AI The last deadbolt slid, and the door opened on the face she’d trained herself to forget.
Lucien filled the doorway in rain-dotted wool, collar darkened, slicked blond hair shoved back with the heel of his hand. One eye burned amber, the other a dark, bottomless black that reflected the yellow stairwell bulb. He stood without the cane he never left behind and held it under one arm, white ivory handle stark against the charcoal of his suit.
Rory’s fingers stayed on the doorframe. Heat from the curry house below curled up the stairwell, turmeric and cumin rising with the damp.
“You don’t live here,” she let out .
“I never have.” His mouth tipped like it wanted to play charming. It didn’t make it that far. “Bonsoir, Rory.”
Her name from his mouth scraped through her chest and found the soft places she kept layered. Ptolemy threaded around her legs and eyed the visitor with the suspicion of a king on a trespasser’s throne. The tabby’s tail flicked once and fatally judged.
“Eva’s asleep,” Rory kept her body in the gap. “And this door has three deadbolts for a reason.”
“I counted them.” He lifted his cane a fraction, a useless gesture of harmlessness that fooled no one. The cuff of his right sleeve had torn. A fine line of red traced along the tendons of his wrist, shallow but insistent. His fingers trembled like he’d carried the city on his palm.
Ptolemy’s ears flattened at the scent of blood.
“You look like trouble,” Rory moved none .
“I prefer profitable inconvenience.”
“You stole from me.”
“You had already decided I did.”
She swallowed the old argument as if it had teeth. The memory of Silas’s ledger slashed across her thoughts. The book had gone missing after a night spent with the Frenchman and too much Glenfiddich. In the morning she’d found his coat draped over her chair and the space beside her cold. She had found the ledger three days later in a pawn shop on Mare Street with a Latin joke scrawled inside the cover in a hand that was not his. She had accused him anyway and worn the bruise of it.
Rain ticked off the iron fire escape. The cold crept in through the stairwell and snagged on her bare ankles.
“I need your help,” he let out with his shoulder tipped against the frame like the world had slanted. “I would not come if I had another door.”
Ptolemy leaped up to the hall table and knocked a drift of envelopes off with the disdain of a god. One slid, caught the door edge, and folded itself in half as if bowing to fate .
Rory stepped back and gave an inch. It felt like a mile. “Shoes off.”
“I bleed on your doormat or your floor.”
“There are rags next to the sink,” she let the door swing open the rest of the way and reached down to drop a towel on the tile by his feet. “Use those.”
“Always the hostess.”
“Always the one cleaning up after you.”
He kicked out of brogues that should have belonged to a banker and crossed the threshold. The three deadbolts clunked into place behind him. He held himself straight, but the straightness lived like it cost.
“You want tea or disinfectant first.”
“Tea sounded like confession when you asked it.”
“Tea sounds like boiling water,” she moved past him toward the galley kitchen, Ptolemy astride the path, tail high like a banner. “Sit. Don’t touch Eva’s notes. She will eat your fingers.”
He scanned the chaos. Books piled into leaning towers. Scrolls tied with red thread. A map of London, older than both of them, thumbtacked over a corkboard, lines of scribble running along arterial streets like veins. Here and there, a cracked-spine paperback romance jostled for space with occult treatises. The tabby took his place on a stack of post marked envelopes and licked one paw with grave purpose.
“A charming shrine,” Lucien propped his cane in the corner and loosened his tie one-handed. The cuff of the torn sleeve peeled back and stuck. His breath hitched. “To what god does she pray.”
“To knowing things before anyone else.” The kettle clicked on. She pulled a first aid kit from beneath a tottering pile of photocopied manuscripts and thunked it down. “Sit.”
He slid himself onto the only patch of sofa without annotations. His palm turned upward without drama. The cut had etched a thin smile into him.
She took his wrist and he didn’t pull away. His skin ran warm, almost fever-touched; his pulse against her fingers thudded. He watched her work the antiseptic cotton along the gash. He didn’t flinch even when it stung.
“You were always neat with your messes,” she pressed a butterfly strip across the edges. “This doesn’t look like yours.”
“It belongs to a door that refused to open.” His laugh cut itself short. “It was unwilling to be reasonable.”
“You try talking to it in French.”
“I tried swearing at it in Avarosi. It did not appreciate poetry.”
One corner of her mouth twitched before she strangled the smile. The patch of quiet between them filled with the kettle building and Ptolemy’s low purr and the city groaning under rain.
“You wore that suit the night we met,” she wiped her hands on a towel and tossed it in the sink.
“You remember my suit.”
“I don’t forget the armour on an invader.”
