AI The third deadbolt slid back with a heavy clunk, a sound Aurora Carter had come to associate with finally shutting out the world. She pulled the door open, a complaint about forgotten keys already half-formed on her lips for Eva.
It died there.
The man on the landing was not her best friend. The dim, flickering bulb in the hallway cast shifting shadows across a face she hadn’t seen in over a year, a face that had haunted the edges of her dreams and the quietest moments of her day. Lucien Moreau stood perfectly still, one hand resting on the ivory head of his cane, the other holding a brown paper bag that smelled faintly of ginger and star anise.
His heterochromatic eyes—one amber, one a bottomless black—took her in with that unnerving, total focus she remembered. He looked exactly the same. Impeccable charcoal suit, platinum hair slicked back from a high forehead, not a single thread out of place. He was a statue of composure, while her own heart was trying to beat its way out of her chest.
“Rory.” Her name was a soft exhale on his lips, a statement and a question all at once.
Aurora gripped the edge of the door, her knuckles turning white. The small crescent scar on her left wrist seemed to pulse . “Lucien.” Her voice was tighter than she intended, a stranger’s voice. “What are you doing here?”
“Eva,” he said, as if that single word explained everything. He lifted the paper bag slightly . “She mentioned you were unwell. A persistent cold. Yu-Fei sent congee.”
Of course Eva had called him. Her meddling best friend, who never believed their story was truly over, who thought a demon’s son with a blade in his cane was just what the doctor ordered for a broken heart. Aurora’s flat above Silas’s bar was one thing; this was Eva’s sanctuary , her private, cluttered world. His presence here felt like a violation of two separate spaces.
“I’m fine. You can leave it.” She made to close the door, a feeble, automatic gesture of self-preservation.
His cane moved, not with speed, but with an inevitable grace, the tip settling gently against the door to stop its swing. “She also said you were out of milk. And that your cough sounds like a dying engine.” His amber eye held hers while the black one seemed to absorb the chaotic , book-lined hallway behind her. “It is… impolite to refuse a gift of soup, Rory. Even from an unwelcome messenger.”
He was using that voice , the one that was all reason and faint, untraceable amusement. The one that used to unravel her. She felt the fight drain out of her, replaced by a weary ache. She *was * out of milk. Her throat was raw, and the flat was cold.
With a sigh that turned into a ragged cough, she stepped back, pulling the door wide. “Fine. But just the soup.”
He inclined his head and crossed the threshold. His entrance into the cramped space was an event. He seemed to shrink the room, his expensive cologne cutting through the scent of old paper, turmeric, and dust. Ptolemy, Eva’s tabby, uncurled from a pile of scrolls on the sofa, gave a low mrrow of interest, and trotted over to weave figure-eights around Lucien’s polished shoes.
“Traitor,” Aurora muttered, shutting the door and re-engaging the three deadbolts. The final clunk sounded more final than ever.
She turned to find him surveying the chaos. Books were stacked in teetering towers on the floor. Ancient scrolls were weighted down by mugs of cold tea on the small dining table. Post-it notes in Eva’s frantic script covered every available surface like yellow fungus.
“Charming,” Lucien remarked, his gaze lingering on a diagram of a seven-pointed ward sketched on the back of a pizza box.
“It’s research. She’s busy.” Aurora crossed her arms over her chest, suddenly conscious of her worn Cardiff University sweater and loose pyjama bottoms. “The kitchen’s through there. You can leave it on the counter.”
Instead, he moved toward the small table, clearing a space with a deftness that belied the cane he leaned on. He set the bag down and began unpacking it with a ritualistic care that was entirely his own. A large thermos of soup. A smaller container of chili oil. A package of fresh herbs. A pint of milk.
He held up the milk carton. “A presumption. Forgive me.”
The simple, mundane act of him buying her milk was a punch to the gut. It was too domestic, too thoughtful. It spoke of a memory of how she took her tea, a memory he had no right to still hold. She looked away, focusing on a dusty tome titled ‘Aethelred’s Grimoire of Uncommon Bindings.’
“Why are you really here, Luc? Eva’s a brilliant meddler, but she doesn’t have the power to summon you across London like a dog.”
The air went still. Ptolemy, sensing the shift, bolted under the sofa. Lucien finished arranging the containers on the table with painstaking precision before he finally looked at her. The amusement was gone, replaced by something darker, more honest.
“Because she said you were alone,” he said, his voice low. “And the thought of you being sick and alone… I found it… disagreeable.”
