AI The third deadbolt snapped back under Aurora’s fingers, and the door swung open just enough for the chain to bite.
Lucien Moreau filled the gap like a cut-out from a magazine, all tailored charcoal and expensive restraint, his platinum blond hair slicked back as if the world never dared ruffle it. His ivory-handled cane rested against his palm, not for balance, for punctuation. One eye glowed amber. The other drank the light, black and bottomless.
Aurora tightened her grip on the chain.
“No.”
His gaze dropped to the narrow slice of her face he could see, then to her left wrist where her sleeve rode up, the small crescent scar flashing pale against her skin.
“Bonsoir, Rory.”
“Don’t call me that.”
His mouth curved, not quite a smile, not quite anything kind .
“You moved. Again.”
Aurora’s laugh came out sharp.
“You found me.”
“I find what I need.”
The old line. The same one he had used the last time he knocked on her life, all polished edges and no apologies. Heat rose in her throat, familiar and ugly.
“You don’t need anything from me,” she said. “Go back to your demons and your deals.”
Lucien leaned in, slow enough to read as politeness, close enough to make the chain feel like a thread.
“You opened.”
“I checked who it was so I could slam it in your face.”
His eyes flicked past her shoulder into the cramped hall, the stacks of books, the loose scrolls pinned under paperweights, the mess that looked like a mind mid-fight . A tabby cat sat on the shoe rack like a sentry, tail twitching once.
Ptolemy gave a low, unimpressed sound.
Lucien’s nostrils flared.
“Your friend keeps wards in curry-stained mugs.”
“Eva makes do.” Aurora kept her voice level . “Unlike you.”
Lucien’s hand slid to the chain, not touching it, hovering a breath away. He respected barriers when it suited him. That had always been part of the problem.
“Remove it.”
“No.”
“Rory.”
Aurora shoved the door another inch closed so the chain rattled in protest.
“Say my name properly.”
Lucien’s jaw worked once. The amber eye softened by a fraction, the black one stayed dead.
“Aurora.”
Better. Worse.
She held the chain. Her pulse knocked in her ears, loud enough to drown out the sounds from the curry house below, clatter and voices seeping up through old pipes. Eva’s flat always smelled faintly of turmeric and paper, like someone had tried to season a library.
Lucien spoke again, quieter.
“You should not keep your locks on display.”
“They’re deadbolts. Not lingerie.”
His gaze slid over her, too knowing, not hungry in an obvious way, but attentive, like he catalogued every weakness and every strength. He always looked like that, even when his hands had been on her. Especially then.
“I did not come for a quarrel,” he said.
“You came because you’re bored.”
“I came because I’m bleeding.”
Aurora’s eyes dropped before she could stop them. A dark stain spread at his side, soaked into his suit near his ribs, blacker than it should have been. Not fresh blood red, more like ink.
He watched her notice .
“You’ve always had such a good eye for detail,” he said. “It made you useful.”
There it was. The sting. The hook.
She swallowed and hated that she still reacted.
“You should’ve led with that,” she said. “Go bleed on your own furniture.”
Lucien’s fingers closed around his cane. The ivory knob turned under his palm, a quiet threat. He held himself upright, but the stiffness at his shoulder gave him away.
“Aurora,” he said, and this time her name sounded like a choice . “Someone followed me.”
That put a different shape in the air.
Aurora’s hand tightened on the chain until the metal bit her skin. She pictured the stairwell outside, the narrow landing, all the places a body could hide in a building that old. Eva’s flat sat above a curry house, but it might as well have been above a fault line. People came and went. Sounds disappeared into the walls.
“You don’t bring trouble to Eva’s door,” Aurora said.
Lucien’s mouth flattened.
“I did not intend to.”
“You never do.” She inhaled through her nose . “Who?”
Lucien lifted his gaze to meet hers.
“The same people you thought you escaped when you left Cardiff.”
Aurora’s stomach dropped so hard it felt like her ribs shifted .
“Don’t,” she said.
Lucien didn’t blink.
“Evan knows you’re in London.”
Her throat tightened. Evan. Not the one on her wrist scar, not childhood, not accidents, but the other scar, the one no one saw . She tasted copper anyway.
Aurora forced her voice steady.
“You’re lying.”
Lucien’s eyes held hers, unblinking, almost gentle.
“If I lied, I would choose something flattering. You always assumed I lied for sport. I lie for leverage.”
She hated that she believed him. She hated that he had come here at all. She hated that a small, traitorous part of her felt relieved to see him standing in the doorway like a problem she understood.
Ptolemy hopped down from the shoe rack and stalked closer, tail straight, then stopped at the gap and sniffed at Lucien’s trouser leg with theatrical disgust.
Lucien looked down.
“Charming.”
“He likes honest people.”
Ptolemy sneezed.