He lifted his gaze and the mismatched irises fixed on her face. Up close, the black eye held no iris at all, just a storm swallow of night, while the amber shimmered with a heat that did not belong to this damp city. “And you came with a tray of dumplings and a map in your head of where I hid every gun.”
“Yu-Fei overstuffed the wontons that night.”
“They defeated two men before we finished our argument.”
“You walked out before we finished anything.”
He shifted and the white of his cuff picked up a smudge of iodine. “I walked out so you would not watch me do what I had to do.”
“You flatter yourself if you think I watch you.” She turned to the kettle as it shrieked. “Black?”
“Always.”
She poured, steam rising, and the smell of tea cut through turmeric and city damp. He glanced at her wrist when she set his mug down and the crescent scar lit pale under the bulb. Her sleeve had ridden up. For a beat, the air went still. His fingers hovered near the cup and not quite near her .
“That from your childhood,” he kept it like a question and not a trespass.
“It is from a bicycle. A fence did not move.” She tucked her wrist under her sleeve.
“You tell every man that story.”
“You think every man asks.” She blew across her tea. “Evan never liked bicycles.”
The name dropped and rolled like a loose coin would on floorboards. Lucien’s jaw set. He wrapped both hands around the mug as if it steadied him.
“Evan liked the feeling of owning doors,” he let out, not looking at her . “Owning rooms. Owning the air inside them.”
“You’re not better just because your suit fits,” Rory sipped and placed her cup on a book requiring a coaster. She ignored its ghostly complaint. “Why are you here.”
“I took something that should not sit anywhere near a telephone.” He glanced toward Eva’s desk without letting his body follow. “It belonged to a man who whispered to it like it was a lover. He used it to count debts that did not exist until he breathed on them.”
“You finally stole something from the right person.”
“It started speaking my name in a voice like bees in a jar.”
“Stop bringing cursed objects to my friends’ flats.”
“I did not bring it here.” He met her eyes over the rim of the mug. “I left it three doors down in a bag inside another bag inside a bin. Tell Eva to burn the bins on this street next week.”
Ptolemy rolled onto his side and offered his belly with a look that promised blood should either of them try. Lucien reached and then withdrew, reading the warning.
“You could have gone to your friends,” Rory leaned against the counter with her hips, a line of chalk along one thigh where she had brushed a stack of spell circles. “You’ve got them. Men who fight for you. Women who do not ask how you got your money.”
“I have clients,” his mouth twitched again, but not upward. “I have fewer friends than you think. And none of them open doors with three deadbolts.”
“You think that means safety.”
“I think it means intention.”
She drained half her tea and let the heat steady the tremor she didn’t want him to notice. “Last time you asked for help, I lost a job.”
He reached for his tie and unravelled it, the movement economical, his eyes not leaving her face. “Last time I asked for help, you kissed me and then told me to find the door.”
“That was after you put me between Silas and a man with a tattoo that moved.”
“You stepped between them before I could,” he set the tie aside, rolled his shoulders, a suggestion of the thing beneath the suit. “You were faster.”
“You used me.”
“I relied on you.”
“You speak four languages and you twist every one to suit your line.” She pushed off the counter and stepped toward him because turning away would grant him ground. “Say it plain.”
His throat moved. He set his cup on the rug, reckless. Ptolemy made a sound that implied judgement. Lucien stood, leaving the cane alone in the corner, and stepped into the small space that smelled like damp paper and tea and something that might have been smoke. He stopped with his knees almost brushing hers and tilted his head enough that his breath found her cheek.
“I wanted you to walk away from me so you would not learn what I am when people call in debts.” His voice for once carried no velvet on it. “I wanted you both far and next to my hand.”
“That’s not plain.” Her mouth pulled tight. “Plain is: I left because I did not know where I ended around you.”
His eyes lowered to her mouth and then lifted, not because he was noble, but because he understood games played too early ruined everything. “You left because I let you.”
“That too.” She glanced past him at the cane, at the wall, at the notes everywhere she had pretended could fill the time she hadn’t called him. “Did you come here to bleed on my floor and confess like a teenager.”
“I came because there is a ledger in this room that can tell me the names of men who think they own me. And because you are the only person I know who reads between lines that are not there.”
She cocked a hip and let a smirk crack through her held face for one half second. “Flattery loosened zero bolts.”
“Then consider this,” he lifted his hand and spread his fingers as if offering a card . The mark on his wrist shone, clean now. Scarlet had dried into a thin seam. “I chose this door because when you yelled at me on Mare Street, you did it with your feet planted and your hands open. People who leave keep their hands in their pockets.”
“You don’t deserve my hands.” Her words rasped and landed heavy, but her fingers lifted anyway and touched the edge of his knuckles. “You don’t get to ask.”
