playing at being a hot-water bottle and leapt off. Lucien winced again. The river of noise from Brick Lane swelled and pulled back like a tide.
“I stood outside your door upstairs at Silas’,” he said. “I had my hand on the frame. I do not know if you know that feel ing. The feel ing that if you step over a line, you will be someone else on the other side.”
She kept her eyes on his cheek, not his mouth. “I know lines.”
“I am not proud of this,” he went on, “but I am good at leaving first. It keeps me alive. It keeps other people alive.” He smiled at the word and looked at his hand. “It is ugly, the calculus, and I am not asking you to approve it or to absolve me of anything. I am saying, very inelegantly and without the pleasure of metaphor, that I stood outside your door and decided not to knock because I did not trust myself to leave again if you asked me to stay.”
Rory’s laugh was small and bitter and sweet. “Look at us,” she said. “Both of us good at living with choices that make us sick.”
Lucien inclined his head. Rain clicked against the window. Somewhere below, a man wheeled a crate of bottles and swore.
“You said Avaran collectors,” she said. Work could save them both from drowning in the beautiful, stupid honesty of the moment. “Why now? What’s different?”
“My father is bored,” he said. “And ambitious. He has discovered that what I have been doing here has value to him. Information. Favours. Leverage.” He rubbed two fingers together, a mime of coin, and the movement made the lamp catch his cufflink. “I am a poor son. He has sent better men to teach me filial piety.”
“And you bled on my rug.”
“I thought about the club in Knightsbridge,” he said. “There is a room. The locks are—”
“I know what the locks are, Lucien.”
His eyes warmed, just a fraction. “Yes,” he said. “You would.”
“So you came because of the three deadbolts,” she said slowly . “And because Eva is not here and she has notes that could stitch a thing to a threshold. There’s a binding sigil in that mess on the table, isn’t there?”
“Your friend is a talent,” he murmured, amused and proud as if he had taught Eva anything besides not trusting him.
Rory moved to the coffee table and dug with brisk, exasperated fingers through a pile of parchment Eva had bullied from a seller with a waxed moustache. She found, between a plate marked by a circle of old tea and a library book that dripped Post-its, the page she wanted. Bold ink had trapped a shape that made Rory’s throat tighten and her fingers cold: angles and curves that made the eye slip the way Lucifer’s tail would have if you’d ever see n it uncoiled around a pillar.
“You can lay it under the mat,” she said. “It’ll hold for an hour, maybe two. Longer, if you talk to it nice.”
Lucien set his untouched water down. “I cannot leave yet,” he said mildly.
“What.”
“Three on the opposite roof,” he said in that soft, observational voice he kept for art and threats. “A man at the curry house door who is very bad at pretending to smoke. The one in the stairwell left a footprint the size of my head. I will have to go out a window when I do go. Not yours.”
She swallowed. The skin between her shoulder blades prickled in unpleasant, useful ways. “You brought them here?”
“I didn’t,” he said, and his mouth did that ghost smile without any of its usual theatre. “They follow long lines. They would have found Eva’s flat in a week because she has a talent that throws reflections. It is fortunate for her that she is at work. It is unfortunate for you that I am here, but not, I think , a disaster. They will not come in while the building is busy. They do not like witnesses.”
“And the binding?”
“For the threshold. I do not like witnesses either,” he said. He looked at her, steady. “You can put them off me for a little while. Give me a breath.”
“Say you need me,” she said, and hated the way her voice made it a joke.
He considered. “I need you.”
The air didn’t change. The light didn’t flicker . Nothing moved but the cat, who decided he had had enough sincerity and padded to his bowl to make commentary about its emptiness. But Rory’s pulse did something low and traitorous. Fine. She could do this and still be angry. People built whole marriages on stranger architecture.
