AI The last deadbolt snapped open under Aurora’s hand and the door jolted inwards, pushed by the weight on the other side.
Lucien Moreau filled the gap like a bad decision made flesh, one amber eye, one black, his tailored charcoal suit torn at the sleeve, his ivory-handled cane angled wrong as if his wrist had forgotten how to hold it. A thin line of blood shone along his jaw where someone had kissed him with a blade.
Ptolemy launched himself off the book-stacked chair with a sound that belonged in an alley fight.
Lucien lifted his free hand, palm out, a gesture so smooth it looked practised in mirrors.
“Bonjour, Rory.”
Aurora kept her grip on the door. She didn’t step back. She didn’t invite him in. She let the chain hang loose, a petty pretence of control.
“You don’t get to use that name.”
His gaze dipped, not to her face but to her left wrist, to the small crescent scar that she never talked about, that he had traced once with the tip of his thumb as if reading braille . His mouth tightened, not apology, not regret, something between restraint and hunger .
“I don’t have time for your pride.”
“You never did.” She angled her body to block the view into Eva’s flat, as if Lucien had not already memorised every weakness in every room he entered. “What are you doing here?”
His nostrils flared. Copper stung the air between them. He had brought the smell of violence into Eva’s cramped one-bedroom, into the nest of scrolls and post-it notes and coffee rings that kept Aurora upright on nights like this.
“Let me in,” he said. “Lock the door.”
“Say please.”
His lips parted in something that could have become a laugh if his ribs had not seized. He shifted his cane and the movement pulled at his torn sleeve. Blood seeped through expensive fabric in slow, offended beads.
“You’re bleeding on Brick Lane,” Aurora said. “Do you want an audience?”
“Not tonight.”
“Then give me a reason.”
Lucien leaned closer, close enough that she caught the faint scent beneath the blood, smoke and something darkly sweet, like burnt sugar. His voice dropped.
“Someone followed me.”
Aurora’s fingers tightened on the edge of the door until the wood bit her skin.
“You led them here,” she said.
“I chose here because you’re here.”
“That isn’t the same thing.”
His gaze flicked past her shoulder, to the corridor beyond, as if he measured distance, exits, angles. He had always moved like a man who counted steps without looking down. Half-demon, fixer, information broker. A man who made favours feel like debts before you even accepted them.
“Rory,” he said again, softer, and the sound of it dug under her ribs. “Open the door.”
Ptolemy hissed, tail bottle-brushed, and launched himself at Lucien’s trouser leg.
Lucien moved with lazy precision. His cane angled, not striking, just interposing, and the tabby bounced back with a yowl, claws skittering on the floorboards. Ptolemy retreated under the narrow console table where Eva kept a pile of warding stones and a half-empty tin of mints.
Aurora’s throat tightened. She hated that Lucien had reacted without panic. She hated that he’d known exactly how not to hurt the cat.
She unhooked the chain and stepped aside.
Lucien slipped in without brushing her, which felt deliberate, and still her skin flared as if he had. He turned immediately, back to the hallway, and pushed the door shut. The three deadbolts waited like teeth.
“Lock it,” he said.
Aurora turned the bolts, one, two, three, metal thudding into place. The sound carried through the thin walls, through the flat’s cluttered quiet, through the paper-dry smell of old books and the sharper tang of ink. She kept her palm on the last bolt a moment too long.
When she faced him, Lucien stood in the middle of Eva’s sitting area, surrounded by research notes and curled parchment, as if he’d stepped into a battlefield made of words. His suit made the chaos look worse.
“You’re dripping,” she said.
He glanced down as if the blood belonged to someone else.
“It’s not mine.”
Aurora’s pulse stuttered and then steadied, stubborn. “That’s meant to reassure me?”
“It should.”
“Because you’ve brought someone else’s blood into my best friend’s home.”
Lucien’s mouth curved. Not a smile. A warning.
“You’re not your best friend. You don’t get fragile.”
Aurora moved past him into the narrow kitchenette, forced her hands to work. Cupboard. Clean tea towel. First-aid tin that Eva kept for paper cuts and ritual burns. Her mind clicked into the old rhythm, observe , calculate , improvise. It beat the alternative, which would have been staring at Lucien like he was a door she’d locked for a reason.