The raw admission hung between them, stark and undeniable. All the cool-headed composure she prided herself on evaporated. She could feel the ghost of his hands on her skin, the memory of his mouth on hers in the back of his town car, the way he’d looked at her the last time—like she was a puzzle he’d finally solved, right before she’d walked away.
“I’m always alone,” she said, the words coming out brittle . “That was the point of leaving. To be alone. To be safe.”
“Safe from Evan? Or safe from me?” He took a half-step closer, the space between them now charged , humming with unsaid things.
“What difference does it make?” She could feel the heat of him, the familiar scent of him wrapping around her, and it was a cruel kind of torture. “You were a complication I couldn’t afford. A… distraction. You deal in information, Luc. In secrets and lies. My life had enough of those.”
“I never lied to you, Aurora.”
“You just never told the whole truth! There’s a difference, and you know it. You’re half-demon, for God’s sake. You carry a sword in your walking stick. Your father is a duke in some hell-realm called Avaros. Those aren’t first-date conversation starters, are they?” Her voice was rising, fueled by a year of pent-up frustration and hurt. “You let me fall for you, and the whole time, you were just… other.”
“*Other *,” he repeated the word as if tasting something foul . “Is that what I am to you? A species? A category? Not the man who listened to you rant about tort law for an hour. Not the man who found you that flat above Silas’s when you had nowhere to go. Not the man who spent three days tracking down that bastard Evan just to ensure he would never, ever find you again.” His own composure was cracking, a rare and dangerous thing. A muscle twitched in his jaw. “You walked away from that. From me. You called it a distraction.”
Tears pricked at her eyes, hot and angry. “What was I supposed to do? Thank you? Sign up for a lifetime of… of whatever this is?” She gestured wildly at the room, at him, at the impossible reality of him standing in Eva’s flat holding a container of soup. “You were a beautiful, terrifying dream, Luc. But I had just woken up from a nightmare. I needed to be awake. I needed to be normal.”
He was right in front of her now, his cane forgotten, leaning against the table. He didn’t touch her, but his presence was a physical force. “And are you?” he whispered, his voice rough . “Awake? Normal?” His heterochromatic eyes searched her face, missing nothing—the fatigue, the lingering fear, the defiant set of her chin. “You deliver noodles for Yu-Fei and live in a room above a bar. You hide in your friend’s book-strewn flat when you get a cold. This is the safety you chose?”
“It’s honest!” she shot back, a tear escaping and tracing a hot path down her cheek. “It’s real!”
His hand came up then, slow, giving her every chance to pull away. He didn’t wipe the tear away. Instead, his thumb brushed against the crescent-shaped scar on her wrist, a touch so light it was almost imaginary. A touch that remembered.
“I am real, Rory,” he said, his voice barely audible . “What I feel for you is the most real thing I have known in a very long time. It is… inconvenient. Maddening. And entirely undiminished by your absence.”
She stopped breathing. The flat, the books, the cold—it all receded into a distant hum. There was only the feel of his thumb on her scar, the intensity of his gaze, and the devastating weight of his words.
“You can’t just say things like that,” she breathed, her defiance crumbling . “You can’t show up here with soup and milk and say things like that.”
“Why not?”
“Because it isn’t fair.”
“Love is rarely fair.” The word landed between them, explosive and quiet. He hadn’t said it before. Not once. Not even at the end.
Another tear fell. He finally caught that one, his thumb brushing it from her cheek. His skin was warm. The gesture was unbearably tender.
“I was scared,” she admitted, the truth torn from her finally . It was the thing she had never said, the core of it all. “I was so scared of what I felt for you. It was too much. Too soon. After everything…”
“I know,” he murmured, his hand moving to cup her jaw, his fingers tangling in the hair at the nape of her neck. “I have always known.”
He bent his head, his forehead resting against hers. Their breath mingled, a shared rhythm in the silent, cluttered room. The past year dissolved. There was no before, no after. There was only this precipice.
“Tell me to leave,” he whispered against her skin, his voice thick with a hope he was trying to dam. “Tell me, and I will walk out that door and you will never see me again. You have only to say the word.”
Aurora closed her eyes. She saw the lonely flat above the bar, the endless deliveries, the life of safe, quiet solitude. She felt the warmth of his hand, the solid reality of him. The terrifying, wonderful, beautiful complication.
Her hands came up, not to push him away, but to clutch the lapels of his impeccable charcoal suit, wrinkling the fine fabric, holding on.
She didn’t say a word.