AI
Three deadbolts. Rory had locked all three. She remembered because Ptolemy had watched from the hallway bookshelf with that judgmental amber stare cats reserved for the paranoid, and she'd turned each lock with deliberate, spiteful force, as if the act itself could seal out more than just the November chill .
So when the third bolt clicked open from the outside, she grabbed the heaviest thing within reach, a clothbound Oxford etymological dictionary, and positioned herself behind the kitchen doorframe.
The door swung inward. A waft of cold air carried the scent of sandalwood and cigarette smoke, a combination so specific it hit her like a hand around the throat.
"I know you're behind the wall, Carter. I can hear you breathing."
She stepped out. Lucien Moreau stood in the doorway of Eva's flat, his ivory-handled cane hooked over one forearm, a set of lockpicks disappearing into his breast pocket with the casual grace of a man pocketing a business card. His charcoal suit was immaculate. His platinum hair caught the sickly hallway light and turned it into something expensive.
Those mismatched eyes, one amber, one black, found hers.
"You changed the locks."
"Eva changed the locks. Because of people like you."
"People like me." A faint smile . He didn't ask to come in. He stepped past her, his cane tapping once on the threshold like a full stop at the end of a sentence, and surveyed the flat with an expression that landed somewhere between amusement and calculated assessment.
Eva's place looked the same as always. Books colonised every surface, stacked in defiant towers on the kitchen counter, fanned across the sofa cushions, piled beneath the radiator where condensation had curled their pages into soft waves. Research notes in Eva's frantic handwriting papered the walls above the desk. The curry house below pumped warm, turmeric-heavy air through the floorboards.
Ptolemy dropped from the bookshelf and wound between Lucien's ankles. Traitor.
"Eva's in Edinburgh until Thursday."
"I know."
"Then why are you here?"
Lucien set his cane against the arm of the sofa and unbuttoned his jacket, one-handed, with the kind of fluid economy that made the gesture look rehearsed. He sat. Ptolemy leapt into his lap. The cat purred like a diesel engine.
"You've been avoiding my calls."
"Avoiding implies effort. I deleted your number."
"And yet you recognised my cologne through a wall."
Rory set the dictionary down on the counter harder than necessary. The stack of books beside it shuddered.
"Say what you came to say, Lucien."
He studied her. That was the thing about his eyes, the way the amber one tracked emotion while the black one simply absorbed. Like being watched by two different people, one who wanted to understand her and one who already did.
"You look thin."
"That's not what you came to say."
"No." He scratched behind Ptolemy's ear . The cat's purring intensified. "Marchetti's people have been asking about you. Three times this week. Different faces each time, same questions."
The name landed in her stomach like a swallowed stone. She kept her expression level.
"Marchetti doesn't know I exist."
"He does now. Someone told him about the Whitechapel job." A pause. "Someone who knew the details."
The implication hung in the air between them. Only four people had known the details of the Whitechapel job. Eva. Silas. Rory. And the man currently sitting on Eva's sofa with a cat in his lap.
"You think I don't know that?" His voice dropped half a register. "You think that's not why I'm here, picking locks at eleven o'clock at night?"
Rory crossed her arms. The crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist caught the lamplight, a pale sliver of old damage.
"Last time you showed up unannounced, you told me the situation was handled. That I could stop looking over my shoulder." She leaned against the counter . "That was four months ago."
"The situation was handled. This is a new situation."
"Funny how they keep finding me."
"Funny how you keep refusing my protection."
The word crackled between them. Protection. He'd used it before, the night everything fractured . Standing in the rain outside Silas's bar, his jacket draped over her shoulders because she'd been shaking, though not from cold. His hand on her face. The impossible warmth of half-demon skin. And that word, spoken like a promise and a cage in the same breath.
*Let me protect you.*
She'd run. Of course she'd run. Running was the one skill Evan had taught her, the only useful thing that relationship had produced, an instinct sharpened to a blade edge. The moment someone's care started to feel like a closing fist, her legs made the decision before her brain caught up.
Lucien hadn't followed. That was the part she couldn't forgive him for, or herself for wanting him to.
"I didn't come to rehash old arguments." He lifted Ptolemy and set the cat gently on the cushion beside him. Rose to his feet. Without the cane, he moved differently, a faint unevenness to his gait that the ivory handle normally disguised. He crossed the small kitchen in three steps and stopped an arm's length from her.
Close enough that the sandalwood sharpened into something warmer underneath. Close enough to see the faint silver scarring along his jaw, half-hidden by the collar of his shirt. Marks from his father's world, she'd guessed once. He'd neither confirmed nor denied it.
"What did you come for, then?"
"To give you this."
He reached into his jacket and produced a folded square of paper, edges worn soft from handling. She took it. Their fingers didn't touch, a careful geometry he'd engineered.
