AI The first deadbolt scraped back, then the second, then the third, each one louder than the last in the cramped hall.
Rory pulled the door open a crack and froze with her hand still on the chain.
Lucien stood on the landing in a charcoal suit so sharp it looked cut from midnight. Rain slicked his slicked-back blond hair flat at the temples, and the weak hall light caught one amber eye and one black. He rested his ivory-handled cane against his shin, too composed for a man who had turned up unannounced on a wet East London night.
Rory stared at him.
He looked at her mouth first. He always did.
“Of all the doors in London,” he murmured, “I chose the one guarded like a bank vault.”
Rory kept the chain on. “You always did have rubbish timing.”
His gaze drifted to the chain, then back to her face. “And you always had a talent for making an entrance feel like an interrogation.”
She leaned her shoulder against the frame and raised a brow. “You’re at the wrong flat.”
“Am I?” His mouth tipped, not quite a smile. “Eva’s address was accurate. The smell of curry was a pleasant confirmation.”
“Funny.” Rory tightened her grip on the door. “What do you want, Lucien?”
The hallway behind her smelled of old paper, cardamom from the curry house below, and Ptolemy’s fur. The tabby wound around her ankles, then stopped short, staring up at Lucien with the flat, judgmental face of a cat that had already decided he was trouble.
Lucien’s eyes dipped to the cat. “Still collecting creatures with poor judgement.”
Ptolemy hissed.
Rory snorted despite herself, then caught it and scowled harder. “That cat has better instincts than most people.”
“Then we’re in agreement on at least one thing.”
His voice slid under her skin the way it had the last time they’d been in the same room, all velvet edges and a blade hidden inside.
She let the silence stretch until it sharpened.
“Well?” she said. “Speak, or go impress someone else’s doorstep.”
Lucien’s face changed by a fraction, enough for her to catch the crease near his mouth before he smoothed it away.
“May I come in?”
“No.”
He nodded once, as if he’d expected that. “Then we’ll stand in the hall and continue this like two idiots who dislike draughts.”
Rory tightened the chain another notch. “You came here for a chat?”
“I came here because I needed you.”
The words landed hard and plain. No flourish. No silk on top. Just the bare shape of it.
Rory didn’t move. “You’ve got a strange way of asking.”
His gaze held hers. “I ran out of better ones.”
For a second, nothing in the hall made a sound. Even the curry house below seemed to hush. Rory caught the faint scent of rain on his coat, cedar, and something warmer under it that made her think of long rooms and low voices and his hand at the small of her back, guiding her through crowds like he had known exactly where she belonged.
She hated that her chest answered before her head did.
“You lost that privilege,” she said.
Lucien’s jaw flexed. “I know.”
“No, you really don’t.”
Ptolemy leapt onto the hall table and batted at a pile of notes. Rory reached back without looking and snagged the cat by the scruff before he could send research skittering to the floor.
Lucien watched her lift the cat with one hand. “You’ve grown fond of this place.”
“It’s not mine.”
“No.” His eyes flicked past her, taking in the narrow corridor, the books stacked in towers, the scrolls tied with string, the life piled up in every spare inch. “It’s Eva’s. Still feels like yours, though.”
Rory’s mouth went dry.
He had no right to say things like that. Not after the last time. Not after he had walked away with that careful, closed expression and left her standing in the middle of the mess he’d helped make.
She shifted the cat to her hip and tipped her chin. “Whatever this is, it can wait till tomorrow.”
“It can’t.”
“Convenient.”
“Entirely inconvenient.” He lifted his free hand, palm open against the hall light, showing he carried nothing. “I would not stand here in the rain if I had another route.”
“You always had routes.”
“Not this time.”
She studied him, looking for the lie. The careful half-step he might take, the small fracture in his calm. He gave her none of it. Only that steady, patient stare that had unnerved her the first time she’d met him and hadn’t stopped since.
Rory let out a slow breath through her nose. “I’m not in the mood to be manipulated tonight.”
His brows rose. “Then I chose the wrong woman to call upon.”
“That’s one thing we agree on.”
A corner of his mouth shifted again. Not amusement. Something thinner.
“Rory.”
Hearing her name from him always felt like someone had slid a finger under the edge of a bandage and peeled it back without warning. She hated that she noticed it. Hated more that he noticed her noticing.
“Don’t,” she warned.
“Then tell me to leave.”
She looked at the landing beyond him. Empty. Wet. Cold. He stood there without an umbrella, shoulders squared, waiting. He could have left the moment she opened the door. He didn’t. That irritated her almost as much as the rest of it.
“Why are you here?” she asked.
Lucien lifted his cane and set the tip against the floorboards with a quiet tap. “Because people have started dying.”
Rory felt the room shift around that. “That’s a hell of a headline.”
“In London, it often is.”
“I mean why tell me?”
“Because the last time I saw the pattern, you noticed it first.”
She went still.
He kept going before she could stop him. “And because whoever is moving underneath it has started using names you and I both know.”
That did it. Her fingers tightened around Ptolemy enough to earn a hard look from the cat.
“Whose names?” she asked.
Lucien’s gaze stayed on hers. “We can discuss that inside.”
Rory barked a laugh without humour. “You really do think I’m going to let you into Eva’s flat because you said something spooky on the landing?”
“I thought you’d let me in because you are curious.”
“I’m furious.”
“That too.”
She looked at him for one long second, at the rain darkening the shoulders of his suit, at the faint shadow of fatigue around his eyes that he hadn’t bothered to hide. He looked expensive, polished, untouched by weather, yet there was something off in the set of him, some strain pulled taut beneath the surface.
