AI Lucien Moreau stood on Eva's threshold like a bad idea in an expensive suit.
I had the last deadbolt halfway turned when my name left his mouth and turned my spine to wire.
"Aurora."
"You lost," I said.
The tabby at my ankles fluffed to twice his usual size and hissed. Ptolemy never liked men who wore cologne that cost more than this street's rent.
Lucien braced himself on his ivory-handled cane and looked at me as if nothing we had left smouldering between us last time had caught fire. One eye, warm amber. The other, black and clear like obsidian. It was an old coin tossed against a dark well and still turning.
"This is not a social call."
"No. It never is with you." I finished the deadbolt and kept my hand on the chain. "State your business, Frenchman."
Something tight pulled near his mouth, not quite a smile . He tilted his head, considering the chain, the cat, the scrolls piled behind me like a hoarder's last stand.
"Madame Ellis in?" His voice sank into that soft place between teasing and careful. "Or do the three deadbolts mean you have finally learned?"
"Eva's out. Library run." I let the chain slide free. "You say what you need in the hall, or you show me blood."
He took a breath and stepped half into the light. The jacket hung wrong on his left side. There, under charcoal wool, a shadow bloomed darker than fine tailoring liked.
Ptolemy stopped hissing and began to growl.
"Fine," I said.
I moved, fast fingers on the chain, and swung the door wide. The smell hit first, not copper, deeper, like struck pennies under hot coals. Half-demon blood always made my throat itch.
He slid in without touching me. Air shifted with him, all spice and clean starch and the faint clink of something glass in his pocket. He looked around once, the way a man counts exits and sins.
"Nice to see you tidy as ever," I said.
"I call it curated chaos," he said.
"Of course you do."
Ptolemy stalked off with a tail like a flag of war. Lucien watched him go, took in the papers, the chalk circles on the floor, the string board Eva swore she would take down last month. A marked map of London bled fastener holes on the wall.
"Kitchen," I said. "If you bleed on anything with ink older than my mother, I will invoice you."
"Delightful." He winced as he moved .
His limp was new. The cane clicked on scuffed floorboards and he carried it like he knew its other purpose did not want daylight. He had always dressed like the word dapper had been minted for him, and even now, with blood seeping from some invisible seam, he looked like a portrait that charged an entrance fee.
In the cramped galley kitchen, I yanked the first aid box from above the kettle and dropped it on the counter. The counter protested with a rattle that let me know Eva had been using it to hide dominoes or worse. The curry house below sent up a ghost of cumin and cardamom that lived in the plaster.
"Jacket off," I said.
"Mademoiselle." He tried for an elegant shrug. It lasted until the small sound under his breath.
He handed me the jacket. His shirtsleeves were darkened near the ribs, the tailored white gone ugly with the spill. I guided him to the chair by the narrow window. No ceremony. My hands moved like I had never stopped doing this.
"You choose a fight with the wrong broker or did one of your clients get bored?" I tugged at the buttons . "Wait. Do not answer. I do not care."
"You care enough to ask," he said.
I slit the fabric with steel scissors I kept for precisely such visits. The blade bit through cotton cleanly. He tensed, the muscles under my fingers drawing and releasing as if they, too, weighed cost.
The wound ran from his lower ribs towards his back, not clean, not messy. A thin thing made it, kissed deep and slid on bone. I had cleaned worse. I had told myself I would never clean him again.
"Whoever did this knew where to aim," I said.
"An educated guess," he said. "Although, if you wish to interrogate me, I prefer wine."
"You are not drinking on that."
"Prudent as always."
"Prudent stops you dying in strange kitchens." I wet a cloth and dabbed. "Hold still."
He obeyed. I had forgotten what it did to me when he obeyed.
His breath warmed my temple. He watched my hands. Not the wound, my hands. The crescent-shaped scar on my left wrist flashed pale against his shirt. His gaze settled there the way men settled bets. With appetite.
"That old thing again," he said.
"It does not change," I said.
"It tells a story."
"It is a scar, not a sermon."
I poured iodine, watched the brown creep and bloom. He did not flinch. He never flinched for pain he could catalogue.
"Last time I saw you," he said, "you told me to lose your name."