She found chalk in Eva’s drawer of indispensable nonsense and drew on the oak floor with the easy muscle memory of late nights and worse plans. The sigil nested itself under the flat’s tired welcome mat like a secret. When she stood, her knee left chalked lace on her leggings. Lucien had come into the narrow hall and leaned, pretense of ease covering pain, against the wall. He watched her with those mismatched eyes that made every room feel like two rooms.
“It will tangle their feet,” she said. “And whisper at them. Make them wonder why their shoes are too tight. You’ll have a window. It’s not elegant.”
“You say that like it’s an insult,” he said. “It is beautiful.”
She pushed past him, shoulder brushing the damp of his sleeve. She didn’t say don’t die or I’m not done being angry at you. She didn’t say come back. He smelled like rain and stubbornness. The narrow hall trapped both.
At the edge of the tiny kitchen, his hand caught her elbow. Not the bruising grip men used when they forgot you were a person; a pause, a question. She looked at his fingers on her skin—long, musician’s bones, scar on the knuckle where one of Silas’ glasses had exploded last spring and she’d watched him pick out slivers with tweezers, unsmiling, precise. She looked up.
“I am sorry,” he said. The words were unadorned . It made them uglier and therefore more likely to belong to him. “About leaving. About using you. About not staying to see whether I could be a man who didn’t.”
Rory let that rest between them. The apology wasn’t a key. It wasn’t a penitent’s promise. It was a fact he had put down on the table, and she could pick it up or leave it. She counted, in her head, on the same beat she used to make a light change with her foot on the accelerator and her eyes on the camera at the junction.
“You don’t get points for turning up bleeding,” she said. “But you get…one for the sorry.”
“One,” he said gravely. “I will not squander it.”
“See that you don’t.”
His hand eased off her arm. She missed the warmth like a laugh you told yourself wasn’t that funny. They stood like that for a second longer than the kettle used to boil. Outside, somewhere distant, a siren rose and passed like a thought.
“You should go when they change shifts,” she said. “Give it forty minutes. They’ll get bored and sloppy.”
“And in the interim?” he asked. The polite man at a stranger’s table.
She gestured at the books with a helpless sweep. “We can…sit.” The word failed under the weight of every thing it suggested and refused. “You can teach me how to say coffee properly in Marseille French. You can not bleed on anything else. I can pretend I don’t mind your voice when you say my name.”
She’d meant not to give him that last one. It fell out like a confession to a priest you didn’t believe in.
The black eye flared, no flame but a heat she knew would singe her if she stood too near for too long. “Aurora,” he said, and made the vowels into something slow and sunlit. She hated him for it, a little. She found herself moving anyway.
They took opposite ends of Eva’s sofa and made a virtue out of the mess between them. Neither reached for the other. He set the cane along the coffee table within easy lift. She held her mug for the simple animal comfort of warmth. They let the city grind and clatter around them and pressed their knees into the cushions like anchors.
“You always have a plan,” he said into the not-silence.
“Not always a good one.”
“Better than most.”
“You set a high bar.” Her gaze found his collarbone where his shirt had gaped, exposed along with the unfashionable beating thing beneath. He followed her eyes and did not look away or hide. He had never been shy. He had simply been careful of the moment he would no longer be.
“If I walk out and they do not catch me,” he said, “I will owe you.”
“You already owe me. Interest compounding. Ask Eva how that works.”
“I will pay in kind,” he said, and lifted his amber eye in a way that made the innuendo optional and therefore more dangerous.
She made a face at him. He smiled like a civilized man who had been caught staring at the dessert tray. For a count of heartbeats they looked at each other and did not move. She remembered the night she had opened her door and found him not on the other side. She remembered making tea for one and spilling it and having no one to blame but the universe and herself. She remembered shutting a cabinet quietly because slamming it would be admitting the room wasn’t as empty as it felt.
“I don’t forgive you,” she said, because she would not let herself be the kind of woman who fell into a man’s apology like a well. “Not yet.”
He nodded once. “Good.”