Aurora let out a breath .
“Get in,” she snapped. “Before you drip on the hallway.”
Lucien’s shoulders loosened by a fraction, as if she had just made a promise. He slipped through the gap when she unhooked the chain, moving with the controlled grace of someone who had learnt to carry pain without giving it the satisfaction of showing.
Aurora slammed the door and threw the deadbolts one, two, three. Each clack sounded too final.
Lucien stood in the narrow hall, close enough that his cologne cut through curry spices and old paper. Something darker threaded under it, faint smoke and iron.
Aurora turned.
“Shoes off.”
Lucien glanced down at his polished leather shoes, then at her face.
“You keep rules.”
“I keep Eva’s floors clean.” Aurora jerked her chin. “And I keep you from leaving footprints.”
Lucien’s mouth twitched. He bent, slow, and removed his shoes with a neatness that felt obscene in a flat where research notes lay in drifts like snow. He set them together by the wall, like a guest. Like he belonged.
Aurora hated how easy he looked in the space, as if he could step into anyone’s life and arrange himself there.
She led him through the cluttered living room. Books stacked in towers. Scrolls rolled and tied with string. A corkboard crowded with newspaper clippings and hand-written notes. A kettle sat on the counter among mugs, some with half-faded sigils drawn in marker. Eva’s work, messy but effective.
Lucien’s gaze touched everything and missed nothing.
“A charming nest,” he murmured.
“Sit.” Aurora pointed at the only armchair not covered in paper.
Lucien lowered himself into it with care, his cane angled across his knees. His fingers flexed once around the ivory handle.
Aurora hovered by the kitchen counter, grabbing a clean tea towel, then thought better of it and took an old T-shirt from a chair instead.
“Lift your jacket,” she said.
Lucien’s amber eye sparked.
“You issue orders so sweetly .”
“Lift it,” she repeated. “Or you can bleed to death and save me the trouble of dealing with you.”
He obeyed, shrugging out of the suit jacket and easing up his shirt. The wound sat between ribs, a slice that looked too clean for a knife fight and too angry for an accident. The blood shimmered wrong, like oil in water.
Aurora’s mouth went dry.
“That’s not human.”
Lucien tilted his head.
“Neither is the person who made it.”
Aurora pressed the cloth against his side. He hissed, the sound sharp, then swallowed it down. His hand shot out and caught her wrist, not hard, but firm, fingers closing over that old crescent scar as if he had memorised it.
“You press like you want it to hurt,” he said.
“I press like I want it to stop.”
Lucien’s thumb stroked once, slow, over the scar. A gesture too intimate for the distance they pretended to keep.
Aurora’s stomach clenched. She pulled her wrist away.
“Don’t.”
Lucien’s eyes lifted to her face.
“That word,” he said. “You used it once before. Do you recall what I did?”
Aurora’s voice came out thin.
“You left.”
Lucien’s expression flickered , something like regret trying to break through a locked door.
“I did not leave,” he said. “I withdrew. There is a difference.”
She scoffed and kept pressure on the wound.
“You withdrew because I stopped being useful.”
Lucien’s laugh held no warmth .
“You were always useful. That was the danger.”
Aurora didn’t look at him. She focused on the blood soaking into the cloth, on the way it clung. Ink-blood. Demon-work.
“You should go to a hospital,” she said.
Lucien’s gaze travelled her face like he traced the lines he had once kissed.
“And tell them what? That a gentleman with an unfortunate parentage took a blade meant for him in an alley behind a club that does not exist on any map?”
Aurora’s mouth tightened.
“You always had an answer.”
“It is what people pay for.” He leaned back, breathing shallow. “You, however, never asked for answers. You asked for truth.”
“Don’t pretend you gave it to me.”
Lucien’s black eye seemed to deepen, swallowing what little softness had appeared.
“I gave you what I could.”
“What you could afford,” she shot back. “You kept your secrets and you handed me crumbs. Then you vanished.”
Lucien’s hand slid to the edge of the cloth, touching where her fingers pressed.
“I vanished because you asked me to.”
Aurora froze.
She met his gaze. The amber eye held hers with infuriating steadiness. The black one made her feel seen in a way she didn’t want.
“I told you to get out,” she said.
Lucien nodded once.
“And I did. Because if I stayed, Aurora, I would have taken more than you offered.”
A pulse of heat ran up her throat. She hated him for that sentence. She hated her body for reacting. She remembered his hands anyway, remembered how he had hovered at her mouth like permission mattered to him more than pride.
She dropped the blood-soaked cloth into the sink with a wet slap.
“Why are you here?” she asked.
Lucien exhaled, slow, controlled.
“Because Evan is not the only one who knows.”
Aurora’s fingers went cold.
“Who else?” she demanded.
Lucien’s gaze flicked to the corkboard, the messy research, the sigils on mugs.
