AI The door swung inward after the third deadbolt clicked back, and there stood Lucien Moreau, looking like he’d just stepped out of a tailor’s window on Savile Row instead of the faintly spiced, rain-damp hallway of Brick Lane. His charcoal suit was impeccable, not a crease out of place. The platinum blond hair was slicked back, sharp as a blade. In one hand, he held his ivory-handled cane, the tip hovering just above the worn doormat that read ‘GO AWAY’ in cheerful, fraying letters.
Rory felt the air leave her lungs, a soft, stupid punch to the gut. She hadn’t seen him in six weeks, not since the mess with the stolen fae ledger had concluded and he’d delivered her final payment with a curt nod and a silence that felt heavier than the envelope of cash. Things had been left… unresolved. A charge in the air that had never fully discharged.
“Aurora,” he said, his voice that low, smooth baritone that always seemed to resonate just beneath her breastbone. His heterochromatic eyes—one amber, one a depthless black—took her in. She was in an old Cardiff rugby jersey and joggers, her black hair still damp from the shower and hanging straight to her shoulders. Ptolemy the tabby wound himself around her ankles, purring loudly, oblivious to the sudden tectonic shift in the flat’s atmosphere.
“Lucien.” She didn’t mean for it to come out so flat. She leaned against the doorframe, crossing her arms over her chest, the worn fabric of the jersey suddenly feeling insubstantial. The small crescent scar on her left wrist itched, an old nervous habit. “You’re a long way from Mayfair.”
“I had business nearby.” It was a lie . They both knew it. Lucien Moreau didn’t have ‘business’ in walk-ups above curry houses. He conducted his affairs in back rooms of private clubs and from behind polished mahogany desks.
“And it couldn’t wait? Or involve a phone call?” She didn’t move to let him in. The cramped space behind her was a disaster zone of Eva’s arcane research—open bestiaries on the sofa, scrolls weighted down by mugs on the floor, Post-it notes in a neon blizzard across the walls. Letting in someone so composed felt like inviting a panther into a junk shop.
His gaze flickered past her shoulder, taking in the controlled chaos. A faint, almost imperceptible smile touched his lips. “Some conversations are better had in person. May I come in? Or shall we negotiate in the hallway like strangers?”
The word ‘strangers’ hung between them, sharp and wrong. They had never been strangers. From the moment he’d hired her for that first delivery job—a simple parcel run that had ended with them back-to-back in a Shoreditch alley, fending off ghouls with his cane-sword and her improvised bike lock—they had been something else. Complicated allies. A source of frustrating, magnetic tension .
With a sigh that felt like surrender, Rory stepped back . “Watch your step. The floor’s a library.”
He entered with a predator’s grace, the tip of his cane making no sound on the scuffed floorboards. He navigated around a stack of books on Balkan river spirits as if he’d memorized the path. Ptolemy immediately abandoned Rory and trotted over, butting his head against Lucien’s perfectly tailored trouser leg. Traitor.
“To what do I owe the visit, Luc?” She used the shortened name deliberately , a relic of easier times. She busied herself clearing a space on the sagging sofa, moving a heap of notes on selkie legal precedents to the floor. “If you’ve got another job, Eva’s out. Won’t be back till late. You’re stuck with just me.”
“It is you I came to see.” He didn’t sit . He stood in the centre of the room, a pillar of order amidst the beautiful chaos, turning his cane slowly in his hand. The amber light from Eva’s desk lamp caught the polished ivory of the handle. “The job is finished. This is not business.”
Her throat tightened. She stopped pretending to tidy and faced him. “Then what is it?”
He was silent for a long moment, his mismatched eyes studying her face with an intensity that made her want to look away. She held his gaze, her bright blue eyes meeting his strange, beautiful ones. She remembered the last time they’d been this close—in the dripping undercroft of a disused church, his arm around her waist pulling her behind a pillar, his hand over her mouth to stifle her breath. His body had been a solid, warm line against her back. They had not moved for a full five minutes, listening to their pursuers clatter past. She had felt the steady, slow beat of his heart through layers of wool and cotton. After, he had released her as if she were electrified .
“I owe you an apology,” he said finally, the words seeming to cost him something .
Rory blinked. “For what? The payment was more than fair.”
“Not for the payment.” A flicker of irritation, or perhaps pain, crossed his features. “For my… departure. It was discourteous.”
“Discourteous,” she repeated, the word tasting bland . “We’re not at a dinner party, Lucien. You did the job, you paid me, you left. That’s the transaction. Courtesy doesn’t enter into it.”
“Don’t.” The word was sharp, a crack in his polished veneer. He took a half-step forward, then checked himself. Ptolemy, sensing the change, leapt onto the windowsill to watch. “Don’t reduce it to that. You know it was never just a transaction. Not with us.”
The ‘us’ landed in the quiet room like a stone in a pond. Rory felt a flush creep up her neck. “What was it, then? You’re the fixer. The information broker. You traffic in favours and secrets. What was I, if not another asset?”
“You were a complication,” he said, his voice dropping, warming almost against his will . “A brilliant, stubborn, infuriating complication. I am not in the business of collecting complications, Aurora. I am in the business of resolving them.”
