AI The door had thunked open before she realised who stood beyond the narrowing rectangle of light. He filled the frame like he belonged there—tailored charcoal clinging to broad shoulders, ivory-handled cane tucked at his elbow, hair slicked back so the pale line of his scalp shone under the hallway bulb. One eye caught the corridor and burned amber. The other drank the dim and offered nothing.
"I thought you'd moved out of Brick Lane," he said.
She didn't step back. Her hand flattened to the door, fingers cooling against the wood; the other tugged at the edge of her sleeve until it bunched beneath the crescent scar on her wrist.
"You weren't supposed to be on Brick Lane," she answered. The words came clipped, like she had shaved them. Books under a lamp in the flat behind her rustled as if eager to listen.
He smiled without moving his mouth much. The cane clicked once on the floor. "I had a reason."
Ptolemy leapt from a pile of research notes and skidded across the threshold, whiskers quivering, then flattened himself against Lucien's shin. He trilled—a low, satisfied sound that did things to the back of her throat.
"You let my cat in on whatever scheme you have," she said. Her breath sounded too loud in her own ears.
"You always told me cats liked the scent of secrets," Lucien answered. He stepped inside. The flat smelled of boiled tea and paper. He closed the door with a careful, practiced motion that avoided the three deadbolts altogether, fingers lingering at the old brass knob as if touching an old bruise .
She didn't move to lock it. Curiosity and irritation warred in her chest; the irritation had sharper teeth.
"You shouldn't be here, Lucien."
He angled his chin toward the living room. "Eva wasn't home. I thought you might be."
The name landed like a flat stone. Eva; the friend who had pulled her out of the grey of Evan's apartment and shoved her toward London. Eva with maps of sigils and a hundred late-night cups of tea. The flat's single bed with its mismatched duvet had held her for weeks. The flat belonged to Eva, but it smelled like the two of them had been carving out a place that was almost a home.
"She texted," Aurora said. "She said she'd be out until midnight."
"Texting didn't tell me where the night would take me." Lucien's amber eye creased, not quite amusement . "So I came."
She let a slow inhale go, then another. "You could have knocked. You could have—"
"I knocked," he said. "You didn't answer."
She remembered that night; the cough of rain on the window, the phone's useless glow. She had slept in fits, half expecting Evan's silhouette to loom in the doorway of any dream. Lucien had not come. He had a way of appearing at the edges of things: a card laid under her door, a message in the margins of a book. Not that night. Not when she had needed a face she trusted.
"You left," she said. The single word wasn't a question.
He looked at her hands. "I had to."
"Had to leave me."
His mouth flattened. "I left because staying would have put you in more danger."
"It never felt like you left to protect me," she snapped. The flat had become too small, the words caught in the low ceiling. "It felt like you left me alone."
Lucien's fingers tapped the cane's carved handle. He moved like someone keeping violence or mercy in reserve and careful not to show either. "I thought distance would make you safer."
"Did you ask me what safer meant?" She stepped around him to the small kitchenette and found a mug with chips at the rim. Her fingers found the scar and rubbed it as if it could smooth memory.
"You told me once that running was a kind of bravery," he said quietly . "You showed me..."
She cut him off with a laugh that tasted like old lemons . "I didn't mean it like that."
The room grew smaller with the breath between them. Ptolemy curled into her ankles and closed his eyes. Lucien bent, hand hovering over the cat, then rested his fingertips against the sleek fur. He closed his eyes for a fragment of a second.
"You could have said no," Aurora said. Words sharpened into accusation. "You could have said, 'stay'."
"I said nothing because the only thing I knew how to do then was what I do now. Move." He straightened. "Collect information. Keep secrets. I thought keeping away kept you clean of me."
Silence hung, thick as dust. Shelves leaned heavy with Eva's research notes and yellowing maps, the edges of pages feathered from constant handling. A cup clinked as she set it on the counter. Tea, probably, she hadn't made it yet.
"That sounded noble," she said, "until it didn't."
"It never sounded noble." He came closer, so close the perfume on his collarbones warmed the air. It had no need of softness; it smelled of smoke and bergamot and something that wasn't quite human . "It sounded like cowardice to me, once I understood what I had done."
"That didn't help." Her voice dropped. She watched his profile, the ivory cane a quiet punctuation. "You walked out and never came back. No notes. No calls. Not even a message."
