AI Three deadbolts. Rory had counted them the first time Eva showed her the flat, laughed about the paranoia of it. Now she threw each one open without thinking, her mind still half-caught in the delivery route she'd been mentally mapping for tomorrow's shift, and pulled the door wide.
Lucien Moreau stood on the landing, one hand resting on the ivory head of his cane, the other holding a bottle of wine by the neck like a man who'd strangled better things.
"Non." She started to push the door shut.
His foot, sheathed in a polished Oxford, slid into the gap. Not aggressive. Just there, the way he always was. Occupying space as though the universe had reserved it for him.
"Five minutes."
"You had five minutes in Brixton. You used them poorly."
"I used them honestly. You're confusing the two."
The smell of cumin and garlic floated up from the curry house below, thick and warm, mixing with whatever cologne he wore, something sharp and clean that cut through it like a blade through silk . Rory held the door at a precise angle, enough to see both his eyes, the amber and the black, catching the hallway's sick fluorescent light. She hated that she'd memorised which was which.
"Eva's not here."
"I know." He tilted his head . "I came for you."
Something hot and unwelcome bloomed behind her sternum. She killed it.
"Whatever you're brokering, I'm not buying."
"It's a Côtes du Rhône, not a contract."
She looked at the bottle. Looked at his face. The angles of his jaw held that particular tension she'd learned to read in the weeks they'd spent circling each other, drawn together by Eva's research and the ugly things that research had unearthed. Back then, he'd been a contact. A means to information. Then he'd been something harder to name, something that smelled like smoke in her hair after late nights poring over scrolls in this same flat, his shoulder against hers, his mismatched eyes scanning text she couldn't decipher.
Then Brixton happened.
"The cat hates you," she said.
"The cat hates everyone. He tolerates me. There's a distinction."
Ptolemy chose that moment to wind between her ankles, his tabby body a warm accusation. Traitor. The cat looked up at Lucien and blinked once, slow, and Rory could have sworn the Frenchman's mouth twitched.
She stepped back from the door. Not an invitation. A retreat, and they both knew it.
Lucien entered the flat the way he entered every room, cataloguing it. His gaze swept the towers of books on the kitchen counter, the scrolls pinned open with mugs and a broken stapler, Eva's mad constellation of research notes tacked to every available wall. He set the wine on the only clear surface, a square foot of counter near the sink, and leaned his cane against the fridge.
"You've been sleeping on the sofa."
He said it without looking at her, his attention on the rumpled blanket, the pillow still dented.
"Eva's bed. Eva's room. I'm a guest."
"You've been here four months."
"Guests can be persistent." She crossed her arms . "What do you want, Lucien?"
He turned, and the full weight of his attention settled on her. Both eyes, mismatched, unblinking. She'd seen demons, real ones, lesser things that crawled out of summoning circles and stank of sulphur, and none of them had ever pinned her the way this man did when he decided to stop performing.
"You changed your number."
"I changed a lot of things."
"Your hair's shorter."
"Observant. Is that why you came? To audit my appearance?"
He pulled out a chair from Eva's tiny dining table, the one buried under a geological layer of photocopied manuscripts, and sat without asking. His fingers laced together, elbows on knees, and the posture stripped something from him. The armour of his tailored charcoal suit suddenly looked like fabric instead of fortification.
"Brixton," he said.
"We're not doing this."
"We are. Sit."
"Don't."
"Please."
The word landed strange in his mouth, accented and angular, like he'd borrowed it from a language he didn't speak natively. She'd heard Lucien negotiate, threaten, charm , and once, memorably, talk a boggart out of a sewer grate in fluent Gaelic. She'd never heard him say please.
She sat on the arm of the sofa. Close enough to hear him, far enough to bolt.
"I should have told you what I was."
"You mean the half-demon thing? Yes, that would've been a nice opener. Somewhere between 'lovely to meet you' and 'shall we order starters.'"
"You already knew about demons. Eva's work, the underworld, none of it shocked you. But I watched your face when you saw, when I, " He stopped. His jaw worked. "I could have prepared you."
"You could have. You didn't."
Silence pooled between them. Ptolemy jumped onto the table, scattering a sheaf of notes, and settled on a stack of leather-bound journals. His purr filled the quiet like static.
Rory remembered Brixton in fragments. The warehouse, the summoning gone wrong, something with too many teeth climbing out of a crack in reality. And Lucien stepping in front of her, his cane drawn, the blade singing free of its sheath, and his face, God, his face. The bones had shifted. The amber eye had burned like a coal in a furnace while the black one swallowed light. She'd seen the thing beneath the tailored suit, the heritage he'd carried from Avaros like shrapnel under skin, and the sound she'd made, a small broken breath, had cut them both.
He'd killed the thing. Cleaned the blade on his trouser leg. Looked at her with a face that was his again, and she'd stepped back.
One step. That was all. But he'd read the whole novel in it.
"I wasn't afraid of you." Her voice came out rougher than she wanted.