“You look like you crawled out of a tailor’s nightmare,” she said, rummaging. “Who did you annoy?”
Lucien followed, silent, his steps careful over scattered books. He didn’t ask where Eva was. He already knew Eva wasn’t home, or he wouldn’t have risked this. That made Aurora’s stomach twist.
“Do you have clean water?” he asked.
“In London? No. We drink gin and pray.”
His low chuckle vibrated through her like a thumb pressed to a bruise. Aurora found herself hating the sound because it still worked on her. It still pulled, still reminded her of the nights that had gone soft at the edges, when his accent had turned her name into something private.
She set a bowl in the sink and ran the tap. The water rattled against metal, a domestic noise that didn’t belong with him. She soaked the tea towel, wrung it out, and turned.
Lucien had shrugged off his jacket. His white shirt clung to his chest and shoulder where a dark stain spread, thick and drying. Not his blood, he’d said. That meant he’d been close. Too close.
Aurora held up the towel. “Sit.”
His amber eye brightened at the command. His black eye stayed empty.
“Careful,” he said. “You sound like you miss ordering me about.”
“I miss nothing about you.” She stepped in, grabbed his sleeve before he could dodge, and rolled the fabric up.
A shallow cut ran across his forearm, clean as a paper slice but deeper, the skin split with surgical spite. Beneath it, a smudge of someone else’s blood smeared his wrist like a crude bracelet.
Lucien watched her hands.
“You came here for bandages?” Aurora asked.
He lifted his arm slightly as she pressed the wet cloth to the cut. His muscles tensed, then eased.
“I came here for you.”
She let out a short breath. “Flattery doesn’t suit you.”
“It isn’t flattery.”
She dabbed, wiped, pushed the cloth hard enough to hurt. If he felt it, he didn’t show it. The bastard never showed pain unless he chose to.
“You vanished,” Aurora said. The words came out sharp. “One minute you were in my kitchen, talking like you’d never leave. Then you were gone. No note. No message. Nothing.”
Lucien’s jaw flexed. The thin line of blood along it cracked. He lifted a finger and wiped it away, then stared at the red on his glove as if judging the shade .
“I told you not to get attached.”
Aurora’s laugh sounded wrong in her own ears. “You told me a lot of things.”
His gaze cut to her mouth, then away. “You listened.”
“Don’t make this my fault.”
Lucien stepped closer, close enough that the cramped kitchenette turned into a trap. He didn’t touch her. He didn’t need to. His presence filled the space like smoke.
“You want fault?” he said. “Fine. I left because if I stayed, I would have ruined you.”
Aurora kept her hands busy, took a strip of gauze from the tin, wrapped his forearm with neat, angry precision.
“You ruined me anyway.”
Lucien’s breath hitched. He reached out, fingers hovering near her left wrist. He paused, waited, like he offered her the choice of being brave.
Aurora didn’t pull away. That refusal cost her.
His thumb brushed her scar, feather-light. Her skin sparked. The touch felt obscene in the middle of Eva’s kitchen, under the stare of a tabby cat and a sink full of dirty mugs.
“You’re intact,” Lucien murmured. “You adapted. Like you always do.”
Aurora swallowed. “Is that why you’re here? To check your work?”
His thumb pressed, a little firmer now, and her pulse answered it.
“No,” he said. “I’m here because the people who want me don’t stop at me.”
The words landed heavier than his body in the doorway. Aurora’s hands stilled. The flat’s clutter seemed to lean in, listening.
“Who?” she asked.
Lucien’s eyes flicked towards the sitting room, towards the wall where Eva had pinned photographs and copied sigils, string linking them like a conspiracy board. He knew the patterns. He lived off patterns.
“The Sable Court,” he said.
Aurora felt her stomach drop, then harden. She had heard the name in the undercurrent of the Golden Empress, in the way certain customers held their chopsticks like knives. A group that dealt in favours and souls with equal grace.
“You don’t get their attention for free,” Aurora said.
Lucien’s mouth tightened again. “No.”
“What did you steal?”
“I didn’t steal.” He paused. “I withheld.”
Aurora scoffed. “That’s your version of innocence.”
He leaned in, close enough that his words brushed her cheek.
“They want a ledger.”
