AI Aurora eased the top deadbolt back, then the second, then the third. Each click landed in the small hallway like a metronome. The chain stayed on.
The curry house below breathed cumin and hot oil up through the floorboards. Ptolemy sat on the shoe rack with his tail wrapped neat, watching her hands.
A shadow filled the frosted glass panel in the door.
Aurora leaned in and peered through the gap by the frame. A sliver of face. Pale hair. A jaw that belonged in a gallery, not on Brick Lane.
Her throat tightened.
She kept her voice low, so it didn’t carry down the stairwell.
“Lucien.”
On the other side, the air shifted. She pictured that half-smile he used when he wanted a room to bend around him.
“Rory.”
She held the chain like it might bite.
“You don’t knock now?”
His voice slid through the crack as if the door had already decided to open for him.
“I knocked. Your neighbour shouted something creative. I chose to stop.”
Aurora looked back at the living room—books in leaning towers, scrolls unfurled like shed skins, Eva’s notes taped to every surface. The sofa had a blanket thrown over it, and her courier jacket lay on the armrest where she’d dropped it. She’d meant to be gone an hour ago.
“You can’t be here,” she answered. “Not like this.”
“I came like a man with manners and an intact heart. You bolted the door anyway.”
Ptolemy hopped down and rubbed his cheek against Aurora’s ankle. His purr vibrated through the wood.
Aurora tightened her grip on the chain.
“What do you want, Luc?”
A beat, then his breath fogged the gap by the hinge.
“Five minutes.”
“That’s what you asked for last time.” Her eyes stung; she blinked it away and tasted dust. “And you took much more.”
He didn’t rush to fill the silence . That always unsettled her, how he could stand in the pause and look comfortable .
“I don’t have the luxury of more than five,” his voice went on . “Not tonight.”
Aurora’s pulse tapped at her wrist. The crescent scar there flashed white against her skin as her fingers flexed.
“You know Eva isn’t here.”
“I know.” A soft scrape sounded, cane tip against concrete. “I didn’t come for Eva.”
Aurora’s mouth went dry. The hallway felt too narrow, the door too close, her skin too exposed.
“Then turn around.”
“I can’t.”
“That sounds like a you problem.”
“It became a you problem the moment you took that ledger from Blackfriars and didn’t burn it.”
Her stomach dropped. She pictured the ledger under Eva’s table, wrapped in a tea towel like it could be domesticated. Ink that looked like normal ink until it didn’t . Pages that made her palms itch.
Aurora let out a slow breath through her nose.
“You followed me.”
“I kept you alive.”
“Don’t dress it up.”
On the other side, Lucien’s silhouette shifted closer to the frosted pane. The glass blurred his features, made him look like any man in the stairwell, any man who could have come for a cup of sugar. His voice ruined that illusion .
“I didn’t come to argue about my taste in methods.”
Aurora’s laugh came out sharp.
“Oh, you didn’t come to argue. That’s generous of you.”
Ptolemy bumped his head into her shin again, impatient. Aurora bent and scooped him up, more for the weight in her arms than for the cat’s comfort. His warmth steadied her.
She slid the chain off and opened the door a handspan.
Lucien stood on the landing in a charcoal suit that looked pressed by someone who feared creases more than death. Rain darkened the shoulders. His hair, slicked back, held its shape anyway. One eye glowed amber in the dim, the other swallowed the light.
His ivory-handled cane rested under his palm like a promise.
He took in the clutter behind her—books, papers, the narrow corridor spilling into the cramped room—and then his gaze found her face and stayed there.
“You cut your hair,” he noted.
Aurora’s fingers tightened around Ptolemy.
“It grew. I trimmed it. London has scissors.”
His mouth twitched, and for a second she saw the version of him that had leaned over her shoulder in a back room, pointing at a map with a fingertip, their bodies too close for the excuse of strategy.
“Still sharp,” he replied.
“Still a bastard.”
His eyes didn’t blink. The amber one held heat; the black one held a depth that made her feel weighed and measured .
