AI The chain slid free and the door swung just enough for a sliver of the hall's yellow light to spill onto the floorboards, and there he was, standing under it like a portrait that had stepped down from its frame. Slicked-back platinum hair, charcoal coat soaked at the shoulders, the ivory-handled cane tucked under his arm catching light. One eye burned amber, the other drank the room like black glass.
"Lucien."
His smile arrived slow and precise. Not the warm thing she'd once kept in a pocket for bad mornings, but a blade of politeness honed to an edge .
"Rory," he said. "I hope you do not mind the intrusion."
Her hand tightened on the brass knob. Three deadbolts, a chain, a peephole. Security she'd practised until it felt like armour . It had stopped strangers. It had not stopped him.
"What do you want?"
"I require a sofa and the truth." He inclined his head . "Not necessarily in that order."
She should have slammed the door, let the bolts bite, let the echo of the slam be the last punctuation between them. She did not. The flat smelled of old paper and curry, the curry from the restaurant below seeping up the stairwell like a stubborn memory. Every surface wore someone else's questions—books stacked by title, notebooks with margins full of arrows and circled words.
Ptolemy, Eva's tabby, leapt from the armchair and braided between Lucien's boots, then flattened his ears and spat. Lucien crouched, unbothered.
"Hello, small tyrant," he murmured, the word soft enough that it could be private. He did not touch the cat. He did not meet her eyes.
"You knew how to get past the deadbolts," she said finally . "You always did."
"Selective forces opened them for me," he said. "It is less dramatic than it sounds, and more useful than being dramatic."
The flat felt narrower with him in the doorway, as if his presence took up more than his physical space. It was ridiculous, and she let herself be ridiculous with the weapon she had kept at hand for so long.
"You had four months' notice," she said. "You had every chance to be dramatic in Marseille, or wherever it was you disappeared to."
"You were safer, in my absence." He straightened, the cane's tip taps like an impatient metronome. "But that choice became my sentence, apparently."
Safety. The word lodged like a splinter. She could list the things he'd sworn to protect her from, the promises that had been sentences shaped into iron. She could also list the nights when she had waited on an empty sofa, listening for his boots on the stairs and instead hearing only the soft rumble of the curry house extractor. She could list the messages he had not answered, the nights her phone glowed like an accusation on the coffee table.
"No," she said, short . "You chose. You walked away."
He smiled again, a different curve, one that carried apology like currency he hadn't earned the right to spend.
"I chose the only path that gave us a chance," he said. "You have to understand, I cannot explain everything."
"That's a new tactic," she said. "Confusion, then mystique. You always had flair."
He stepped one foot into the hallway and then another, closing the gap until his coat rest brushed the threshold but the flat still held its line. Close enough that she could see the faint pale crescent scar on his left knuckle. Close enough that the scent of him—cigarette smoke threaded with something older, like metal and thyme—made her nostrils flare.
"You left me with questions and three deadbolts," she said. "You left me with Evan breathing down my neck until I left Cardiff."
He flinched at the name. A small thing, the way his shoulder dipped, but it was a confession all the same.
"Evan found you," he said. "He listened. He traded favours."
"You left me to trade favours?" Her laugh came out tight and false. "Is that the version of you who cares, Lucien? Or the one who uses 'favours' like bridesmaids use postcards?"
He looked at her then, and for a moment the careful clarity in his features softened. The amber eye, the warm one, flickered like an ember.
"I tried to remove him from your orbit," he said. "I underestimated how anchored he was."
"And you underestimated me," she said, the words a slow blade. "You think you can walk back into my life with your suits and charming French and I'm supposed to open the book where you left off? No, Lucien. You don't get bookmarks."
He laughed, small and sharp.
"Bookmarks are sentimental," he said. "I prefer clean conclusions. Unfortunately, life is messy."
"Life and you are synonyms then."
He cocked his head, precisely amused.
"You have not forgiven me."
"I haven't had the time," she said. "Time has been used by other things. Work. Avoiding friends who ask too many questions. Staring at the ceiling. Falling asleep and waking up again."
Silence, not the comfortable sort, stretched like elastic between them. Ptolemy padded over and wound himself around her ankle, asserting a kind of ownership that was answer enough to a great deal of things.
Lucien looked beyond her, past the stacks of books, to the kitchen where a mug still carried the ghost of tea. "You look well on neglect," he observed.
She could have struck him then, told him everything she'd wanted to say in a single motion—how his absence had stung like a live wire, how she had learned to brace for loneliness, how she had allowed herself only measured attachments out of preservation. Instead, she let the truth slide into the room like a thin thread.
"Why are you here, really ?" she asked. "Don't be poetic. Don't be theatrical. Why knock on my door when I have no use for people who vanish?"
He closed his eyes for a breath and when he opened them the blackness in one seemed deeper, a depth that did not belong to any human.
"There are things in London that do not belong to London," he said. "They move between cracks and prefer tidy little ecosystems. They have noticed you."
She was not used to the words fitting together with urgency. He rarely spoke bluntly, but when he did, the effect was like a door slamming. She felt the air change.
"Noticed me how?" she asked.
"With teeth." He said the word without the drama, and the flat filled with an invisible weight . "I might have known sooner, had I not been an idiot and cut my channels. I am trying to undo the chaos I left behind."