“Your friend has been asking questions,” he said. “Loud ones.”
Aurora’s stomach tightened.
“Eva doesn’t ask questions loudly. She hoards them quietly.”
Lucien’s mouth curved.
“She became careless.”
“That’s not like her.”
Lucien shifted in the chair and grimaced. He sat straighter, stubborn.
“It becomes like her when she fears for you.”
Aurora bristled.
“You don’t get to speak for her.”
Lucien’s voice softened, dangerous for how calm it sounded.
“I do not speak for her. I speak for the eyes on this building, the ones that were not here last week.”
Aurora’s mouth went dry. She moved to the window, careful not to step on loose papers, and peeked through a gap in the curtains. Brick Lane’s chaos looked normal from here, people moving, lights from shops, nothing obvious. That made it worse.
She turned back.
“You brought them,” she said.
Lucien didn’t flinch.
“I led them away twice,” he said. “They circled back. They want what you carry.”
“I don’t carry anything.”
Lucien’s amber eye flicked to her left wrist again.
“You do,” he said. “You simply stopped looking at it in mirrors.”
Aurora’s skin prickled. The scar. Childhood accident, she had always called it that because it sounded harmless. The truth sat under it like a splinter.
Lucien watched her face, as if he read each flicker .
“You never told me what you knew,” she said.
“I asked.” He leaned forward a fraction, pain tightening his mouth. “You smiled at me like a solicitor in training and said nothing. You lied with silence , Aurora. It suited you.”
Her cheeks flushed, anger and something else.
“You enjoyed that,” she said. “You enjoyed watching me squirm.”
Lucien’s gaze dropped to her mouth, lingered. His voice came out lower.
“I enjoyed many things about you.”
Aurora’s breath caught. She hated the way the room shrank around that sentence, how the air thickened between them. She forced her hands to stay busy, grabbed another cloth, rinsed it, wrung it out hard.
“You can’t flirt your way out of this,” she said.
Lucien’s mouth twitched.
“I do not flirt when I bleed on someone else’s floor.”
“Charming.”
He held her gaze.
“I do not apologise for wanting you.”
Aurora’s heart thumped. She stepped closer before she could stop herself, the space between them narrowing. The smell of him filled her head, expensive and wrong, like a promise that always came with a cost.
“You don’t get to want me whenever it suits you,” she said.
Lucien lifted his hand, slow, palm up, offering rather than taking.
“Then tell me what I get,” he said. “Because you opened the door.”
Aurora stared at his hand. Pale knuckles, clean nails, a faint smear of his own blood near the base of his thumb. He made even an invitation look like a contract.
She didn’t put her hand in his. She reached past him, grabbed his shirt hem, and yanked it up enough to see the wound again.
“If you die in Eva’s chair, she’ll resurrect you to kill you again,” Aurora said.
Lucien inhaled, a sharp sound that might have been laughter if it had warmth .
“Noted.”
Aurora pressed the clean cloth against his ribs. He tensed, then steadied. His hand rose and stopped at her waist, hovering, then settled with a light touch that made her stomach clench harder than any insult.
“You still shake when you’re angry,” he murmured.
“I’m not shaking.”
His fingers tightened a fraction, just enough to tell her he felt it too, the faint tremor in her muscles, the pulse in her skin.
“You are,” he said. “And you still stand too close when you want to run.”
Aurora swallowed.
“I want you out.”
Lucien’s black eye fixed on her, unreadable .
“Lie again,” he said, softly .
The words hit like a slap because they landed on something true. Aurora’s breath caught, and for one ugly second she pictured it, his mouth on hers, the way he had always held back until she closed the distance, like he liked watching her choose.
A heavy thud jolted the door.
Ptolemy shot upright, fur bristling, a low growl vibrating out of his small body.
Another thud, harder, the deadbolts rattling in their sockets.
Lucien’s hand dropped from her waist to his cane in one smooth motion. The ivory handle turned, and steel whispered from within, a thin blade sliding out like a secret finally admitted.
Aurora stepped back, blood rising cold in her veins.
“That’s not Evan,” she said.
Lucien rose, the movement controlled, but pain pinched his mouth. His amber eye flared brighter. The black one seemed to widen.
“No,” he said. “Evan knocks like a man.”
The door shuddered again, and something scraped across the wood, slow and deliberate, like a nail testing grain.
Lucien angled himself between Aurora and the hall.
“Do not open it,” he said.
Aurora’s fingers curled into fists.
“I didn’t plan to.”
A voice slid through the door, muffled but clear enough to raise the hair on Aurora’s arms. Not Evan’s. Not human.
“Aurora Carter,” it called, sweet as syrup and twice as rotten. “We came for what you owe.”
The deadbolts screamed as the door buckled inward, and Lucien’s blade caught the light as he lifted it.