“So you resolved me by leaving without a word.” The hurt she’d been carefully boxing up for weeks spilled out, raw and accusing.
“I left because if I had stayed another minute that night, I would have done something we would both regret.” The admission was quiet, stark . He wasn’t looking at her anymore; he was staring at a faded map of ley lines pinned to Eva’s wall as if it held the answers. “Or perhaps not regret. But it would have changed things. Made them… irreversible.”
The air between them thickened, humming with everything unsaid. The near-kiss in the rain-slicked street after they’d bested the ghouls. The way his hand had lingered on the small of her back when guiding her through a crowd. The nights spent in his sleek car or her tiny flat above Silas’s bar, talking strategy over cheap wine, the conversation always veering into territories far more personal than employer and contractor should ever tread.
“You think things haven’t already changed?” Rory’s voice was barely a whisper . She uncrossed her arms, letting her hands hang at her sides. “You think I don’t look for you in every crowded room? That I don’t jump every time my phone buzzes, hoping it’s a text from an unknown number? You vanished, Lucien. That changes things all on its own.”
He turned his head back to her, and the look in his eyes was utterly unguarded—a turbulent mix of yearning and self-recrimination. “I have spent my entire life building walls. Calculated distances. It is how I survive. With you, the calculus failed. Every time. You have a way of… bypassing the machinery.”
He took a step closer, then another, until he was within arm’s reach. The scent of him—sandalwood, crisp linen, and something darker, a hint of ozone that was purely his demonic heritage—wrapped around her. “I told myself it was a vulnerability I could not afford. That involving you further, in any capacity beyond the professional, would put you in more danger than you already attract by simply being your remarkably troublesome self.”
“I can handle danger,” she said, her chin lifting. “I’m not some porcelain doll you need to keep on a shelf.”
“I know.” A ghost of his usual smirk returned. “You are more akin to a hand grenade with the pin already pulled. It is part of your considerable charm .” The smirk faded. “But the dangers in my world are not just physical. They are corrupting. They leave marks on the soul. I have spent decades ensuring my own is sufficiently tarnished to be of no further interest to such forces. I would not see yours darkened. Not for me.”
It was the most he had ever spoken about himself, about the cost of his life. Rory felt her anger soften, melting into a profound , aching sadness. She saw it then—the weariness in the set of his shoulders, the slight tightening of his knuckles where they gripped the cane. The isolation that his perfect suits and polyglot fluency were designed to conceal.
“You don’t get to make that choice for me,” she said softly . She reached out, not to touch him, but to gesture at the room around them . “Look at this place. Look at my life. I deliver dim sum by day and help my best friend research how to banish bogeymen by night. I left a perfectly respectable pre-law future and a toxic ex to live above a bar and run odd jobs for a half-demon fixer. My soul’s not exactly pristine , Lucien. And I like it that way. It’s *mine *.”
He stared at her, his breath catching. The amber eye seemed to glow in the low light.
“So you show up here,” she continued, her voice gaining strength, “unannounced, in the middle of my messy, unprofessional life, to tell me you’re sorry for protecting me from yourself? That’s not an apology. That’s a confession.”
“What would you have me confess, then?” His voice was rough.
“That you missed me.”
The words hung there, simple and devastating.
Lucien closed his eyes. For a long moment, he was perfectly still, a statue of a man in a room full of words. When he opened them, both the amber and the black depths were resolved , certain. He let his cane lean against the sofa and, with his now-free hand, reached up. He didn’t touch her face. Instead, his fingertips came to rest lightly on the sleeve of her jersey, over the small, hidden scar on her wrist. A point of connection, fragile and electric .
“Every day,” he breathed. “It has been an exercise in profound and daily stupidity. A tactical error of the highest order. I missed you with an idiocy that shames me.”
A laugh escaped her, watery and relieved. “Now that sounds like a real apology.”
His thumb brushed over the fabric, a slow, deliberate stroke. “I am not a good man, Rory. I am a useful one. There is a difference.”
“I’m not asking for a good man,” she said, shifting her wrist so her fingers could curl around his. His skin was warm. “I’m asking for the one who shows up uninvited because he can’t stay away anymore.”
He moved then, closing the last inch of space. His free hand came up to cradle the side of her face, his touch astonishingly gentle. He searched her eyes, giving her one last moment to refuse, to pull back into the safety of hurt and distance.
Rory did not refuse. She rose onto her toes and met him halfway.
The kiss was not gentle. It was six weeks of silence and want, of complicated history and uncertain future, crashing together. It was all the unsaid things finally speaking in a language older than words. His lips were softer than she’d imagined, but the kiss itself was demanding, hungry, a claiming and a surrender all at once. She fisted her hands in the immaculate wool of his suit jacket, pulling him closer, anchoring herself against the dizzying reality of him.
When they finally broke apart, breathless, foreheads resting together, the world had narrowed to the space between them. The flat, the books, the rain starting to patter against the window—it all fell away.
“This,” Lucien murmured against her lips, his voice ragged with a wonder he didn’t try to hide, “changes everything.”
Rory smiled, her nose brushing his. “It was already changed,” she whispered back. “You were just late to the meeting.”