"You flinched."
"I was processing."
"You left."
"I left the warehouse. I didn't leave the country."
"You changed your number," he repeated, quieter now.
The accusation in it needled her because it was fair. She'd changed her number, changed her delivery routes to avoid the streets where she might run into his network, told Eva she didn't want updates. She'd built three deadbolts of her own, invisible ones, and here he sat in the middle of her borrowed life, dismantling them with a bottle of wine and a word she'd never heard him use.
She rubbed the crescent scar on her left wrist. Old habit. Comfort and warning tangled together.
"The last man I ran from," she said, measuring each word, "I ran because he made me smaller. Every day, a little less of me. You know about Evan."
"I know."
"What I didn't tell you, what I didn't tell anyone except Eva, is that the worst part wasn't the bruises. It was that I stayed. I stayed and I made excuses and I shrank myself to fit inside his version of who I was."
Lucien's fingers tightened against each other. A muscle jumped in his cheek.
"And then there's you," she continued. "Who are the opposite of small. Who fill rooms and broker secrets and carry a demon father's blood like it's a bespoke accessory. And I don't shrink around you, Lucien. That's the problem. I expand. I take up more space. And it terrifies me because I don't know where it stops."
He stood. Slowly, the way you move near something wounded, and closed the distance between them. His hand came up and hovered near her jaw, not touching. Asking.
She didn't step back. Didn't flinch.
His thumb traced the line of her cheekbone. His skin ran warmer than it should have, a furnace banked low, and the heat soaked into her like sunlight through glass. This close, she could see the faint tracery of something beneath the skin of his temple, veins that glowed faintly amber when his control slipped. He wasn't slipping now. He was holding himself in check with a precision that must have cost him dearly, because the black eye had gone deep and liquid and the amber one flickered like a candle flame in a draught.
"I don't want you smaller," he said. "I want you unbearable."
A laugh escaped her, short and startled and real. "Unbearable."
"Monstrous. Inconvenient. Taking up every room I walk into so I can't think straight."
"You're describing a problem."
"I'm describing a woman who terrified a half-demon in a Brixton warehouse. Not with a blade. With a breath."
Her hand found his wrist. She could feel the pulse there, fast, faster than he'd ever let his voice betray. Lucien Moreau, fixer, broker, master of four languages and a blade hidden inside civility, and his heart hammered against her fingertips like something caged.
"Five months," she said. "You waited five months."
"You needed the distance."
"And if I didn't?"
His expression cracked. Hairline fracture, there and gone, but she saw the whole fault line beneath it, the months of silence , the number he must have called before she changed it, the information network that could find anyone in London and the restraint it took not to use it until now.
"Then I wasted time we didn't have." His voice dropped. "And I'm sorry."
Ptolemy yawned. A siren wailed somewhere down Brick Lane, dopplering past, and the curry house below sent up a fresh wave of spice through the floorboards.
Rory pulled his wrist down, closing the gap between his hand and her skin, and pressed her cheek into his palm. His fingers curled into her hair, shorter now, and the warmth of him spread across her scalp like fever.
"Don't lie to me again," she said against his palm. "Not by omission. Not by silence . If you're something, I want to see it."
"All of it."
"All of it."
His other hand found the small of her back and drew her upright, off the sofa arm, and for a moment they stood in the cramped flat with its three deadbolts and its chaos of arcane scholarship and its indifferent cat, breathing the same cumin-scented air.
"The wine," he murmured. "It's a good vintage."
"I don't care about the wine."
She kissed him. Or he kissed her. The distinction collapsed somewhere between intention and impact, his mouth warm and tasting of nothing but himself, no pretence, and her hand fisted the lapel of his charcoal jacket and pulled. She felt the shift under his skin, a tremor, heat spiking where her fingers gripped, and she didn't flinch, didn't step back, pressed closer.
His cane slid off the fridge and clattered to the floor.
Neither of them picked it up.
Then the phone rang, the landline Eva kept because she didn't trust mobiles, its shrill mechanical bell shattering the air like a fire alarm. Rory pulled back an inch. Lucien's hand stayed in her hair.
"Leave it."
The answering machine clicked. Eva's recorded voice, bright and rapid, told the caller to leave a message. A beat of static. Then a voice Rory had never heard before, low and guttural and speaking in a language that made the lightbulb above them flicker and Ptolemy's fur stand on end.
Lucien's face changed. Not the shift from Brixton, not the demon blood rising, but something colder . Recognition. Fear.
"That's Avaric," he said. "Old dialect. Royal court."
"What's it saying?"
His hand dropped from her hair. He crossed to the answering machine in three strides, his limp sharper without the cane, and listened. The message ran for ten more seconds, then cut to dead air. The lightbulb steadied. Ptolemy bolted under the sofa.
Lucien rewound the tape and played it again, his lips moving silently, translating. His face, when he turned back to her, had gone the colour of ash.
"It's for me," he said. "My father's dead. And something followed him out."