AI I flipped the last deadbolt and yanked the door open, ready to snap at Eva for losing her keys again.
Lucien Moreau filled the doorway instead, one hand braced on the frame, the other pressed hard to his side. Blood had soaked through the clean white edge of his shirt and spread into his charcoal jacket. His platinum hair still sat slicked back, as if he had stopped to tame it before bleeding on Brick Lane. One eye burned amber. The other looked black enough to swallow the hall.
“Shut the door, Rory.”
I held it wider.
“You’ve got nerve.”
“Among other excellent qualities.”
His cane slipped on the worn landing tile. The ivory handle knocked the wall. Not a stumble, not quite, but close enough to strip the polish off the moment .
Below us, the curry house kitchen clanged and hissed. Garlic, hot oil, turmeric, cardamom. Under it sat another smell, thin and sharp. Sulphur.
Lucien’s gaze cut past me into the flat.
“Unless you’d prefer company, lock me in or leave me out. Choose.”
Footsteps scraped the stairs below. Too light for neighbours. Too measured for drunk tourists.
I caught the door and hauled him inside.
The flat swallowed us in paper and shadows. Books covered the sofa, the floor, the windowsill, every chair except one. Scrolls leaned in tied bundles against a radiator that had never beaten the damp. Research notes crowded the walls in Eva’s cramped hand. Ptolemy shot out from under a stack of atlases, hissed at Lucien, and vanished beneath the bed in the next room.
I slammed the door and threw all three deadbolts.
Lucien leaned on his cane and smiled at the locks.
“Still fond of overkill. How reassuring.”
“You remember the locks, do you?”
“I remember everything in this room that belongs to you.”
“That narrowed it down to nothing.”
He let out a quiet breath. It sounded scraped raw.
When he took his hand from his side, blood slicked his fingers black at the edges, red at the centre. Not human blood alone, then. His demon half had woken under the skin. I had seen it once before and once had been enough to teach me how much heat a body could hold without bursting into flame.
“Sit,” I said.
“How tender.”
“Collapse on Eva’s notes and she’ll skin us both.”
That won me the ghost of a laugh. He crossed the room with a limp he tried to hide. His suit pulled tight across his shoulders when he lowered himself into the only clear chair at Eva’s table. The table pretended to be useful for meals. Eva used it to dissect old texts and leave tea rings on maps of places sensible people avoided.
I pulled open drawers until I found the first aid tin, a packet of salt, a sewing kit, and a bottle of cheap vodka Eva kept for emergencies and terrible dates.
Lucien watched me with the steady focus of a man lining up a shot.
“Eva isn’t here.”
“No.”
“Convenient.”
“For you, perhaps. She would’ve set you on fire.”
“She lacks imagination. Fire is common.”
I set the supplies down hard enough to rattle the needles.
“What do you want, Lucien?”
He looked at the deadbolts, then at the door.
“Six minutes. After that, if you still want me gone, I’ll take my blood and offend another household.”
“You already spent six months gone.”
Something moved in his face. Not much. With Lucien, not much counted.
“You timed it.”
“I noticed the silence .”
He stripped off his gloves with his teeth, one finger at a time, and dropped them on the table. His hands looked too clean for the rest of him, elegant and pale, the knuckles nicked, one ring gone from his right hand. I remembered that ring . Black stone. Gold setting. He had turned it round and round with his thumb when he lied.
He had not worn it tonight.
“Open the jacket,” I said.
“Straight to orders. I had missed that.”
“Open it.”
He obeyed. That unsettled me more than if he had argued.
The jacket slipped from one shoulder. The white shirt underneath had torn near the ribs. Blood glazed the fabric in a dark sheet. I reached for the buttons. He caught my wrist before I touched the first one.
His fingers closed around the old crescent scar on my left wrist.
Not hard. Never hard. That made it worse.
His thumb rested over the mark as if he had every right in the world to remember where it sat.
I looked at his hand until he let go.
“Don’t,” I said.
“Don’t what?”
“Arrive half-dead and act familiar .”
His gaze dropped to my wrist again.
“I never forgot how familiar you felt.”
I cut the shirt open with Eva’s paper knife.
The blade rasped through cotton. Lucien did not flinch until I peeled the cloth back from the wound. A narrow stab, low in the side. Deep. The skin around it had gone dark, threaded with black veins that pulsed once and then stilled.