"I had reasons," he said. This time the sentence didn't try to obscure itself. The amber eye pinched, and for a moment the black one flicked like a shutter closing. "Danger wrapped itself in layers. I couldn't carry you through all of them."
"How generous," she said. "To decide for me."
He smiled, then it turned brittle. "I had to decide. For both of us."
"You chose for us both. You chose like the rest of them. You chose without asking."
A slow laugh escaped him—surprised and raw. "You don't let anyone choose for you, Aurora. You hate it. Except when you don't. God, you confuse me."
"You confuse yourself," she said. "And you went."
He closed his mouth. Nothing for a moment. The flat felt like the space between a breath and its fall. Lucien reached into his inner coat pocket and produced an envelope. It lay between his palms like something alive.
"I left this," he said. "Months ago. I meant to give it to you. I couldn't. The wrong hands would have read it."
She took the envelope without thinking. Her fingers brushed his and the lightness of contact made her skin hum. He had the same old smell—cigarette smoke that never was smoke, a scent tailored as precisely as his suits. Her thumb traced the paper's edge. His name was not on it. Only her name, written in a hand that didn't belong to either of them.
"What is it?" she asked.
"A key," he said. "Not to any door in this building."
Her pulse stuttered. "You're not holding out on me a literal second chance."
He blinked, amber catching the lamp's light. "Not a chance. A choice."
"Of course." She let a breath go that became a laugh. "Lucien, this is hardly a romcom."
He did not smile. "No."
She opened the flap. There was a single folded photograph inside. Her finger slid under the corner and eased the paper free. It showed her—young, hair differently cut, eyes clearer—standing in front of a low, iron gate in a place that smelled of salt and wild grass. Behind her, a shadowed man leaned in; his face was not Lucien's, though the posture, the angle of the hand, everything suggested the same protection she'd once craved and had sought in the wrong places.
She could feel the night unspooling, the rain that had fallen when he didn't come. The photograph smelled faintly of old tobacco and rain. She had been smiling in the picture. Her ribs ached at the memory.
"You took this?" she asked.
"I did." He put his hands in his pockets as if the action would dismiss the weight . "I left it where you would find it, if you ever needed to remember who you were before everything got messy."
"Messy?" She let the word fall, tasting it. "You were a part of it."
"I was." He said it as if he had swallowed the word and it had lodged somewhere on the way down. "And I was trying to fix a way out."
"Pity you made everyone else pay." She scalded her tongue on the tea she'd poured without meaning to. The mug cooled between her palms.
"I know." He stepped in, until their knees almost touched. "I know I broke things."
"You broke me." The admission trembled loose. She didn't hide it. It had been a long time since she'd let those syllables out. They landed on the photo between them and sagged.
Lucien's fingers moved, brushed the curve of her wrist. His touch was light, as if the skin must still be mapped with betrayal. He wouldn't close the distance, not yet. He seemed careful with the space, as if measuring how much he was allowed .
"You carry it like a compass," he murmured. "The scar."
She jerked her hand away, fingers quick as a shutter. "Don't."
"I couldn't tell if it meant you had survived or if it meant you were still wounded." He held her stare. "I was afraid I would make it worse."
"Making it worse was your specialty," she said. The words had no warmth . "You disappeared into shadows and left the light to die."
"Shadows are handy when you want to keep someone alive," he said, and the sentence wasn't an excuse; it was bare fact . "But you've lived long enough in the dark. You didn't need me to do that to you."
She laughed then—a short, hot sound that echoed too loud off the cramped walls. "You think I'm fragile, Lucien? I survived Evan."
"Which makes this worse," he said. "Because you didn't deserve the choosing."
Ptolemy moved between them and bumped his head against her ankle, then Lucien's hand. The small cat looked up with a face that could not possibly be judgmental and yet, somehow, it was. The presence of the animal cut through the noir film of their argument and left something almost domestic in its wake.
"You could have knocked," Aurora said again, softer this time. The repetition made it an offering. "You could have stayed awake. You could have waited."
"I did wait." His voice turned gravelly. "For months. I marked the streets. I counted passers-by. I waited until I could stand in that doorway without bringing a storm."
"Too late," she said. "If you were ever going to arrive, you arrived as a stranger."