She unfolded it. A photograph, printed on cheap copier paper. Grainy, taken from across a street. It showed the front of the Golden Empress, the red and gold awning she ducked under six days a week, Yu-Fei's handwritten specials board propped against the doorframe.
And there, emerging with a stack of delivery bags, captured mid-stride, Rory.
A red circle drawn around her face.
"This was pinned to Marchetti's office wall. My source photographed it two days ago."
The paper trembled in her hand. She pressed it flat against the counter.
"Two days."
"I needed to verify, "
"Two days, Lucien."
"I wasn't going to come to you with speculation."
"No, you'd rather come with proof that someone's been watching me for God knows how long." Her voice stayed level. Steady as surgical steel. But her fingers curled against the countertop.
He noticed. He always noticed.
"There's more." He reached into the other side of his jacket. A second photograph. This one showed the street outside Silas's bar. Her window, second floor, light on behind the curtain. Another red circle, this time around the window itself.
"They know where you work. They know where you sleep."
"Cheery."
"This isn't a joke."
"Do I look like I'm laughing?"
She didn't. She looked like a woman doing arithmetic behind her eyes, running calculations, mapping exits. He'd seen that look before, the night she'd told him about Evan, her voice flat and clinical, as though she were describing something that had happened to a stranger.
"I have a safehouse," he said. "Bermondsey. Clean, unregistered, warded against scrying. You stay there until I sort this."
"Until you sort this."
"Yes."
"And what does that look like? Sorting it?"
Something shifted behind his black eye. A flicker , like light bending in deep water.
"You don't want that answer."
"I stopped wanting easy answers around the time I left Cardiff."
He exhaled through his nose. The amber eye held her gaze while the black one did that thing , that absorbing thing, where she felt certain he could see beneath her skin to the clockwork underneath.
"Marchetti has a ledger. Names, transactions, leverage. Everyone he controls, everyone who owes him. I destroy the ledger, his network fragments. His interest in you becomes irrelevant."
"And destroying the ledger involves..."
"Things I'm good at."
The space between them thinned. She hadn't moved. Neither had he. But the kitchen felt smaller, the curry-spiced air thicker, the ambient noise of Brick Lane muffled to a murmur.
"You could have sent a message. Posted the photos. Hired a courier, you certainly know enough of them." She tilted her chin up. "You didn't need to come."
"No."
"So why did you?"
The question stripped the room of pretence. Ptolemy had gone silent on the sofa. The radiator ticked in the wall. Somewhere below, a chef shouted in Bengali and a pan clattered.
Lucien's hand came up. Stopped. He held it between them, palm open, fingers slightly curled, a question asked in flesh rather than language. The same hand that had touched her face in the rain four months ago. The same hand she'd pulled away from.
"Because you deleted my number," he said. "And I haven't slept since."
Her chest ached. A physical thing, like a bruise pressed.
She didn't take his hand. But she didn't step back.
"The safehouse. How long?"
"A week. Maybe two."
"And you'll be where?"
"Close."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I have."
She stared at his open palm. The lines there were strange, she remembered. Forked in places human hands didn't fork. A cartography of mixed blood.
"If I go with you," she said, "this isn't what it was before. You don't get to make decisions for me. You don't get to disappear for weeks and come back smelling like other people's problems and expect me to just, "
"I know."
"Let me finish." Her blue eyes held a voltage that made the amber one flinch. "You don't get to protect me like I'm something fragile. I'm not. I've never been. And if you ever use that word like a leash again, I'll disappear so thoroughly even your sources won't find me."
He closed his hand. Slowly. The tendons in his wrist flexed.
"Understood."
"Good." She pushed off the counter. "I need fifteen minutes. And you're feeding Ptolemy before we leave, he bites me every time I try."
She walked toward Eva's bedroom. At the doorframe, she paused without turning.
"Lucien."
"Oui."
"I didn't delete your number."
She heard the breath he took. A rough, serrated thing.
She closed the bedroom door before he could answer, and leaned her forehead against the wood, pressing both palms flat to the grain. Her pulse hammered in her wrists, in her throat, in the crescent scar that tingled as though it remembered being touched.
Fifteen minutes. Pack a bag. Think later.
She pulled open Eva's wardrobe, grabbed the go-bag her friend kept behind the winter coats, because of course Eva kept a go-bag, and started checking its contents. Torch. Cash. Burner phone. Change of clothes. A small leather journal filled with symbols Rory couldn't read.
From the kitchen came the sound of a tin being opened , and Ptolemy's indignant yowl, and Lucien swearing in rapid, breathless French.
Then, through the thin wall, three sharp knocks on the front door.
Not the rhythm of a neighbour. Not the tentative rap of a delivery. Three knocks, evenly spaced, with the weight of a fist behind them.
Lucien went silent.
Rory dropped the bag and pressed her ear to the bedroom wall.
A voice from the hallway, muffled but audible, thick with an accent she couldn't place.
"Mr. Moreau. We know you're in there. Mr. Marchetti sends his regards."