“Poison?”
He nodded.
“Whose?”
“Avarosi. Crude work.”
“Your family?”
He smiled with one side of his mouth.
“Such a charming way to say it.”
“You taught me charm by example.”
I poured vodka over the wound. He gripped the edge of the table. The wood creaked under his hand.
“Still angry.”
“You broke into my life, used me, disappeared, and left me with a price on my head for three weeks. Angry felt proportionate.”
“Used you?”
I stared at him.
The black eye sharpened first, then the amber one followed, bright as a struck match.
“Careful,” he said.
“No. You be careful. You sent me into Blackfriars with a parcel you swore contained contracts. It held a binding coin. Three things with teeth followed me into a station tunnel because of it. One nearly tore my throat open.”
“I know.”
“You know.”
“I killed two of them outside Southwark.”
I stopped with the bandage in my hand.
“You left the third for me?”
“I arrived late for the third because a witch in Holborn sold your route to a collector, and I was busy removing her tongue.”
That shut the room still.
Below us, a pan clattered in the curry house kitchen. Someone laughed in the street. Close by, paper rustled where the draught slid under the window frame. The ordinary sounds made his words land harder.
“You expect gratitude?” I asked.
“No.”
“What, then?”
He tipped his head and looked at me as if he could read the answer off my face.
“The truth, at last.”
I dragged the chair opposite him into place and sat. The flat pressed around us in stacks of books and old ink. A lamp on the sideboard threw weak yellow light across his throat, his cut shirt, the hollow under his cheekbone. He looked sharpened by blood loss, all clean lines and hunger.
“Start talking,” I said.
He unbuttoned the rest of his shirt and opened it.
Scars crossed his chest in pale, fine strokes, too neat for street fights, too deep for accidents. Lower down, just beneath his ribs, black ink curled over his skin in a pattern that shifted when I looked straight at it. Demon script. Contract work. The fresh stab had cut across one line of it and turned the surrounding flesh angry and hot.
I threaded the needle.
“What did you tell me your father did, back when you still lied with style?”
“He ruined his children with expensive tastes.”
“And the rest?”
“He came from Avaros.”
“That part, I worked out.”
“You did more than that. You opened a ledger meant for blooded houses and read a name you were never meant to see.”
My hand stilled.
In the next room, Ptolemy gave a low, growling yowl.
Lucien watched me over steepled fingers.
“Laila,” he said softly . “Written beside an old claim.”
I put the needle down.
“Don’t call me that.”
“You used it once.”
“I used it because I needed a false name.”
“It wasn’t false.”
His voice stayed calm. Mine did not.
“You do not get to tell me who I am.”
“No. I get to tell you who was looking.”
I stood so fast the chair legs scraped.
He moved at once, not towards me, but back . Space. Deliberate. He had seen the way narrow rooms and men who blocked doors set my muscles into wire. Most men noticed too late, after they had already made the mistake. Lucien had always noticed in time.
That knowledge sat under my skin like heat.
“You should have told me then,” I said.
“If I had told you then, you would have dug. If you had dug, you would have lit every signal fire between here and the river.”
“I’m not reckless.”
He looked at the open bottle, the thread between my fingers, the knife I had used on his shirt.
“I stand corrected.”
The corner of my mouth almost twitched. I killed it.
He leaned forward, forearms on his knees. Blood dripped from the bandage I had not yet tied and pattered onto Eva’s notes about infernal inheritance rights.
“I left because your name had started to circulate in rooms where names get sold. I burned one contract, three copies, and a broker. I could not do that and keep turning up at your door.”
“You never came to my door.”
“I knew where it was.”
That landed low and hard.
“You watched it.”
“I kept it clean.”
For one ugly second I saw the months after Blackfriars, the stranger outside the bar who had vanished when I stepped into the alley, the smashed sigil under my window, the silence that had felt empty at the time and now felt crowded.
“Why not tell me?”
His gaze slid to my wrist again, then lifted to my face.
“Because you would have looked at me as if I had a right to stay.”
I laughed once. It came out thin.
“You’re standing in Eva’s flat bleeding on a thirteenth-century index and that’s your grand confession?”
“It is the shortest version.”
