AI The third knock was insistent, a sharp tattoo that cut through the muffled sounds of Brick Lane below. Rory looked up from the grimoire spread open on Eva’s cluttered kitchen table, her neck stiff. It was past ten. Eva was in Edinburgh for a symposium, and no one else should have known she was here, house-sitting Ptolemy and, ostensibly, keeping the plants alive. She’d been avoiding her own flat above Silas’s bar for days, the memories there too thin, the walls too close.
She marked her place with a pencil and stood, the floorboards creaking. The three deadbolts on Eva’s front door were a ritual. Top one, brass, smooth. Middle, steel, stubborn. Bottom, a heavy Chubb that always caught. She slid them back, one after the other, the sounds loud in the quiet flat. She didn’t bother with the chain. If it was something that meant harm, a chain wouldn’t stop it.
She opened the door.
And there he was, leaning on his ivory-handled cane, a silhouette of tailored charcoal against the dim hallway light. Lucien Moreau. The air left her lungs in a quiet, controlled exhale.
“Rory,” he said. His voice was exactly as she remembered: a low, smooth baritone, the French accent softened by years in London but still present, a ghost of Marseille in the vowels.
She didn’t speak. Couldn’t. Her mind, usually so quick to assemble and dissect, went blank and white. She saw the details because she always saw details. The platinum blond hair, slicked back perfectly , not a strand out of place. The sharp line of his jaw, shadowed with a day’s growth. The impossible eyes: one the warm amber of old whisky, the other a bottomless, pupil-less black. The demon eye. He was wearing a suit, of course. A charcoal three-piece, the waistcoat buttoned, the tie a slash of midnight silk . He looked immaculate. He looked tired.
“May I come in?” he asked when the silence stretched. “It’s rather public out here.”
She found her voice. It sounded colder than she intended. “It’s been eight months.”
“Seven months, twenty-three days,” he corrected softly, and the precision was a knife twist. He remembered. Of course he remembered. He was a broker of information; details were his currency.
“What do you want, Lucien?”
“To talk. To explain.”
“You had eight months to explain.” She made no move to let him in. Ptolemy wound around her ankles, a warm, striped pressure, then stopped. The cat’s fur bristled, his back arching slightly as he stared at the figure in the doorway. Animals always knew.
Lucien’s gaze flicked down to the cat, then back to her. A faint, rueful smile touched his lips. “I see the welcoming committee is as discerning as ever.” He shifted his weight onto the cane. It was a subtle movement, but she caught it. The injury he never talked about, the slight favouring of his right leg. “Please, Rory. Five minutes.”
The *please * did it. Lucien Moreau did not say please . He commanded, he negotiated, he charmed. He did not plead. She stepped back, a silent, grudging invitation.
He moved past her into the flat, bringing with him the scent of cold night air, expensive sandalwood cologne, and something beneath it, something dry and ancient like parchment and ash. His demon heritage. He surveyed the chaos of Eva’s living space: the towers of books on the floor, the scrolls unfurled on the sofa, the notes pinned to a corkboard with chaotic strings of red yarn. His heterochromatic eyes took it all in, missing nothing.
“Cosy,” he remarked.
“What do you want?” she asked again, closing the door but leaving the deadbolts undone. A statement. He wouldn’t be staying long.
He turned to face her, leaning both hands on the ivory head of his cane. “I heard about Evan.”
A jolt of ice went through her. She crossed her arms over her chest, her fingers unconsciously finding the small, crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist. A childhood accident, a fall from a tree. A tangible piece of a past that made sense. “What about him?”
“He’s in London. He’s been asking questions. In certain circles.” Lucien’s tone was neutral, professional. But his amber eye held a heat that the black one swallowed whole.
“What circles?” Her voice was tight.
“My circles.” He paused. “He’s looking for you, Rory. And he’s not coming with flowers.”
She had known this, in the dread-filled quiet of her own mind. Evan was a poison that hadn’t fully purged. Her leaving had been an escape, not a resolution. “I can handle Evan.”
“Can you?” Lucien took a step forward. The space in Eva’s flat was limited ; he was suddenly too close. She could see the fine weave of his wool suit, the faint lines at the corners of his eyes. “He’s connected now. He’s found patronage with a minor syndicate. They deal in memory charms and compelled confessions. Nasty business. He’s not the feckless boy you left in Cardiff anymore. He’s something angrier. And he has resources.”
“And you’re here to offer me better resources?” The bitterness leaked out. “For a price?”
He flinched, almost imperceptibly. “There is no price.”
“Everything has a price with you, Lucien. That was the problem, remember?” The words hung between them, charged and sharp. The last time they’d seen each other, it had been in his elegant office in Mayfair. She’d asked him for help with a problem—a spectral haunting tied to a delivery for Yu-Fei. He’d provided the solution, flawlessly. And then he’d presented his invoice. Not in pounds, but in a favour . A specific, personal favour that would have put her in his debt, and deeper into his world. She’d refused. She’d called him a manipulator, a devil in a Savile Row suit. He’d told her she was naive to think the world operated on kindness. She’d walked out and hadn’t looked back.
Until now.
“I was wrong,” he said, the words so quiet she almost didn’t hear them .
She stared at him. “What?”
“I was wrong,” he repeated, stronger now. “To treat you like a client. To think I could… compartmentalise you.” His knuckles were white on the cane. “You were never a transaction, Aurora. Even when I tried very hard to convince myself you were.”
Her full name in his mouth. He rarely used it. It felt like a touch.
