AI The door opened and he filled the frame like a memory that had come back to life. Moonlight pinned his suit to him; charcoal fabric pressed across broad shoulders, the ivory handle of his cane catching a sliver of light. One eye burned amber, the other sat like a drop of coal. He looked too clean to have been standing on Brick Lane in the wind. He did not look like someone who left.
"Rory."
He said nothing else. The name sat between them, heavy and familiar .
She leaned against the jamb. Books teetered on the hallway table behind her, pages fanned like small white flags. Ptolemy threaded between her ankles, tail up, unimpressed by drama. She had not expected the night to fracture like this.
"Lucien."
Her voice came out too even. Fingers curled around the door's wood, thumb brushing the crescent scar on her wrist without meaning to. The motion had been small. He watched it when he stepped forward an inch.
He kept his hands visible, cane planted against the threshold like a promise and a warning. He looked at the scar, at the quick, involuntary fold in her hand. The corner of his mouth moved. He did not smile.
"You shouldn't be here," she said.
"You shouldn't be alone," he answered.
Her laugh scraped against the books on the shelf. "Bullshit. You mean I shouldn't be within reach of whatever dragged you away."
He blinked, the amber eye warming as if a candle had been nearer. "I didn't drag you," he said. "I thought leaving was the only way to keep you clean of my mess."
"Clean?" She pushed the door wider, forcing the space between them. The flat smelled of old paper and tea gone cold. "You left. You packed what you wanted and stepped into the night. You left without a word. That's not keeping anyone clean, Lucien. That's abandonment."
His jaw loosened. "I left to stop you getting pulled in—" He stopped himself as if the rest of the sentence tasted bitter. "If someone like me takes root where you are, you'll rot with every kind of dirt that comes with me." He sounded practiced . He sounded exhausted.
"Someone like you," she repeated, and the words cut sharper than they should have. "So now all of a sudden you're an ethical choice. You walk out and call it protection."
Ptolemy hopped up onto the hallway radiator and surveyed them both with an expression that said, very clearly, this was tedious adult business.
Lucien glanced at the cat and his fingers brushed the ivory of his cane. "I thought the less I left behind, the less they would have to follow."
"You thought for me," she said. "You'd decided what I could bear and what I couldn't. You didn't give me a choice."
He closed his eyes for a long beat, and the flat filled with the hush of that small movement. "I thought—" His voice narrowed . When he spoke again, it bore a softness that did not sit well with his suit's sharp lines. "I thought I could buy time. I thought distance would make the thing that hunts me lose interest. I could not make you safe."
"Could not make me safe," she echoed , tasting the syllables like a new poison. "You told me you would stay. You told me you'd be there. I believed you."
He stepped one, careful step across the threshold, and the distance between them narrowed by a breath. "You believed me," he repeated. "I never meant to break that."
"Then why did you?" The words came small, brittle.
"Because I was being honest—"
"Honest?" She barked a laugh that bounced off the books. "Honest is staying and explaining. Honest is facing it with me in the room, not leaving me to learn you by the shape of the bed."
He let out a sound that was almost a laugh and almost a groan. "You talk to me like I'm one of the things you'd catalogue on those scrolls in Eva's sitting room. Like I'm an entry with a date and a footnote."
"You disappeared." She said it like a verdict. "You left, and then I had to explain to myself why. I lay awake threading every possibility—abandonment, fear, protection. I read your habits like they were spells. I tried to guess where you went when you walked away. That was my life for months."
A pigeon clattered somewhere in the street below, an ordinary, human noise. He watched her as if the outline of her had shifted and he had been given new light to see it. "I wanted you to choose not to follow me."
"And what, Lucien? Make you less of what you are? Turn your shoulders into something you are not?" She scoffed. "You made the decision for me. You took my choice."
His fingers opened and closed around the cane; the ivory rattled softly . He reached toward the doorframe, not quite touching it . "If you would have chosen me, the cost would have been—" He faltered. The next words came like confession. "The cost would have eaten you. I couldn't let that happen."
"So you left me to bleed out in that choice," she said, and the accusation was less theatrical and more like a wound opened and prodded .
Silence settled. Ptolemy yawned a deliberate, enormous yawn and slid down, rubbing against Lucien's shins like he approved of the company. Lucien's hand stilled where the cat leaned.
"I thought I could shield you," he said finally. "From enemies who would use you as leverage. From me. I thought the only honest thing to do was to put space between us."
"We were already in each other's space, Lucien." She stepped back, letting the doorway take her weight . Her palm came away from the wood wet. "We lived on the same side of a line that had your footprints all over it."
"So come inside," he said. Not an order. A plea disguised as an invitation.
Her mouth flattened. "Is this a sales pitch now? Admission of guilt and a glass of something? No."
A tightness ran through his features. "I didn't come to apologise and leave. I came because something followed me. Something that wants the part of my life that touches you." He raised his chin. "I came because I could not carry what I needed to carry alone anymore."
The book stacks watched them like a chorus, spines creasing. Her laugh had gone; there was only the steady hum under her ribs. "So you're looking for a place to dump your mess."
"I want you to know," he said. "I want to look at you and not make excuses."
"You could have looked at me when you left," she shot back. "You could have said, 'Rory, I'm leaving, and I'm sorry.'"
"I could have," he agreed. "And then we'd both have had to make the wrong choices in the dark." He took another step forward. The hallway narrowed. Their breaths met.
She could feel the heat rolling off him—an impossible warmth that wasn't just his body. It brushed her face; it made the small hairs on her forearms lift. The pull between them had not eased with time. It had grown the shape of something inconvenient and honest.