Aurora’s fingers curled around the edge of the sink until her nails pressed into porcelain . “A ledger of what?”
Lucien’s eyes sharpened, hungry and bleak at once.
“Names,” he said. “Payments. Contracts. Human and otherwise. The kind of list that makes powerful men pray to gods they don’t believe in.”
Aurora’s mind raced through what she’d seen on Eva’s table earlier, the new parchment, the cramped handwriting, the one page Eva had snatched away too quickly .
“You think Eva has it,” Aurora said.
Lucien’s gaze held hers without blinking. “I know she has it.”
Aurora’s voice dropped. “How?”
Lucien didn’t answer. His silence carried implication like perfume. Eva’s flat. Eva’s research. Eva’s secrets. And Lucien, always at the centre of the web, smiling while it tightened.
“You used her,” Aurora said.
Lucien’s black eye went colder. “Eva used me. Everyone uses me. Don’t pretend you didn’t.”
Aurora stepped back, forced distance. The flat’s narrow corridor opened behind her, lined with books stacked in unstable towers. She could see Eva’s bedroom door, covered in taped-up notes, and the sitting room beyond, where a circle of chalk marked the floorboards, half-smudged by hurried feet.
“I didn’t invite you,” Aurora said. “You don’t get to barge in here and drag your mess through her life.”
Lucien’s cane tapped once against the floor. A neat, controlled sound. A warning he’d dressed up as a habit.
“And yet,” he said, “you let me in.”
Aurora’s cheeks heated. She hated that he was right. She hated that her body had recognised him before her brain had finished listing reasons to slam the door.
Ptolemy crept from under the console table, eyes wide and unblinking, then darted towards the sitting room, tail low.
Aurora watched the cat go, and a sick feeling crawled up her throat.
Ptolemy didn’t flee when Eva’s friends visited. He didn’t skulk for no reason. He reacted to things he couldn’t explain with language.
Aurora moved past Lucien into the sitting room. Papers littered the floor, some covered in Eva’s tight scrawl, others in older scripts that looked like scratches in bone . The chalk circle sat off-centre, broken at one edge where a shoe had smeared it.
Lucien followed without speaking. He stood in the doorway and watched Aurora like she was the only object worth measuring.
Aurora crouched, picked up a photograph from the floor. A blurred shot of a man leaving a building, face turned away. Another photo lay beneath it, a close-up of a hand with a signet ring. The ring bore a symbol like a crescent swallowing a star.
Aurora’s breath caught.
“That’s Sable Court,” she said.
Lucien’s cane tip clicked softly against the wood. “Yes.”
Aurora stood, photo in hand. “If they’re involved, why would they come to a flat above a curry house? They could burn this whole building down and call it urban renewal.”
Lucien stepped in behind her. His chest hovered near her back, heat without contact. His voice slid into her ear.
“Because Eva did something clever,” he said. “She hid it under their noses. And because you’re here. They know you’re here.”
Aurora turned fast, too fast, and her shoulder brushed his chest. The contact punched air from her lungs. Lucien’s hand shot out and caught her elbow, steadying her, possessive in the same breath.
“Don’t,” she snapped, but her body leaned into the hold before she could stop it .
Lucien’s gaze dropped to her mouth again. He looked like he could kiss her out of spite, out of longing, out of strategy. Dark romance with a knife tucked behind its back.
A sharp crack split the flat.
Not from inside.
From the front door.
Wood groaned. The deadbolts shuddered as if something heavy had slammed into them from the corridor. Dust shook free from the doorframe.
Ptolemy yowled and shot under the sofa.
Aurora’s heart jerked into her throat. She moved without thought, grabbed the nearest heavy object, Eva’s thick hardback grimoire, and held it like a weapon.
Lucien’s expression didn’t change, but his grip tightened on his cane. The ivory handle rotated a fraction, and Aurora heard the faint metallic whisper of a hidden blade shifting inside.
Another удар, harder. The top deadbolt snapped with a sound like bone.
Lucien’s voice stayed calm, a cruel lullaby.
“Now,” he said, “you can tell me you miss nothing about me.”
The second deadbolt tore free. The door buckled inward, splitting along the frame, and something on the other side laughed, low and wet, as if it tasted fear through the cracks.