“I am not asking for forever,” his breath raked. “I am asking for tonight.”
“You think you’ll get me to translate a rune and then let yourself out at dawn.”
“I think you will translate the rune because it is ugly and you hate ugly things touching London. And I think I will sleep on this sofa if your cat allows it.”
“The cat likes you less than I do.”
“The cat is wise.”
Ptolemy sneezed as if blessing the declaration .
She moved around him to the desk and parted a sea of notes with her hands. “Describe the rune.”
He closed the small distance she had just created, standing behind but not crowding. The heat of him reached along her spine and lay there like a hand. His voice traced the shapes in the air, words he shouldn’t have known if he had kept to the safer sides of his business. Her hand found the rubbings of a sigil Eva had annotated last week and slid it free.
“This,” she held the paper up so he could see.
His face hardened and softened at once. “Yes.”
“It’s not a debt rune.” She set it down between maps. “It’s a leash.”
He stayed very still. “On whom.”
“You,” her mouth thinned. “Anyone born split between this and the other place.”
He didn’t reach for her then. He reached for the edge of the paper and pinched it and did not look at her while his jaw worked. “Burn it.”
“After we copy it six times.” She flicked on a lamp. “And after you tell me how you got crosswise with a man who whispers to books.”
“I touched the wrong door.”
“You keep touching wrong doors.”
“I am trying to learn.”
She snorted and pulled the notebook closer. “Spell it out.”
He didn’t speak for a breath. Then, finally, he let something slide off his shoulders. Not apology. Not something so clean. He let weariness fall and it left a man under the suit who had run too many stairs. “I have missed you.”
“No, you missed the way I solve things.”
“That also,” and a half-smile that had cut too many throats tried for honest and almost made it. “But I missed you laughing when I pretend British tea is real.”
She didn’t look at him. She kept her pen moving, the lines of the rune repeating themselves under her hand until they imprinted. “It’s not pretending if you drink it.”
“I drink it for company.”
“You drink it because your mother raised you right.”
“That, and because in Marseille the coffee could fight, and your tea does not throw punches.”
Her hand hesitated, not because of Marseille, but because of the way he said mother. Then she started it moving again and kept her tongue even. “You’re bleeding again.”
He glanced down. A thin line had seeped along the edge of the butterfly strip. He swore in something that sounded old and leaned back on his heels. “It will hold.”
“Sit,” she touched his elbow and the command in her palm landed in both of them. He sank back onto the sofa and watched her from under lashes that belonged in an oil painting. Ptolemy took that as invitation and leapt onto his lap and dug in. Lucien didn’t move, took the claws like penance.
“Do you always bring trouble with you,” Rory leaned in the doorway and studied the two of them, man in a suit bleeding on a cat hair sofa while the universe scribbled around him.
He tipped his head back on the arm and looked over at her with those mismatched eyes that had moved through too much darkness and liked it anyway. “Only to doors that will open.”
She held his gaze a long beat until the kettle ticked as it cooled and the rain eased and the smell of curry downstairs shifted as someone opened a window. The flat, for all its chaos, wrapped round them like a closed book.
“Fine,” she pulled one of Eva’s stools over and planted it in front of him and sat. “We work. You sleep on the sofa. In the morning, you fix whatever this is without asking me to like you for it.”
“I do not expect to be liked.”
“Liar.”
He let out an exhale that was not quite a laugh . “Habit.”
“Lose it.”
He lifted a hand, palm out, a mock oath. “Only the truth.”
“You’re insufferable when you perform.”
“You prefer me honest and ugly.”
“Ugly suits you.”
His eyes bounced to her mouth again. He didn’t flinch from it this time. “Come closer, then.”
“In your dreams.”
“Tonight,” he tapped his temple. “And if the cat spares me, tomorrow morning.”
Ptolemy yawned loud enough to be taken as a verdict.
Rory shifted the stool an inch nearer and placed both hands on her knees where he could see they were steady. “Start from the door that cut you. Don’t dress it up. If you hedge, I lock you out and throw the cane after you.”
He leaned forward, forearms braced on his thighs, the space between them the width of a breath, the loose tie draped over his open collar like a question. “Once upon a night on Brick Lane—”
“Don’t.”
He caved, the smirk dying. “A man with no shadow opened a book and it moved my name across the page.” He swallowed and tilted his chin down like he could hide the tremble in his throat. “And I thought of you.”
She didn’t answer. Her hand rose without permission and hovered over his cheek. He didn’t lean into it. He waited, and the waiting felt like the only honest thing he’d done all week.
Her palm settled, warm to warm, stopped there, and then she drew back to her stool and the notebook and the work.
“Fine,” she breathed out like she’d been holding it the whole time. “Let’s ruin someone’s day.”