"Would you have opened the door for a stranger?" His amber eye watched the scar on her wrist, then flicked up to her face. "Would you have let a stranger in?"
Her throat worked. "I don't know."
He exhaled, a sound that might have been a laugh if it had held humour. "I should have asked."
"Yes."
He folded his hands in front of him as if to keep them from reaching out. "I'm here now."
"Why?" she asked. The question could have been many things—why after so long, why to her flat, why at this hour. She let it be plain and simple because complicated answers would only curve the knife.
"Because I don't know how to make amends with a map." He looked at the photograph, at the envelope, at her. "Because I couldn't bear the thought of leaving you with nothing but the impression of my absence."
"Impressions wear thin," she said. "They fade."
"So does anger," he answered, quiet and unexpected. "It fades when it's honest."
Her laugh this time was almost a sob. She couldn't tell if she wanted him to stay or wanted him to leave. Both desires burned like acid in her mouth.
"Honest how?" she asked.
"Start with the truth," he said. "I left because danger drew me away. I also left because I was afraid if I stayed I'd do something worse—something that would cost you everything. I'm telling you now because the cost is no longer yours to carry alone."
She stared at him until the room blurred. The words were not a promise. They were not an apology she could fold into the neatness of a reply. They were a confession coated in something like remorse .
"I walked out," she said finally, and the sentence was less an accusation than a report . "You didn't stay. We were a mess."
"We were," he agreed. "And we're still here. And I'm not asking for forgiveness the way people ask for surrender. I'm asking for an answer."
She looked at the three deadbolts on the door and imagined how many others had clicked those locks in their lives, how many doors she'd wished would open and stayed stubbornly shut. Her thumb brushed the edge of the photograph again.
"Why did you come now?" she asked. "After everything you've done with your secrets, why choose tonight?"
"Because the map's changed," he said. "Because I found a way to keep you from having to make things harder than they already are. Because I... wanted to see if you would let me try."
Ptolemy batted the photograph and sent it skittering across the floor like a small, deliberate dismissal. Lucien bent to pick it up and then didn't. He let it lie, face up in the lamplight, and that small refusal felt like a hinge unlocking somewhere inside the room.
"You can't fix me," Aurora said. "You can't fix what was."
"I don't intend to fix you," he replied. "I intend to stand next to you while you decide what sort of fixing you want, if any."
She swallowed. The words sat between them like a fulcrum. She had spent months stacking her life so it wouldn't tip; now his presence tipped it regardless.
"You're very persuasive," she said, halting the truth with a guarded smile.
"Practice," he said. "I brokering information for a living trains you in conversation."
"And in disappearing." She couldn't salvage the softness of anything.
"I stopped practising that." He met her eyes and held them. "For now."
She heard footsteps on the stairs outside the flat. Eva's keys jingled at the door beyond it. The sound was small but it pulled at the room's edges—reminded her that life, mundane and blinking, continued outside the charged atmosphere between them.
"I didn't bake you anything," she said abruptly. "If that's what you were coming for."
"I didn't expect cake," he countered, and the corner of his mouth quirked. It was the smallest concession he had given so far.
She took a breath and folded the photograph back into the envelope. The paper was warm from their contact.
"Tell me one thing," she said.
He waited.
"Do you still want me, or do you want the idea of what I could do for you?"
He looked at her as if sorting through an old wardrobe for garments that might still fit . "I wanted you," he said. "When I walked out and when I walked back in. The rest is work."
Ptolemy purred, insistent. Lucia… Lucien swallowed a laugh.
"You always complicate things," she said.
"I make them interesting." His smile softened, just a fraction.
The door behind them creaked open then, and Eva's voice called up the stairwell, bright and untroubled. "Rory? I'm home—"
Aurora let the name fall out of her mouth and it felt like a decision, light and heavy at once.
"Stay," Lucien said.
She looked at him. The flat smelled of tea and paper and the possibility that a night could pivot. She could lock the door and wordlessly ask him to leave. She could push him away with everything she had rehearsed for lonely nights. Or she could step back, let him in properly this time, and see what happened when two people who had broken each other tried to piece something honest out of the shards.
She moved first. Her hand rested on the brass knob; the crescent scar showed pale against the tan of her skin. She turned the key in the lock and felt the bolt slide home with a soft, decisive click.