"Chaos." She tasted the irony. "You left me chaos. You left me with a broken lock and a history."
"I left you with an absence I thought would shield you. I was wrong." He looked at the cane, then back at her. He set it against the shoe rack and it clinked. "There is someone looking for me, and they will not stop because I have a fondness for quiet women and cramped flats."
He stepped fully inside then, deliberate, as if entering a territory where he had a right . Fear flicked in her like a candle. The chain creaked, a reminder of everything she had used to keep the world at bay. She could call out. She could lock him out. Instead she closed the distance to take a plate off the table, a small defiant act of domesticity.
"Why here?" she asked. "Why Eva's flat?"
"You are the one who reads the margins," he said. "You are the one who notices the wrong things in the right books. Whoever hunts me does not know you read the right things, they only know you were close to me. That proximity puts you at risk."
She could deny proximity until facts turned to fiction. She had kept her distance, but proximity was a flexible currency.
"How long do I have," she asked, turning the plate in her hands like it were a halo she could cradle.
"In days, perhaps hours," he said. His face, immaculate until then, tightened. "I brought you a map of possible exits."
He put a folded square of paper on the table with the gentleness of an offering. She unfolded it and the map was not a map in the tourist sense but a single page of annotations —names, narrow alleys circled in red, references to places that hummed with otherness: a warehouse in Wapping, the back rooms of Silas' bar, a market stall that sold lucky charms to men who gambled over losses.
She read the script and felt the hair at the back of her neck rise.
"Why help me?" she said.
His mouth twisted. "Because leaving you behind like that was poor taste, and poor ethics. Also because I cannot properly sleep when you are within reach of harm, and that is a selfish motive but also a truthful one."
Heat crawled up her neck. He had never been less than elegant in his selfishness. It had been part of his charm . It also wounded like a coin pressed into the skin.
Before she could retort, the hall outside erupted with the sound of rapid footsteps , the kind that belonged to men dividing up their fear with urgency.
"Lucien Moreau," a voice barked.
"Police," another shouted, not official, clipped and coarse, like someone used to blunt force rather than paperwork.
The old deadbolt on the door trembled under a shoulder, then under another. Wood groaned. Eva's front door, the one Aurora had chained against the night's small terrors, suddenly felt flimsy under the pounding .
Lucien's hand found the cane and his fingers closed around the ivory as if bracing for battle . The amber eye flared.
"Who is it?" she demanded, the plate slipping from her fingers and shivering across the tiles.
"Open up," the voice outside said. "We know you're in there, Moreau. Step away from the woman."
Lucien's jaw set. He looked at her for a heartbeat that stretched until it hurt, as if measuring whether she would run or fight, forgive or lock down like a vault .
"Do not open the door," he said. "Do not make any sound that acknowledges them. I can buy us time, but not forever."
"Who's 'them'?" she asked.
He did not answer. The door splintered like the sudden snap of a twig. The room filled with the smell of dust and the sharp tang of fear. A shape shoved through the gap. Heavy boots, a bulk that belonged to someone who had been hired to break things.
"Stay back!" The lead man swung something metallic that gleamed like judgement.
Lucien stepped forward, cane in hand like a sword's partner.
The first man shoved into the flat and sunlight—or something like sunlight, harsh and unnatural —spilled in behind him. It struck Lucien's face, and for one terrible breath his two eyes matched: one amber, one full of black that seemed to drink the light. The man's hand froze mid-swing.
"Lucien Moreau," the intruder said, as if repeating a litany , "you are under—"
The sentence died as Lucien moved, fast, an economy of motion honed by years of walking between worlds. The cane flashed, a white arc, and the intruder's arm snapped back with a sound like a branch breaking. Around them, the flat scattered into movement: books skittered, a mug toppled, Ptolemy's hiss became a scream of fur and fury.
Aurora found she was not thinking . She was reacting , catching the handlebar of the cane as it spun, feeling the pull between the man and the man who had once left her in a room full of questions. For a second their hands touched, his palm warm and callused, and the world narrowed to that contact, absurdly intimate amid the chaos.
Then a second shadow moved through the doorway, faster than the first. The intruder's eyes, however human before, had gone flat and distant. A line of salt-white marks showed along his skin, like scars on a map.
"Get them," someone outside hissed. "No witnesses."
Lucien's grip tightened on her wrist. The cane's blade would bite if he chose, and the man in the doorway drew something from his belt that glinted with a hungry light.
The door behind them banged as more bodies pressed, voices thick with either authority or malice. The flat that had been her sanctuary , lined with margins and marginalia, contracted until it felt like a throat about to close .
Lucien did not look at her then. He looked at the intruder and his eyes were no longer only Lucien's. There was a depth there that had nothing to do with charm .
"Run," he said, not as a request. The word landed with the weight of an order and the tenderness of a confession.
The second intruder lunged. The cane flashed. A plate shattered against the wall, and the smell of copper came up strong, immediate, like a promise about to be fulfilled.
The man's hand landed on Lucien's shoulder, fingers clawing. Lucien's blade-wrist moved, an elegant arc that left a red line across a forearm and a man crumpling with a curse that sounded not quite human .
Another crash from the hallway, the door splintered further, and a voice, unmistakable and low, called the name that had been a wound in her life, the name she had hoped would never cross her doorway again.
"Evan," said the voice, and the room seemed to inhale at once .