AI Three deadbolts. Rory remembered when Eva had installed them, laughing about overkill. Now she turned all three before bed like breathing.
The knock came at half ten, two sharp raps followed by a pause, then a third. Not Eva's rhythm. Not the landlord's either, who hammered like he wanted the door off its hinges.
She pressed her eye to the peephole.
Lucien Moreau stood on the landing in a tailored charcoal suit, his ivory-handled cane hooked over one forearm, his platinum blond hair slicked back with the kind of precision that suggested he'd come from somewhere important. Or wanted her to think so. His mismatched eyes, one amber, one black, caught the hallway's fluorescent light and threw it back wrong.
She hadn't seen him in six weeks. Not since the night at the Rotherhithe warehouse, when he'd pulled her out of a collapsing ward circle with one hand and straightened his tie with the other, then vanished into the back of a black car without a word. No call. No message through the usual channels. Nothing.
Rory slid back the first bolt. Then the second. She left the chain on and cracked the door four inches.
"No."
"Bonsoir to you as well."
"Whatever it is, no."
"You haven't heard what it is."
"Don't need to. Last time I heard you out, I spent three days pulling glass out of my hair."
His mouth twitched. Not quite a smile. The scar that ran along his jaw, the one he never explained, caught shadow and disappeared again.
"I brought wine."
He lifted a bottle into view. Something French, dark glass, no label she recognised. Rory stared at it, then at him, then at the bottle again.
"It's half ten on a Tuesday."
"The wine doesn't know that."
Ptolemy threaded between her ankles, pressing his warm tabby weight against her shins, and let out a low chirp directed at the gap in the door. Traitor. The cat had always liked Lucien, which Rory considered a serious character flaw in an otherwise decent animal.
She closed the door. Undid the chain. Opened it again.
Lucien stepped inside with the careful economy of someone used to navigating spaces that weren't his own. His gaze swept the flat in a single pass, cataloguing exits, changes, threats. Old habit. The cane's ferrule clicked once against the threshold, then went silent on the carpet.
Eva's flat hadn't improved since his last visit. Books colonised every horizontal surface, some stacked in towers that defied physics, others splayed open and pinned with coffee mugs. Scrolls in languages Rory couldn't read, and a few she could, spilled from a milk crate by the sofa. Research notes papered one wall in overlapping layers, connected by red string and drawing pins that left the plaster looking like it had survived a shotgun blast. The smell of turmeric from the curry house below seeped through the floorboards, thick and permanent, mixing with old paper and cat.
Lucien set the wine on the kitchen counter, beside a stack of Eva's photocopied manuscripts and a bowl of Ptolemy's biscuits.
"Where's the sommelier?"
"Eva's in Edinburgh. Conference." Rory folded her arms. "How'd you know she wasn't here?"
"I didn't."
"Liar."
He turned to face her, and the full weight of his attention landed like a hand pressed to her sternum. That was the trouble with Lucien. He rationed his focus, doled it out in glances and half-looks, so that when he gave it all at once it felt like standing too close to a fire .
"I came because I need your help. Anything beyond that is incidental."
"Incidental." She tasted the word . Bitter. "Right."
Rory pulled two mismatched glasses from the drying rack, a proper wine glass and a Simpsons mug with a chipped handle. She set the mug in front of him.
"Guest of honour."
His lip twitched again. He uncorked the wine with a penknife he produced from somewhere inside his jacket, poured both servings with the steady hand of a surgeon, and slid the glass toward her. Red. Something earthy that smelled like rain-soaked stone and black cherry.
Neither of them drank.
"Six weeks," Rory said.
"I'm aware."
"You pulled me out of that circle. My ribs cracked. I couldn't breathe for two days. And you just, what, got in your little car and drove into the night like bloody Batman?"
"I don't drive. Matthias drives."
"That's what you're going with."
He set both hands on the counter, the cane leaning against his hip. Without its support his posture shifted, something human leaking through the armour of his suit. He looked tired. Not the kind of tired that sleep fixed.
"I left because staying would have been worse."
"For who?"
"Both of us."
Ptolemy jumped onto the counter between them, sat on a stack of Eva's notes about Sumerian binding rites, and began cleaning his paw with aggressive indifference. Rory scratched behind his ear without looking at him.
"You said you needed help."
"I do."
"Then talk. You've got until I finish this glass."
She picked it up. Took a sip. The wine was obscene, layers of flavour folding over each other, the kind of bottle that cost more than her monthly delivery wages at the Golden Empress.
Lucien watched her drink with an expression she couldn't quite decode . Satisfaction, maybe. Or hunger. With him, those lived in the same neighbourhood.