She blinked. “Good?”
“Because then I have to come back.”
She stared at him. Ptolemy sneezed. The tea steamed. Beyond the window, rain stitched the city to itself.
“We can call that point two,” she said. Her voice sounded steadier than her pulse. “If you make it.”
“I like a woman who sets conditions.” He set his palms flat on his knees and leaned his head back against the cushion, closed his eyes as if to keep something too sharp from cutting its way out. Even with the bruise, even with the wet suit and the tired mouth, he was beautiful in a way that felt less like art and more like certain kinds of weather. You did not deserve it. You endured it. If you were lucky, you learned to read it.
Rory watched him and allowed herself the small treachery of wanting his mouth on hers. She did not move. The chemistry between them had always felt like walking the spine of a roof in the rain; you could get where you were going by being careful, or you could fall and pretend the fall had been your intention.
The clock on Eva’s mantel ticked like a polite threat. Forty minutes to go. In the old stories, that might have been enough to save a life and change a fate. In this one, it was enough to sit beside a half-demon in a flat full of paper and cat hair and know that anger could make a place for desire at a small table without either of them starving.
“You’re dripping on my sock,” she said after a while, because she had to say something before all the things she wasn’t saying became a noise she couldn’t outshout.
He cracked one eye. “I thought you liked adventure.”
“I like my socks dry.”
He looked at her mouth in a way that put thoughts in her body like fenceposts. He lifted his cane and leaned forward as if to stand. She did not reach to help. She wanted to, and wanting was not the same as obeying. He grimaced as the shift pulled at his side and then, with ridiculous, unfashionable grace, he rose.
“I will not take your mat when I go,” he said.
“Generous.”
“And I will knock next time.” He took up his coat from the chair back and shrugged into it carefully , hiding the wound with habit and wool. At the door, he put his hand, palm flat, on the frame. He looked down and then up at her in a movement that hit a place under her breastbone she didn’t like to admit had nerve endings.
It felt like a line. He smiled, almost nothing, and stepped back from it.
“Don’t die,” she said. It left her like she’d bitten something and bled.
“For your sake?” he said, gentle.
“For mine.” She breathed out. “And for Eva’s rug.”
He inclined his head again with courtly absurdity and slid the top deadbolt. He lifted the mat, the chalk whispering. He did not thank her for the sigil. He always had understood the moments when gratitude could curdle into debt and how a thank you could ruin the use of a favor.
The corridor’s damp crept in. He opened the door six inches, like she had, and turned enough to let her see the profile that had landed him favors he never asked for twice. “Aurora.”
She shouldn’t have—she unfolded out of herself, took two steps, and kissed him.
It was quick because she made it quick, because limits could be beautiful, too. He made a noise into her mouth that sounded like a word in a language she didn’t speak. He tasted like rain and blood and peppermint he hadn’t drunk and the oldest thing she knew under her anger. He didn’t pull her in. He didn’t press. He let her set the terms and she hated and loved him for the restraint.
She broke it and stood back and learned she had no lungs for a second, like a diver surfacing too fast.
“Forty minutes,” she said, and it came out like a dare.
“I am very good with a clock,” he murmured.
“You are very bad with doors,” she shot back.
He laughed, low. “I will work on that.”
He went. She slid the deadbolts into place one by one and rested her forehead against the wood until the chill pushed the heat out of her skin. Ptolemy came and twined between her ankles like a complication. She reached down blindly and rubbed the spot behind his ear that made him go soft.
In forty minutes, if the chalk held and the night stayed themselves, he would be gone. And he would come back. Or he would not. The anger and the wanting would both still be here, sitting on Eva’s sofa with their elbows on their knees, waiting patiently for her to decide what to feed them.
Rory pushed away from the door, rewound the tea towel and rinsed it until the water ran clear, and pretended her hands didn’t shake. Then she sat and watched the rain and counted the lines across which she knew she’d already stepped.