The anger in her wavered , revealing the hurt beneath. It was a raw, exposed nerve. “You shut me out. After everything we…” She trailed off, unable to say it. The nights spent talking in his library, the electric brush of fingers when he handed her a glass of wine, the unspoken understanding that had felt like a secret language . It had been building to something, a precipice they were both approaching. And then the case had happened, and he’d retreated behind the persona of the fixer, the broker. He’d turned what was between them into a ledger entry.
“I know,” he said. He took another step, closing the distance completely . She didn’t retreat. The bookshelf dug into her back. “It is a reflex. A defence. My father’s blood, perhaps. Or just my own cowardice.” His amber eye searched her face. “The thought of you vulnerable to someone like Evan… it is unacceptable. I am not here as a broker. I am here as a man who made a mistake. A man who has spent seven months and twenty-three days regretting it.”
The air was thick, charged with the past and the dangerous present. Ptolemy, having decided the demon was not an immediate threat, leapt onto the table, knocking a pile of notes to the floor. The sound broke the spell, just for a second.
“What are you offering, then?” she asked, her voice husky .
“Protection. Information. My help. No favours owed. No strings.” He lifted a hand, slowly , as if approaching a skittish animal . He didn’t touch her. He gestured to the flat around them. “You are already in the deep end, Rory. Eva’s work, your own curiosity… you are neck-deep in the unseen world. You need a guide who won’t bill you for it.”
“And that’s you?”
“It could be.” His hand fell back to his side. “If you can forgive my idiocy.”
She looked away, at the scattered notes on the floor. A drawing of a warding symbol, a phrase in Latin. It was her life now: strange, dangerous, full of hidden patterns. She had run from Evan, from law school, from a prescribed future, only to find herself in a labyrinth of magic and monsters. And the one person who had ever made her feel both safe and excited within that labyrinth was standing before her, asking for a second chance.
“Evan,” she said, forcing the topic back to practicalities. It was safer. “What do you know?”
“He’s staying in a flat near King’s Cross. He has two associates. They’ve been asking about a dark-haired girl who works for a Chinese restaurant in Soho, who asks too many questions. Your name hasn’t surfaced yet, but it’s a matter of time.” Lucien’s professional demeanour was fully back, but it felt different now. There was no wall between them. He was letting her see the gears turning. “I can make the problem disappear.”
She met his gaze. “I don’t want him disappeared. I’m not you.”
A genuine smile, small and tired, touched his lips. “No. You are decidedly not me. What do you want?”
“I want him to leave me alone. To know that coming near me is the worst mistake he could ever make.”
Lucien nodded slowly . “A deterrent. More elegant. And more your style.” He seemed to consider. “It can be arranged. It will require… theatre.”
“I’m good at theatre.”
“I know you are.” The way he said it held a world of memory. The time she’d bluffed her way into a vampire’s nest. The time she’d convinced a river spirit she was a sanitation inspector. He’d been there, watching, a reluctant admiration in his strange eyes.
Silence settled again, but it was softer now. The initial shock had worn off, replaced by a fraught, humming awareness. He was here. In Eva’s messy flat. And the things they hadn’t said eight months ago were pressing against the silence , demanding to be heard.
“Why tonight?” she asked. “Why now?”
“Because I could not wait another day,” he said simply. The raw honesty was disarming. “When the information about Evan crossed my desk, my first thought was not of strategy or opportunity. It was fear. A very human, very undignified fear. For you. And I realised that all my carefully maintained distance was a lie. So I came.”
Her resolve crumbled. The cool-headed facade she wore like armour cracked. She saw the same exhaustion, the same wariness in him that she felt in herself. They were two people who had seen too much of the world’s hidden corners, who trusted too little, and who had somehow, against all odds, found a mirror in each other.
She uncrossed her arms. Her hand lifted, almost of its own volition, and hovered near the lapel of his impeccable suit. “You look tired, Luc.”
He let out a breath , a slow sigh that seemed to come from the very core of him . He leaned into her touch, his cheek brushing her fingers. “I am tired, Rory. Of the games. Of the loneliness.”
Her fingers traced the line of his jaw, the rough stubble. She let her thumb brush the corner of his mouth. His black eye seemed to deepen, to pull at her, while his amber eye burned with a gentle, aching warmth .
“Five minutes is up,” she whispered.
“Arrest me,” he murmured, and then he was kissing her.
It was not a gentle kiss. It was seven months and twenty-three days of regret, of anger, of longing, distilled into a collision. His cane clattered to the floor, forgotten. His hands came up to cradle her face, his touch surprisingly tender against the desperation of his mouth. She kissed him back, her fingers twisting in the wool of his suit, pulling him closer. The taste of him was coffee and that faint, ancient ash, and something uniquely Lucien. It was familiar and terrifyingly new.
When they finally broke apart, breathing ragged, foreheads pressed together, the world had narrowed to the space between them. The flat, the cat, the threat of Evan—all of it receded.
“I should have done that a long time ago,” he said, his voice rough .
“You were an idiot.”
“I believe we’ve established that.”
She smiled, a real one, for the first time since she’d opened the door. It felt strange on her face. “Your cane is on my foot.”
He chuckled, a low, rich sound she hadn’t heard in too long. He bent, wincing slightly at the movement, and retrieved it. “My apologies.”
She took his hand. It was warm, the skin smooth but for a few old scars across the knuckles. “Stay,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
He looked at their joined hands, then back at her face. The mask was gone . All that was left was the man—the half-demon, the fixer, the lonely soul—looking at her with something like wonder . “As long as you’ll have me.”
It wasn’t a solution. Evan was still out there. The past was still a tangled knot. But as she led him through the maze of books towards the small bedroom, the three deadbolts on the door finally clicked shut, one by one. For tonight, it was enough.