"This isn't about guilt and absolution," he said. "It's about being ridiculous enough to think I could decide a life for you."
"This is about the fact you abandoned me the only way you knew how: by walking away and expecting me to become a shadow in your absence." Her words came clipped. "I did not ask to be part of your world. I volunteered. You took that offering and slammed the door."
He closed the last foot of the distance between them and paused in the doorway with his cane behind him, as if the threshold itself demanded ceremony. "I slammed it because I didn't know how to open it again... without bringing monsters across the sill."
She watched him. Her hands had gone cold. "And yet here you are, standing in my doorway."
"I couldn't find a way to stay away." He let the confession fall into the air like a quiet thing. "I had to see if you were breathing."
Ptolemy twined his body between their legs and looked up at her with a face that said, very clearly, he had no patience for riddles.
"You could have called," she said. "Sent a message. I would have listened."
"I couldn't trust any line that ran through me," he said. "They can trace blood. They can trace words. There were days I wrote your name on the backs of receipts and then burnt the paper because it felt like leaving a trail."
She watched him, unable to decide whether to be furious or ache. "So what now? You stand in my hall and declare you couldn't keep away. That's not a plan, Lucien. That's just—"
"—the truth," he finished. "The truth is I am tired of running. The truth is I am tired of being the man who leaves. The truth is I want to try being the man who stays."
Her laugh was a little. It didn't reach her eyes. "You make promises like weapons. They have an edge."
"Then don't take them," he said. "Take me. The good parts. The bad parts. Leave the rest of the weapons in whatever hole I dug them in."
She swallowed. The thing hurting in her chest had the same name as the thing that made her stare at a blank wall at two in the morning. Desire had teeth. It had also been betrayed . Words were not heavy enough to balance either.
"I don't know if I can trust you," she admitted. There. She had said it. It was a small admission, a raw one.
"Neither can I," he answered. "But I know what I want." He reached out then, and for a moment the world condensed to the slow arc of his hand toward her wrist. He did not touch the scar at first. He traced the air above it. "I want to be with you anyway."
She watched his fingers with vacant attention, the scar a map of a childhood crack. When his fingers finally brushed her skin, it was only with the pads of his thumb. No fire. No searing . Just pressure like a promise being weighed .
"You thought leaving would keep me safe," she murmured.
"I thought it would," he said. "I miscalculated."
Her breath hitched. He was so close that she felt his heartbeat against the inside of his palm—slower than hers, steady like a drummer who had learned how to count in quarters and beats. It said, in the language of palms and bones, I am here.
"You smell like rain," she said suddenly , absurd and specific.
He let out a sound that might have been a smile. "And regret."
"And cologne you probably ruin on purpose so people remember you." She managed a snarl that nearly softened into a smile.
He shifted the cane to his other hand and closed the space between them. Ptolemy wove and waggled and left a small trail of fur that stuck to Lucien's trousers.
"Eva's place got some new scrolls," she said, surprising herself with the triviality. "They're scattered on her sofa. You used to comment on the calligraphy." The sentence broke into a laugh that had no iron in it.
"I never learned to stop," he said. "Even absence left me reading the margins."
She jutted her chin. "Then answer this. If you stay now, what's changed? What makes you think you'll be different?"
He rested his forehead against hers before she could frame another question. The contact was not intimate and it was not casual; it was a small surrender. "I have no illusions about myself," he said. "But I'm done pretending I can protect you by erasing myself. I'm going to carry whatever comes. I am asking you not to run from that. If you want to, I will break and need you to be the one to pick me up. If you don't want to, I will step back."
Her breath slowed at the heat against her forehead. She could smell the sort of soap he used — clean, expensive, dangerous. Her fingers found his wrist, then his hand, then the cane. The ivory felt warm.
"You could get me killed," she said softly .
"And you could get me worse things," he countered. "But sitting on opposite sides of a closed door has not helped either of us."
She thought of the nights she had spent unravelling possibilities, of the evenings she had imagined his return and how the wanting had become a rumour in her chest. Thoughts unspooled into a single, dangerous desire that pulled her up to meet him halfway.
She closed the door behind her with a click that sounded final and delicate all at once. Her fingers lingered on the wood for a heartbeat, then dropped. The hallway dimmed into the room where Eva's books argued in silence . Ptolemy flopped, belly up, indifferent to their great human trouble.
"I shouldn't be making this decision in a hallway," she said.
"Then take it into a room," he replied.
She studied him a long moment, the edge of war and apology and longing layered like the suits he wore. Her chest ached in a way that had nothing to do with danger and everything to do with truth.
"Stay in the living room," she said. "On the floor. No bringing other people. No introducing me to the demon father. No dramatic rescues."
"I cannot promise the last one," he said.
"Then don't," she said. "Promise me simple things."
"I can promise simple things," he said.
She let out a breath she had been holding since he had stepped into the frame. It became a small laugh, uncontrollable now because the stairs had been climbed and neither of them had a map. She stepped aside and held out the corridor as if it were a bridge.
Lucien's hand slid from the cane to her waist without fanfare. The touch was firm and real. It anchored both of them in the sill of the doorway they had once believed would keep them apart.
Ptolemy batted at Lucien's cuff as if to grant him some sort of honourable test. Lucien looked down and then up at her, expression open, unprotected.
"You're ridiculous," she said.
"So are you," he answered.
She closed the door behind them and the sound of deadbolts slid into place like sentences sealing a page.