AI Rory heard the knock through curry and rain.
The flat above the curry house held heat like a closed palm. Cardamom and turmeric seeped through the thin floorboards; the window glass sweat under the drizzle. Books and scrolls buried the little dining table; Eva’s notes spidered in graphite along the edges of receipts and takeaway menus. Ptolemy, the tabby with a philosopher’s stare, sprawled over a stack of photocopies and twitched an ear at the sound.
Nobody knocked at Eva’s place. Eva texted. Eva threw her shoulder against the door and cursed because of the deadbolts. Twice this week, Rory had pulled deliveries for Yu-Fei down Shoreditch High Street and timed her break to sit in this exact chair with a mug of tea and silence. Nobody knocked.
Rory set the pen down and listened. A second knock followed, deliberate, spaced out as if whoever stood in the hall counted heartbeats. Rain ribboned down the fire escape outside. In the hallway, a radio down the stairs drifted aimlessly over a football game and the hiss of a deep fryer.
She stood, and Ptolemy rose with her, offended by the disturbance, then remembered he was a cat and dodged to the mat near the door, where he sat and regarded the wood with grave interest.
“Don’t you start,” Rory told him, half to tamp the sudden eventless rise of her pulse.
She crossed the cramped room and thumbed the top deadbolt. It stuck at first; the flat had swelled from the damp, as if it too took offense at June rain. She worked each lock down in turn—three with their own satisfying clack, the arithmetic of caution. The gesture was bone memory by now: the Cardiff flat after Evan, the first month in London when she slept with a chair wedged under the knob.
“Aurora,” said a voice on the other side of the wood, smooth as a silver blade. That accent—born of Marseille sunlight and London smoke—threaded something between her shoulder blades and drew it taut.
Rory’s hand went cold on metal. She didn’t intend to breathe his name, but it escaped anyway, too soft even for Ptolemy. “Lucien.”
She put her eye to the peephole. A distorted man stared back, stretched by the fishbowl lens into a courteous specter: slicked platinum hair darkened by rain at the temples, charcoal suit sharp enough to make the dingy stairs look guilty. The cane with the ivory handle like a fragment of someone else’s moon. One eye amber, fox-keen, the other soot-black, pupil swallowing any light it found.
Every part of her that had sworn not to do this again came awake all the same. Attraction didn’t check old resolutions before it went to work.
“What do you want?” she asked the wood.
Lucien laughed once, weary. “To come in before I am very conspicuously murdered in your hallway, chérie.”
“You always did like an entrance,” she said, and slid the chain free.
He caught the door as she opened it. The hallway’s damp air rushed the room. He stood there with rain freckling his shoulders, like an apology he hadn’t learned to say yet, like London had let him in on a secret that wasn’t hers.
For a breath, they look ed at one another the way you look at a photograph you thought you’d burned.
“You cut your hair,” he said finally.
“Good eye.” She stepped back, made the invitation small enough to deny later. Ptolemy twined around her ankle, then attached himself to Lucien’s shin with the air of a landlord inspecting a new tenant.
Lucien tipped the cane against the jamb and swept inside, careful not to brush her, which felt, perversely, like another kind of touch. He look ed like trouble in grayscale: the suit dark as wet slate; white cuffs, a slice of wrist; his mouth like a lesson and an argument both. The cane, as always, with that understated menace—ivory handle smooth from his hand, thin blade sleeping inside. He shut the door and turned his face to the locks as if they were old acquaintances. She slid the deadbolts home around him. The weight of the final click settled something in her.
“How did you find me?” she said. “And don’t say you’re an information broker. That trick got old the first time you used it.”
“Eva told me once,” he said, eyes on Ptolemy, who had fully committed to his greeting and was currently sniffing the hem of Lucien’s trousers with priestly reverence. “Years ago. She was very drunk and very fond. Every thing about you leaks into other people, Aurora.”
“Don’t call me that.”
He flicked a glance up, quick as a fishturn. “What shall I call you tonight? Laila? Malphora?” He tried the last one like a challenge. Too right he remembered.
Rory’s jaw tightened. She had worn Malphora like a mask the winter she ran deliveries for cash and portents for favors, when she wanted to be someone who didn’t bruise. He had met that girl in a backroom with nowhere to sit and called her by a name she couldn’t admit she’d picked for the way it sounded like a sin.
“Rory,” she said. “You could try Rory.”
“Rory, then.” He inclined his head as if they’d settled terms. He took the little patch of standing room between the radiator and Eva’s books and examined the chaos with a tactful sweep of his gaze. “She is either very close to a breakthrough or very close to suffocating to death under her own scholarship.”
“You could send flowers for the funeral,” Rory said dryly. “What do you want?”
He took a breath that expanded the fine line of his tie, and in that breath she caught it—the faintest whiff of something not cologne. Smoke, but not from any fire she knew; the iron of wet stone. The reminder came like a bruise pressed by accident: half-demon. You could forget when he played at human so well. You could remember when it was inconvenient.
“I’m here because someone is asking for you,” Lucien said. “Someone who knows the name you do not want known. Someone with money he does not want shown. He came to me first. He always comes to me first.”