“You let me in,” he replied, like she’d already given him something.
She shifted her stance in the doorway, blocking most of it with her body.
“I let the cat breathe. That’s all.”
Ptolemy stared at Lucien with the flat stare of a creature unimpressed by charm . Then he yawned, displaying teeth like small knives, and went limp in Aurora’s arms.
Lucien’s gaze dropped to the cat, then back to Aurora. His voice softened, not sweet, not tender—focused.
“There are people looking for you.”
Aurora kept her face still. Her heart didn’t cooperate.
“You always show up with a storm in your pocket.”
“This storm has names.”
“Give me one.”
Lucien’s hand tightened on the cane, knuckles paling.
“Alisdair Quinn.”
Aurora’s throat closed around the name. She tasted the warehouse air from months ago—metal, mould, old blood. Quinn’s men had smiles like broken glass.
“Quinn doesn’t come to Brick Lane,” she managed. “He comes with vans.”
“Then he sent someone with feet,” Lucien replied. “Two of them. They stood across the street from your restaurant this afternoon and watched the door for three hours.”
Aurora’s mind flicked to Golden Empress: Yu-Fei’s cutting board, the wok flame, her delivery bag slung over her shoulder. The bell over the restaurant door. The feeling of being watched, dismissed as city paranoia.
“I didn’t see them,” she murmured.
“You weren’t meant to.”
She held the door narrower again, as if she could squeeze danger out by limiting the space.
“So you tracked me. Watched me. And now you’ve come up the stairs like a stray with a sob story.”
Lucien’s gaze didn’t flinch.
“I came because you stopped answering your phone.”
Aurora’s mouth tightened.
“I changed the number.”
“I know.”
“Of course you do.”
He leaned slightly , as if the hallway belonged to him.
“Rory.”
Her name in his accent had always felt like a hand under her chin . It did now, too, and she hated that it still worked on her body even when her mind bared its teeth.
“What?” Her voice came out thin.
“I didn’t come to force my way into your life,” he replied. “I came to keep you from being pulled out of it.”
Aurora stared at his suit collar, at the crisp edge where rainwater clung. She didn’t look at his mouth. She couldn’t, not if she wanted to keep the door between them.
“You walked away,” she reminded him.
He didn’t dodge it.
“You told me to.”
“I told you to tell me the truth,” she snapped. “You gave me a story with lace on it and left.”
His jaw flexed.
“The truth wasn’t safe for you.”
“I’m not a child.”
“No.” His eyes held her. “You weren’t, and that was the problem.”
Heat crawled up Aurora’s neck. She hated the way his words dragged up nights she’d filed away: his hand at the small of her back guiding her through a crowded club, his breath at her ear when he spoke a language she didn’t know, the taste of smoke on his mouth when she kissed him as if she could drown out the rest of the world.
She shifted Ptolemy to one arm and planted her free hand against the doorframe.
“You don’t get to come here and talk like you know me.”
Lucien’s cane tip clicked once on the landing, small and controlled.
“I knew you well enough to know you’d take the ledger.”
Aurora’s laugh turned brittle.
“I took it because it was going to get someone killed.”
“You took it because you couldn’t leave it,” Lucien shot back. “You don’t walk past a burning house.”
Aurora’s nostrils flared.
“And you don’t either. So why’d you leave me outside it?”
Lucien’s shoulders rose with a breath, then fell. He looked past her into the flat, to the mess of research, to Eva’s scrawled charts on the wall.
“You’ve been living inside the fire,” he replied. “You didn’t notice the smoke until it stained your lungs.”
Aurora swallowed. Her wrist scar itched as if it remembered heat.
She moved the door a fraction wider. The landing light fell across Lucien’s cheekbones, picked out the edge of a bruise near his temple that the rain hadn’t washed away. New. Purple blooming under skin.
Her voice dropped.
“Who hit you?”
Lucien’s mouth curved, but it didn’t reach his eyes.
“A man who thought pain made him persuasive.”