"There's a ledger," he said. "Cambion trade records from the early 1800s. It surfaced at a private auction in Mayfair three days ago. Someone bought it before my bid cleared."
"And you want it back."
"It was never theirs to sell."
"Whose was it?"
"My father's."
The word sat between them like a stone dropped in still water. Lucien never mentioned his father. Not once in the eight months Rory had known him, not through all the late-night debriefs and back-alley negotiations and that one terrible evening in a Hackney safe house when they'd shared a bottle worse than this one and he'd almost, almost told her something real before pulling back behind his smile like a door clicking shut.
"Your father. From Avaros."
"The same."
"And you're telling me this because..."
"Because the person who bought it knows what it contains. Names. Lineages. Every half-blood born to a demon of that realm for two centuries." He paused. "Including mine."
Rory set her glass down. The wine's aftertaste turned sour on her tongue.
"Someone's building a list."
"Someone has a list. The question is what they intend to do with it."
"And you came to me, not your network of very scary fixers and informants, because..."
"Because the buyer's name is Hargrove. Philippa Hargrove."
The name landed. Rory felt her spine go rigid.
"Eva's Hargrove? The one who funded her department?"
"The one who tried to recruit you last spring, if memory serves."
It served. Philippa Hargrove, sharp-boned and silver-haired, with a handshake like a trap closing. She'd cornered Rory after a talk at SOAS, offered her a research position that paid four times the Golden Empress gig. Rory had said no because the woman's smile never reached her eyes and because Eva had gone pale at the mention of her name.
"You need someone she already knows."
"I need someone she underestimated."
Rory picked up her glass again. Drank. Set it down.
"And the six weeks of silence ? Where does that fit?"
Lucien lifted the Simpsons mug. Turned it in his hands. Homer's faded face grinned up at him from the ceramic.
"I stayed away because the last time we were in a room together, I wanted to do something unwise."
"Unwise."
"Deeply."
"Could you be more specific, or is vague innuendo your love language?"
He set the mug down and stepped around the counter. One step. Two. Close enough that she could smell his cologne under the wine, something sharp and resinous, like juniper burned over coals. Close enough that the black eye and the amber eye resolved into their own separate gravities, each pulling a different direction.
"I wanted to stay," he said. "That night. I wanted to carry you to the car and take you somewhere safe and sit beside you until you could breathe again. And then I wanted to do things that had nothing to do with safety."
Rory's pulse kicked against the scar on her left wrist. The crescent moon shape, small and pale and stupid, from a childhood fall that shouldn't have left a mark but did.
"So you left."
"So I left."
"Because that's what you do. You assess the risk, you run the numbers, and you remove yourself from the equation."
"Yes."
"And now you're back. Standing in my kitchen. At half ten on a Tuesday. With wine."
"Yes."
"Because you need me."
"Because I need you." Something shifted in his voice. A crack in the lacquer. "In every sense that phrase can hold."
Ptolemy meowed, bored by the lack of attention, and knocked a scroll off the counter. It hit the floor and unrolled across the carpet, revealing a dense lattice of Aramaic script. Neither of them looked at it.
"Here's what's going to happen," Rory said. "You're going to sit on that sofa. You're going to tell me everything about Philippa Hargrove and this ledger. Names, dates, locations, the works. And when you're done, I'm going to decide if I help you."
"And the other matter?"
"What other matter?"
His gaze dropped to her mouth. Held. Lifted.
"Unwise things," he said.
"Table them."
"Indefinitely?"
"Until I've finished the bottle."
She grabbed the wine and walked to the sofa, sweeping a stack of Eva's notes onto the floor. Ptolemy pounced on them. Rory sat, tucked one leg beneath her, and poured herself a second glass with a hand that didn't shake, not quite .
Lucien followed. He lowered himself onto the opposite end of the sofa with the careful grace of a man whose body cost him something, unhooked his cane and laid it across his knees. The hidden blade inside made the faintest sound against the ivory handle, metal kissing bone.
"Start from the beginning," she said.
"Which beginning?"
"The one where you tell me the truth."
His mismatched eyes found hers, and for half a second the mask slipped entirely. Underneath was something raw, unfinished, afraid. Then he blinked and it smoothed over, not gone but tucked away, the way he tucked the blade inside the cane .
"Three months ago," he said, "a man walked into a pub in Marseille and asked the barman about my mother."
Rory's hand tightened on the glass. Ptolemy settled between them on the sofa, a warm rumbling barrier, and Lucien began to talk.
He got four sentences in before the lights went out.
Not the flat's lights. Not the landing. Every light on Brick Lane, above and below, extinguished at once, plunging the curry house, the street, the stairwell, and the flat into a darkness so complete Rory couldn't see the wine in her hand.
Ptolemy hissed.
Something scratched at the window.