It made her angrier.
“Fine,” she said, and slid the chain free.
Lucien stepped inside without brushing her, but close enough that the heat of him reached her skin. The hall seemed to shrink around the pair of them. Ptolemy twisted in her arms and glared at Lucien from the safe height of her shoulder.
Rory shut the door and snapped the deadbolts back into place behind him, each turn a hard little verdict.
Lucien glanced around the flat, taking in the chaos with the briefest lift of his brows. “Eva has not changed.”
“She’s not here.”
“No, she isn’t.”
Rory caught the way he said it and narrowed her eyes. “You knew that already.”
“I suspected.”
“Convenient again.”
He turned, and the narrow hall forced them close. Too close. His cologne and rain and that dark, warm undertone hit her all at once. Rory lifted her chin, refusing to step back.
“If you came to see Eva, you wasted the trip.”
“I came to see you.”
The words fell between them with the same clean weight as the first admission at the door. Rory swallowed and hated herself for it.
“Well,” she said, voice flat, “you’ve seen me.”
Lucien’s black eye flicked over her face, then the crescent scar at her wrist where she still held the cat. “You look tired.”
Rory gave him a stare that could have chipped glass. “You look like a man who still owns too many suits.”
“And you look like someone who has not slept enough.”
“Your observational skills remain a plague.”
He took one measured step closer, then stopped, as if he’d felt the line between them and chose not to cross it. “If I were here to provoke you, I would have brought flowers.”
“You’d have brought something expensive and offensive.”
“I would have considered orchids.”
“Would have hated them.”
“I know.”
That “I know” did more than it should have. It dragged up old evenings, old arguments, his hand hovering near her elbow when she’d been ready to bite someone’s head off, the look he gave her when she’d outsmarted a room full of monsters and enjoyed it too much.
Rory looked away first. She hated that too.
“Say what you came to say,” she muttered. “Then go.”
Lucien’s fingers tightened once around the cane. “Not here.”
“Then you shouldn’t have come here.”
“I had no choice.”
“Bullshit.”
That drew the smallest pause from him. Not offence. Recognition. She’d hit something true.
He glanced toward the sitting room, where a stack of notes spilled across the coffee table and an open book sat facedown beside a mug gone cold. “You’ve been working.”
Rory huffed. “You didn’t answer me.”
“No.”
“Lucien.”
His eyes came back to her. “The people I’m tracking have means, money, and enough knowledge to open doors they should not know exist. One of their couriers used an old name for a place in Marseille.”
Rory’s skin went cold in a way that had nothing to do with the draft from the stairwell.
He watched her face and kept going, each word clipped into place. “A name tied to me.”
Her throat tightened. “Avaros.”
One amber eye sharpened. The black one stayed unreadable .
“Someone has been saying it aloud in London,” he said. “And if that sounds like a careless detail, you’d be wrong.”
Rory shifted Ptolemy higher on her shoulder. The cat kneaded her collarbone with sharp little paws, irritated by the tension . She didn’t blame him.
“You came all this way because someone said your demon daddy’s postcode in a back alley?”
Lucien’s expression didn’t move, but the air between them did.
“That,” he said, voice very even, “is not what I said.”
“You don’t have to say it. I can hear the family issue in your face.”
A beat.
Then, to her surprise, he barked a short laugh. It lasted half a second and left him looking more dangerous than before.
“You have not changed either.”
Rory crossed her arms, balancing the cat awkwardly. “And yet here you are.”
“Yes.”
“Why me?”
The question came out sharper than she planned. It cut the hall open and left them both standing in the middle of it.
Lucien’s gaze didn’t waver. “Because you were right the last time, and I was wrong.”
Rory laughed once, low and bitter. “That’s one hell of a way to open a conversation.”
“It felt like the honest one.”
“You don’t get to turn up here, say something like that, and expect me to melt into the wallpaper.”
“I would never expect you to melt.”
“No?”
“No.” His eyes swept over her, slow and direct, and heat sparked under her skin in spite of everything. “You have never done anything small when I was concerned.”
Rory stared at him, too aware of the narrow hall, the closed front door, the rain ticking at the window over the stairs. Too aware of the fact that he knew exactly what kind of thing that line did to her because he had always known where to aim.
“You’re still doing it,” she said.
“Doing what?”
“Looking at me like that.”
His jaw worked once. “Like what?”
“Like you haven’t had enough.”
The silence that followed felt crowded. Ptolemy chose that moment to wriggle free and leap to the floor, where he strutted away with his tail high, offended on principle.
Lucien watched the cat go. “A fair criticism.”
Rory’s pulse gave one hard kick. She hated how his voice changed when the air turned thin between them. Softer. Rougher. Less polished around the edges.
She pushed off the door and jerked her head toward the sitting room. “If you’re staying inside, take off the rain and sit down. If you’re not, keep talking on the landing until the whole building hates us.”
Lucien took a slow breath, the first one she’d seen him really take since he arrived. He set his cane against the wall and began to shrug out of his coat.
“On one condition,” he said.
Rory folded her arms tighter. “You don’t get conditions.”
“Then I suppose I’ll have to make a request.”
Her mouth twitched despite itself. “Fine. Request.”
He looked at her over the line of his shoulder as he pulled free of the coat. “Don’t tell me to leave until you’ve heard me out.”
Rory held his gaze, then tipped her head once.
“Talk,” she said.