"I told you to bury it," I said. "You kept it on a chain."
"It is a good name. Yours. Laila. Rory. Malphora." He rolled the letters with a mouth made for secrets. "I am indulgent with fine things."
"Indulgent got me nearly thrown off Hammersmith Bridge."
"That was a misunderstanding on the part of men whose understanding of gravity is better than their understanding of metaphors."
I looked up at him. He did the innocent thing with the eyes. One of them was a night without stars.
"You left," I said.
"I left you breathing."
"You left me holding a debt that was not mine. I paid for your artful exit."
He leaned back an inch. The light cut a line across his cheekbone. "Which is why I am here."
"To settle it?" I stared at him. "Or to open a new ledger?"
He reached into his pocket and set something wrapped in silk on the table. Blue silk , old and soft. I did not touch it.
"You think I do not see the hook," I said.
"I would never insult you with a hook you could see," he said. "The men at Hammersmith were unpleasant. I corrected that unpleasantness."
"How generous."
"I like my investments ambulatory."
"Lucien."
He let my name hang between us. Not one of my aliases, not a joke. The room seemed to hold it with two hands.
"I did something to keep you breathing," he said. "I put a lock on your name and fed it to a thing that listens when my father speaks."
I tied off the bandage, snug and neat. My stomach turned to chalk.
"You did what," I said.
"The realm does not love my kind when we refuse it," he said. "A price then. I paid it. I told Avaros you were not for the ledger. As long as I hold, you are... buffered."
"You bound me," I said.
"I protected you."
"Without asking," I said.
"If I had asked, you would have said no." He looked at me like the answer was stitched into my wrist. "And then you would have died. Eventually, the mathematics does not care for persuasion."
I stood so suddenly the chair scraped harshly. "You cannot calculate me like one of your little crimes."
"I have never found your variables comfortable ," he said.
The tea towel under his hand stained slow and dark. I folded the silk back enough to see a coin the size of a plum pip. Not a coin, a seal. Blackened silver, carved with a sigil that made the little hairs at the base of my skull stand up.
I slid the silk back over it.
"You brought that thing into Eva's flat," I said.
"It enjoys travel," he said. "And it wants to be returned home."
"You want me to return it."
He looked pointedly at my hands, then at the chalk circles on the floor by the bookshelf. "You have a ritual half drawn already. How serendipitous."
"You think I will help you because a coin needs a ride."
"Because somebody else already knows I locked your name with it." He lowered his voice. "And because they will come here next. You, Aurora Carter, enjoy a talent for attracting inconvenient suitors."
"Still jealous of amateurs?"
His smile tilted. "Always."
"Tell me who," I said.
"An old client," he said. "Coincidences do not exist when you are me. He read my tells. He follows mess like a pig after truffles. And he likes solving locks."
"You brought a fox into my henhouse and now you want me to guard the door," I said.
"I want you alive tomorrow."
"That sounds like an agenda."
"Yes."
"Honesty looks strange on you."
"Do not get used to it."
We were close enough that if I leaned a fraction, I could have licked the cut of his lower lip where the razor had missed a hair. I hated knowing that about his face. I hated knowing he had let me learn that.
The kettle clicked on where I had brushed the switch with my hip. Steam spiralled, thin and theatrical. Neither of us moved for tea.
"I am not sleeping with you," I said.
He looked down at my hands holding the bandage tails and up into my eyes. "You are not sleeping."
I let go of him like he burned. He grabbed my wrist, not rough, a man catching a falling glass. His thumb traced the crescent on my skin. Cold there, colder than the rest of him. Avaros in the marrow.
"Aurora," he said. He always said it best when he did not dress it up. "I cannot undo what I have done without you."
"You could try."
"It would kill you," he said. "And that would ruin my evening."
The floor creaked under someone heavier than a cat. Both our heads turned. Eva's neighbours were loud, fond of night laughter and morning arguments that spilled down the stairs. This tread had purpose. This tread knew the number of deadbolts it needed to break.
"You brought him here," I whispered.
"I told you he would come."
"Lovely. Any other gifts? Rabid dogs? Singing telegrams?"