“Give me the longer one.”
A thud hit the stairwell outside.
Both of us went still.
Not a neighbour. Too heavy. The wood in the door gave a faint shiver.
Lucien reached for his cane.
I reached for the salt.
“We’ve got less than six minutes now,” he said.
“Who followed you?”
“Two collectors and one hound.”
“Only one?”
“I insulted the others.”
I crossed to Eva’s shelves and yanked down the tin of chalk, the brass bell, the little ceramic bowl full of iron filings. The flat smelt of old paper, spice, blood, and the sulphur thickening beyond the door.
“You could have gone anywhere,” I said, kneeling by the threshold. “Why here?”
He joined me with more grace than a wounded man should have had. He crouched opposite, jacket shrugged off, shirt hanging open, one hand pressed to his side while the other unscrewed the head of the cane and drew the hidden blade in one clean whisper . Thin steel flashed.
“This door has three deadbolts, a cat with excellent instincts, and shelves full of illegal scholarship,” he said.
“That’s your answer?”
“No.”
He held out his hand for the chalk. I gave it to him. His fingers brushed mine, warm enough to sting.
He drew a sharp circle inside Eva’s existing ward marks, his script elegant even on a warped floorboard. I followed with salt. Our shoulders nearly touched. He smelt of iron, smoke, and the clean citrus cologne he always wore like an insult to the filth around him.
“You,” he said.
The word stayed between us.
I looked up.
“What about me?”
“That is why I came here.”
The second thud split the silence . Ptolemy bolted from the bedroom, fur puffed double, and vanished under the sofa. A scroll case toppled from a stack and rolled across the floor.
I rang the brass bell once. The note hummed through the flat and sank into the chalk line. Lucien set his palm over the fresh mark on his ribs and hissed through his teeth.
“You’re feeding the ward,” I said.
“I heal faster than doors.”
“That’s arrogance.”
“That’s anatomy.”
I tied the bandage tight while he held still for me. His breath caught once, hot against my temple. When I finished, he looked down at my hands on him as if I had done something intimate and unforgivable.
I had.
His fingers closed over mine.
“Rory.”
“Don’t use that voice.”
“Which one?”
“The one that sounds expensive.”
His mouth curved, slow and tired.
“Ah. This voice.”
He lifted my hand, turned it, and pressed his lips to the inside of my scarred wrist.
The kiss landed exactly where his thumb had rested earlier, soft enough to strip the room bare.
My pulse kicked against his mouth. I hated that he would feel it. I hated more that I did not pull away.
“You left a note,” I said.
He released my wrist and looked up through his lashes.
“Did I.”
“Three words. Don’t look for me.”
“Yes.”
I should have slapped him. Instead I heard myself ask the stupidest question available.
“Did you mean it?”
He rose from the floor in one fluid movement and backed me into Eva’s overstuffed shelves before I could breathe. Books nudged my spine. A folded map slipped loose and drifted to the floor between us.
“I meant every cruel word that kept you alive,” he said.
His hand slid to my waist. Not trapping. Holding. Asking with pressure instead of mercy.
“And the rest?”
His gaze dropped to my mouth.
“The rest kept me awake for months.”
That should have fed my temper. It fed something else. He had blood on his skin, danger at the door, and sin in both eyes. I had wanted to forget him often enough to know how useless wanting could be.
So I caught his shirt, hauled him down, and kissed him first.
He answered with a low, rough sound that went straight through me. No caution. No pretty restraint. His mouth took and gave in the same breath, hungry, precise, infuriatingly sure of the effect he had. The flat shrank to heat, paper dust, spice, and the drag of his body against mine. His blade hand stayed low and clear. His other hand splayed over my back and held me as if he had spent those missing months memorising the weight of the absence.
I bit his lower lip.
He smiled into the kiss.
“There she is.”
“Don’t get smug.”
“Too late.”
The door groaned.
Not a knock this time. Wood strained. Metal complained. The first deadbolt gave a tiny, sharp snap inside the frame.
Lucien turned at once, all warmth gone, blade lifted.
A voice came through the splintering wood, smooth and male, one I knew far too well.
“Rory.”
Every muscle in my body locked.
Lucien’s head snapped towards me.
The second deadbolt tore clean out of the wall.