Aurora shifted forward without meaning to. Ptolemy wriggled, then settled again with a grumpy huff.
“You got into it,” she murmured. “You came straight here after.”
“I came straight here,” he agreed, and something passed over his face—exhaustion, hunger, the kind that came from running too hard for too long.
Aurora’s fingers loosened on the edge of the door.
“You can’t bring Quinn to Eva’s doorstep.”
“I didn’t.” Lucien angled his head, listening. The stairwell held only distant traffic and the curry house’s extractor fan. “I shook them.”
“You shook them,” she echoed , then the anger found a new seam. “And you shook me, too.”
Lucien’s gaze returned to hers, steady as a blade held flat.
“You shut the door on me,” he replied.
“I shut the door because you didn’t trust me with the truth.”
A pause. The hallway seemed to shrink around them. Lucien’s eyes dropped to her left wrist where the crescent scar caught the light between the sleeve of her jumper and her skin.
“You hurt yourself when you were small,” he murmured, voice quiet .
Aurora’s hand moved on instinct, tugging the sleeve down.
“Don’t.”
His gaze lifted back to her face.
“You kept that scar,” he replied, and the words carried the weight of all the things she’d kept—old bruises, old fear, old names that still tasted wrong . “You kept everything.”
Aurora’s grip on the door slackened further. She hated how he saw her, how he remembered details no one else held onto. She hated that part of her wanted him to step inside so she could slam the world out and deal with him in private.
“You don’t get to talk about what I keep.” She forced air into her lungs. “You left.”
Lucien’s hand slid up the cane until his thumb rested on the ivory handle. For a second she pictured the blade hidden inside, slim and sure.
“I left because I owed you less danger than I carried,” he replied. “I failed.”
Aurora’s chest tightened. Ptolemy’s purr vibrated against her ribs like a warning.
She looked down the stairwell. No footsteps . No voices. Only the hum of London, indifferent.
Aurora opened the door wide enough to let him pass if he dared.
Lucien didn’t move. He stood there as if he waited for a verdict.
Aurora’s voice came out rough.
“Five minutes,” she repeated. “That’s what you asked.”
Lucien’s eyes didn’t leave her.
“I’ll take whatever you give.”
Aurora stepped back into the flat, the mess of Eva’s work swallowing her. Ptolemy wriggled out of her arms and padded away with his tail up, as if he owned the place.
Lucien crossed the threshold. Rainwater darkened the worn rug by the door. He paused, then glanced over his shoulder at the landing before he nudged the door shut with the tip of his cane.
The click of the latch sounded too loud.
Aurora kept her back against the kitchen counter, distance between them carved out by stacks of books and a leaning tower of folders. Lucien stood near the door as if he respected the boundary, or as if he measured the quickest way out.
His gaze roamed the room—Eva’s cramped chaos, the handwritten sigils in the margins of textbooks, the kettle with a crust of limescale, the teacups mismatched.
“You stayed with Eva,” he noted.
Aurora’s mouth twisted.
“I don’t have a flat full of suits to go back to.”
His eyes flicked to her courier jacket on the sofa arm.
“You worked tonight.”
“I worked every night.” She pushed off the counter and walked closer, stopping just out of reach. “People eat. Bills don’t care about Quinn.”
Lucien’s gaze dropped to her hands, empty now. He looked as if he remembered them on his chest, fingers curled in his shirt.
“I brought you something,” he replied.
Aurora’s eyes narrowed .
“If it’s another lie, keep it.”
Lucien slipped his free hand inside his suit jacket. The motion stayed smooth, practiced, the sort that could have pulled a gun or a passport or a folded confession.
Aurora’s pulse jumped, and she held his gaze like a dare.
He drew out a small, battered notebook, corners soft from use. He held it out, palm up, not stepping closer.
Aurora stared at it.
“That’s not yours,” she whispered.
Lucien’s amber eye caught the room’s weak light and held it.
“No,” he replied. “It was Evan’s.”