Rory moved around Ptolemy and around him in a wide arc to the kettle. Her fingers found the switch without look ing. Tea in a crisis wasn't a cliché; it was a life rope. “Who?”
Lucien watched her in his steady, unblinking way, and then leaned the cane against the wall, close enough she could see where his thumb had worn the ivory faintly dull. “Your ex. Evan.”
The name crashed through her skull like a dropped pan. She hadn’t said it aloud in months. She could taste bile; she could taste last winter’s blood. She swallowed and reached for mugs as if that small, stupid choreography could reorder the world.
“He told you what?” she asked. The kettle wheezed, not yet boiling.
“That he would pay. For—” Lucien cut the air with a small, disgusted movement. “For the return of certain things. For a location. He used the word ‘property’ and look ed as if saying it gave him an erection.”
Rory leaned both hands on the counter until the laminate’s edge cut her palms. Ptolemy bumped his head against her calf, unbothered by human disaster. “He’s found me?”
Lucien’s gaze softened by a micron. “He’s trying. I did not confirm you. I did not deny you. I told him that if this was about a person, I was not his man for it.”
“And he believed you?” Her voice wanted to rise, but she kept it level by force and old training. She had been a barrister’s daughter. Argument was a craft. Fear was a barbed hook; you didn’t have to bite.
“He believed that I would not be cheap,” Lucien said. “And that I might be… persuadable, if the person in question had done me wrong.” One corner of his mouth twitched as if even he found that distasteful.
Rory remembered the last night they’d seen one another. The warehouse in Bermondsey that stank of brine and paper rot. The book Eva needed—black as a wound, pages slick with something like oil. Lucien’s hand on her wrist to stop her from bolting when the sirens started. The way the kiss had happened like an accident, like a cut you discover after you’re already bleeding. And then her telling him to leave without her, to take the book and go because it would bring every bastard with a taste for power to Eva’s door if they got caught . He’d gone. He swore later he’d gone to draw heat. She’d said he’d gone because that’s what he did—calculate, choose, cut. They had not touched since.
“You came to warn me?” she said.
“And to ask you to leave here for a few days. Eva is not home. She cannot keep you safe through goodwill and heavy reference texts.” He glanced mildly at the nearest stack of papers. “You have enemies you did not create, Rory. And one you did. They will all go to a fixer eventually. It is my nature to be in the middle of such things. It is also—unfortunately for me—my nature to care.”
The kettle clacked itself off. Steam spilled like a ghost. Her fingers moved again, automatic: teabags, pour, the ancient chipped mug she always chose when she needed a talisman. As the water hit, the scent rose—tannins, warmth. She put a mug in his hand because she didn’t know what else to do with them.
He took it with that fraction of surprise he saved for kindness. His heterochromatic eyes lifted to her face and didn't slide away. “Merci.”
“Don’t ‘merci’ me,” she muttered, and then winced at how petty it sounded—like she had nothing else to stand on.
Ptolemy hopped onto the back of the sofa and fixed Lucien with the look of an old magistrate. The cat, traitor, seemed to approve. He leaped down and planted himself on Lucien’s thigh without so much as a meow. A damp patch from Lucien’s coat spread slowly beneath the cat’s fur. Lucien, who shrugged off threats as if they were admirers, sat very still so as not to disturb the animal.
Rory watched him stroke Ptolemy’s head, slow-charmed into it, and something in her own chest loosened in spite of her. It was always like this: a catalogue of reasons not to trust him, undone in a heartbeat by the smallest mercy.
“You could have sold me,” she said. “You could have let him find me and taken your cut.”
“At times, I am very good at pretending I am the man who would,” Lucien said. “It keeps me alive around people who prefer simple villains to complicated allies.” He lifted his mug, drank, and grimaced. “This is terrible.”
“It’s Eva’s idea of black tea,” Rory said. “She thinks it should taste like penance.”
Lucien huffed something like a laugh. It touched his mouth, didn’t change his eyes. He set the mug down on a book about apotropaic symbols because there was no empty space anywhere else.
Outside, a motorbike roared past and coughed at the red light. Rain threshed itself finer, a veil on Brick Lane’s neon. The room pulsed quietly with the presence of two people trying not to touch memory.
“What are you asking?” she said finally. “Plainly.”
“I’m asking you to pack a bag. To stay somewhere that isn’t here. I have a place.” He lifted a hand when her mouth started to shape a refusal. “No. Not mine. Neutral ground. A friend with wards on the doors and a mean streak. He likes cats; Ptolemy will not be offended.”
“And you?” she said.
“I will set a rumor on Evan’s path that you left town. I will send him somewhere wet and unlit to talk to men who will talk him into losing a great deal of money. I will make myself very busy being in the way.” He tilted his head. A drop of rain fell from his hair and tracked the line of his neck into his collar. “I cannot fix what I broke, Rory. But I can do this.”
She moved past him to the narrow wardrobe where Eva kept a spare umbrella and a tangle of old scarves. The crescent scar on her left wrist flashed as she reached. He noticed; she saw it in the tilt of his gaze. She wanted to cover it with her sleeve and refused on principle.