He reached with his free hand and, with a smooth tug, freed a thin sliver of polished steel from the cane. The room found a new stillness around that line of light. Ptolemy, who had turned up on the windowsill to sulk, made a strangled sound like a broken engine.
"Stay behind me," Lucien said.
I looked at the knife in my sink and at his blade and at the door. I looked at the little coin under silk . None of those things were going to ask permission.
"No," I said. "You stay behind me."
"You are welcome to that argument," he said.
The knock came, polite and patient, as if it had been practising on a thousand doors until it learned how to sound like a friend with biscuits.
"Rory?" The voice slid under the wood and laid itself on the floor between us. Wrong voice for this staircase. Wrong city. My lungs forgot their job.
Evan.
Lucien did not miss the way my knees wanted to turn to water.
"Aurora," he said, soft and surgical, "why is a man who smells like anger and cheap gin calling you Rory through a door with three deadbolts."
"Because I left him before he finished breaking my ribs," I said. "Open your mouth about it again and I will stuff that cane down your throat."
His dark eye flashed. His hand tightened on the hilt, not on me. "Understood."
Another knock. Harder. The chain danced. A laugh syruped through. I could see him in my head, the red scar on his knuckles, the little white line on his eyebrow where my keys had split him.
"Rory, love. Let me in. We should talk." His voice warmed into the kind of promise that always iced my wrists.
Lucien stepped aside just far enough that, if the door gave, anyone storming in would not see him first. The angle of the blade mirrored the line of his cheek. He had done this dance before.
"You stay quiet," I whispered.
"I am a ghost," he said.
Evan's voice softened further. He had learned that tone from eight years of practicing apologies. "I know you are in there. The woman downstairs said a fancy bloke went up. That old friend of yours. The one with the suit and the face."
Lucien smiled without humour. "How rude of me to inspire gossip."
I moved to the door. My pulse was loud in my mouth. I touched the chain with one finger and did not undo it.
"Evan," I said. "You do not belong here."
"Oh, come on, love. Do not be like that."
"You do not belong here," I said again.
His breath hit wood. "So that is it. You run to London. You act new. You take up with posh boys and you think I will not come fetch you."
Lucien's head tipped. The corner of his mouth sharpened. "Posh boy," he murmured.
"Shut up," I said, without looking .
The coin under silk pulsed against the table. It did not move, not truly, but the temperature in the room bent and came back with a taste like burnt sugar. Lucien's eye, the black one, flicked to it then to me. He shook his head once. Not yet.
"I am not your fetch," I called through the door.
He laughed. The deadbolt above the chain juddered. Metal squealed.
Lucien whispered, so close I felt the word against my ear, "You did not consider that he might not be alone?"
I swallowed. The breath under the door doubled. Someone else out there, breathing mouth open, wet.
"We have a problem," Lucien said.
"I noticed," I said.
The chain burst its little screws from the jamb with a noise that called every old fear by name. Wood spat like angry hail. The door slammed inward, hit the stopper, rebounded an inch. Evan stood there with two shapes behind him, men with bored eyes and new knuckles. He smiled. It was someone's idea of handsome if you squinted and liked cruelty cheap.
"Hello, love."
He saw Lucien. His smile thinned.
"Oh," he said. "Company."
Lucien's blade kissed air. He did not look at me, not once.
"Enchanté," he said.
The coin on the table flared like a coal waking up. The chalk circles across the room lifted from the floor in pale threads. Ptolemy made no sound at all. He launched himself for the bookcase.
Evan's friends took one step each, in time like a march.
I grabbed the heaviest thing within reach, which turned out to be an old little brass candlestick that Eva had claimed from a house clearance and called history. It sat sweet in my palm, ready, a good solid old weight with one job left in it.
"Close the door," I said to nobody who listened.
"By all means," Lucien said, and met the first man halfway.
Steel rang. The coin beat like a second heart. The chalk threads flicked once, twice, and then the light in the room bent the wrong way, like a lens taking a breath.
Something not in the hall pushed through the window without touching glass. The old pane crazed like ice over a dark pond. Air punched itself out of the room. The smell of hot pennies locked around my throat.
"Aurora," Lucien said. He did not have to finish the sentence.
I brought the candlestick up as the window exploded inward and the thing that wanted my name found our little kitchen.