“It’s not safe for you,” she said. “If someone knows me well enough to go to you, they know us well enough to know… us.”
“We were never subtle,” he agreed. “I am not particularly safe at any hour of the day. It is the one consistent thing about my schedule.” He shifted Ptolemy delicately, stood, left the cane by the wall as if it belonged to the flat for the night. “Tell me you will not go to him. Tell me you will not think that handling this yourself makes you stronger.”
She closed her hand around the umbrella’s curved handle. The fabric of the old thing was printed with forget-me-nots. Eva had a sense of humor. “I haven’t thought that in years.”
“Liar,” he said, and the word was so soft she almost missed it, and so gentle it didn’t land like an accusation.
“I hate you a little bit,” she blurted, and then wanted to bite her tongue off. She stared at the ugly brown carpet so she wouldn’t have to see what stepped across his face.
“I’m flattered,” he said lightly .
“I wish that were a joke.”
“It isn’t,” he said. “And I am sorry.”
Silence unrolled between them, quiet as velvet , heavy as a ledger. The rain thickened outside, a suggestion that the city had closed its eyes. In that hush, she felt their last kiss like an old radio tuned to a station too far away—faint, full of static, still somehow unbearable. He had tasted like cinnamon gum and winter air. He had held the back of her head as if it were the most fragile object he’d ever handled. She still woke sometimes with the shape of his shoulder under her cheek like a bruise she had invented.
“Eva will kill me,” she said at last. “For leaving her notes unattended.”
“She has a method for disasters,” he said. “She files them by century.”
Rory barked a laugh without meaning to. She look ed at him and it hurt and it healed. He look ed back and did something with his mouth that wasn’t a smile and wasn’t not.
“All right,” she said. “A bag. Two nights. You don’t get to know what’s in it.”
“Tempt me,” he said, and immediately gave himself a half-reproachful shake, like he’d said something neither of them would handle well if they chased it. He reached for the cane and missed; Rory’s hand was already on the ivory. She drew it toward herself. This close she could see where the join hid, hairline and cunning. She could almost feel the hum of the blade sleeping inside.
He reached out, careful, and folded his hand over hers. His skin was warm—human-warm, nothing infernal about it. For a beat they held a stupid stick of bone and steel like it was a child.
“Careful,” he said. “It’s sharper than it look s.”
“So are you,” she murmured, and then flushed, and then turned away altogether so he wouldn’t see it.
He let go first. The absence of his touch skinned her nerves.
“Do you need anything from your place?” he asked. “Above Silas’ bar? I can have someone—”
“I don’t want your someone,” she snapped, and then softened because he flinched, barely, and because this was not the time to rehearse old wars. “I’ll text Silas. He’ll bring my bag down. He owes me.”
Lucien nodded. “Then we go when you’re ready.”
She packed as if she’d been born to it—small, quick, practiced: jumper, trousers, two sets of underwear, Eva’s spare toothbrush, the knot of hair ties that seemed to breed in every drawer. Ptolemy supervised, tail switching like a metronome. She added the black notebook where she thought loudly so she didn’t have to out loud. She hesitated over the photograph tucked into the back: her mother and father on Tenby beach, laughter so bright you could feel it, the curve of the world behind them, ocean throwing itself against rocks because that’s what it did. The photograph went in.
When she turned, Lucien stood by the door, the cane in his right hand, all his own pieces gathered. He had stopped dripping. He had not once tried to touch her again. Something in that restraint made her want to cry for reasons she refused to examine.
“You’ll tell me the truth?” she said. “If Evan gets near. If you find him. You’ll not… play with it.”
“No games,” he said. “Not with this.”
For a stupid second she believed him without the buffer of suspicion that made living with him possible. For a stupid second she wanted to lean her forehead to his, to say something unarmored and watch him flinch. She did not. She shouldered the bag.
They stood with the door between them and the stairwell’s hush. Three deadbolts waited like chances.
“Ready?” he asked.
She look ed past him to the little room, the books breathing paper dust into the heat. Ptolemy purred, oblivious, already making a nest of the coat he’d abandoned on the couch. Outside, rain hammered London down to the essentials: light, wet, breath.
“No,” she said. “But let’s go anyway.”
He smiled then—small, rueful, the curve of a man who had learned to live with consequences. He slid the top bolt. She reached for the second. Their wrists brushed. The contact was nothing. It was every thing.
They didn’t comment. They opened the door. The hall breathed damp at them. Lucien stepped out first, measuring the shadows with that predator’s ease that sometimes made it hard to remember he was, infuriatingly, often the gentlest person in the room. He look ed back, held out his right hand without thinking. She didn’t take it. He didn’t pull it back.
On the landing, a man’s voice rose and fell with the radio, narrating a play none of them would remember in a week. On the street, neon shivered in puddles. Somewhere under it all, London’s old heart beat: money changing hands, secrets changing owners, people locking doors and then unlocking them because trouble knocked and used your name.
Rory shut Eva’s door and fitted the keys into her pocket, and followed Lucien toward whatever waited, her chest tight and full at once, a bruise pressed and pressed until it began to feel like warmth.