AI The first deadbolt clacked free, then the second, then the third, each one sharp in the narrow hallway above the curry house.
Rory paused with her hand still on the last lock, her delivery bag hanging off one shoulder, rain dampening the collar of her jacket. She pulled the door in and found Lucien Moreau standing on the landing as if he belonged there, charcoal coat immaculate, platinum hair slicked back, ivory-handled cane tucked against his side.
His amber eye fixed on her face. The black one slid to the bag at her shoulder, then back.
“You have a talent for making a woman regret opening her own door,” Rory muttered.
Ptolemy shot past her ankle and wrapped himself around Lucien’s shoe with all the confidence of a cat who’d never feared consequences in his life.
Lucien’s mouth twitched. “I am flattered to be included in your domestic welcome.”
Rory stared at him for a beat longer, searching for the reason his presence sat wrong in her chest. She found it in the shape of his shoulders, in the careful stillness he wore when he’d already made up his mind to stand his ground.
“You’re not meant to be here.”
“I noticed.”
She tipped her chin toward the stairwell. “Then you can keep noticing somewhere else.”
He looked past her into the flat, into the chaos stacked on every surface, the books and scrolls and scattered notes lit gold by the single lamp in the corner. Eva’s flat looked less like a home than a case that had exploded and never been put back together. Rory had spent enough hours in it to stop seeing the clutter, but under Lucien’s gaze it all seemed to sharpen.
“I need two minutes,” he said.
Rory laughed once, without humour. “You always needed more than that.”
Ptolemy wound around Lucien’s cane next, tail high, purring like a tiny engine. Lucien glanced down at him. “Even your cat has better manners than you.”
“He lives here.”
“So do you, and yet.”
Rory’s fingers tightened on the door. The hallway behind Lucien smelled of wet concrete and old chip fat and the night bus rumbling over Brick Lane. Somewhere below, a shout rose from the curry house kitchen, then died under the hiss of the extractor fan.
“You turned up here after eleven,” she said. “Unannounced. On a Tuesday. That’s not a social visit.”
“No.”
“No?” She leaned into the frame, eyes on his face. “That’s all you’ve got?”
His gaze held hers, steady and maddening. “It is not a social visit.”
A pulse jumped in her wrist where the crescent scar sat under her cuff. She hated that he still knew exactly where to look when he wanted to unsettle her. Hated more that he didn’t have to try.
Rory huffed a breath and stepped back. “Fine. Two minutes. If this turns into one of your little speeches, I’m throwing you down the stairs.”
Lucien crossed the threshold with the smooth grace of a man who had never once been thrown anywhere against his will. Ptolemy followed at his heels, pleased with himself, and Rory shut the door hard enough to rattle the frames on the wall. She threw the deadbolts again. One. Two. Three.
Lucien watched her from the middle of the cramped living room. “You still lock up as if you expect the walls to bite.”
“Living in London makes that sensible.”
He tilted his head, taking in the books stacked on the table, the open atlas pinned beneath three teacups, the ring of candles burned to stubs near the sink. “This is Eva’s work. She has not become tidier.”
Rory dropped her bag by the sofa. “No. She just took her mess and spread it around me.”
Lucien’s mouth curved a fraction at that, though it didn’t reach his eyes. “You always did suit chaos more than you admitted.”
“That’s rich coming from you.”
His gaze flicked to her mouth and away again. The look lasted less than a second, but it hit with the force of a hand at the waist. Rory moved to the kettle out of reflex, because standing still in front of him had never done her any favours.
“You want tea?”
“I want you to hear me first.”
She set the kettle back on its base with a clack. “That sounded expensive.”
“It was.”
“Of course it was.”
Ptolemy leapt onto the sofa, kneaded Rory’s blanket, and curled into a loaf with his eyes half-closed. Lucien tracked the cat’s movement, then looked back at her.
“I have a problem,” he said.
Rory crossed her arms. “You have several.”
“One in particular.”
“Lucien.”
“Rory.”
The way he used her name made her shoulders pull tight. Not the nickname. Not Carter. Rory, plain and intimate, as if he’d earned the right to shorten her down to one sharp syllable and leave the rest exposed.
She folded her expression flat. “Out with it.”
He shifted the cane in his hand. “Someone is asking questions about you.”
Rory laughed again, this time without any humour at all. “You come here after months of silence to tell me that?”
“I came because the questions have become active.”
“Active.”
“They are not polite inquiries.”
She stepped closer before she meant to, anger hot and immediate. “I don’t need your vocabulary lesson, Lucien. Who’s asking?”
He studied her face with that strange half-demonic patience, as though her anger had texture he could read with his bare hands. “That depends on the name you still use when you do not want to be found.”
Something in the room changed. Even Ptolemy opened one eye.
Rory went still. “No.”
“Rory—”
“No.” She jabbed a finger at his chest, stopping just short of his lapel. “You do not get to walk into Eva’s flat and say things like that after disappearing on me.”
His jaw tightened. “I did not disappear.”
“You vanished.” Her voice came out low and sharp. “You left a note. One line. ‘It was unwise for us to continue.’ That was it. No explanation. No goodbye. No return of the phone you promised to bring back. Nothing.”
His amber eye flashed, and the black one went unreadable , a pool without light. “You wanted honesty. I gave it.”
“I wanted more than that.”
His gaze dropped to her hand still lifted between them. She jerked it back as if the air around him had burned.
Lucien exhaled through his nose. “If I had remained, the consequences would have reached you sooner.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do.”
“You always think you do.” She folded her arms again, but it did nothing to protect the part of her that still remembered the weight of his coat, the taste of wine on his mouth, the way he’d looked at her like she was a line he wanted to cross and feared crossing at once. “You don’t get to turn up, say some cryptic rubbish, and act like that fixes it.”
“I am not asking for absolution.”
“Then what are you asking for?”
He went quiet. Outside, rain pressed the window with soft, restless taps. The flat hummed around them, the fridge ticking, the kettle beginning to gather heat.
Lucien’s mouth settled into a line. “Access.”
Rory stared at him. “You’re joking.”
“No.”
“Lucien.”
“Someone came to my office yesterday with one of your old Cardiff names in his mouth.”
Her stomach dropped, quick and cold. She didn’t move, but he saw the shift. He always saw too much.
“My what?”
“An old name,” he said. “Not one of the obvious ones. A name only a small number of people would know.”
Rory’s voice flattened. “Tell me who.”
“Not here.”
“Why not here? You walked into my flat with a threat and you want privacy?”
He took one slow step toward her. Rory didn’t retreat. The space between them narrowed until she could smell him, rain and smoke and some expensive cologne with a metallic edge that always reminded her of a knife freshly honed.
“Because your walls are thin, and because the man who asked about you followed me for two streets before I led him elsewhere.”
Her pulse hammered once, hard. “You led him elsewhere?”
“Do you hear another sentence in that?”
Her eyes narrowed . “You’re telling me you brought trouble to my door.”
“I am telling you I did not allow trouble to remain at your door.”
“That’s supposed to comfort me?”
“It should.”
She stared at him, anger and something much worse turning over in her chest. “You think a few careful words make this all right.”
“No.” His voice dropped. “I think I should not have come.”
Rory felt that one deep. She hated the way it sounded like a door half-closing .
Ptolemy yawned, stretched, and hopped off the sofa to weave around Rory’s ankles before making a circuit of Lucien’s polished shoes. Lucien glanced down and nudged the cat aside with a careful movement of his cane, as if even the gesture had been measured .
Rory watched his hands. Long fingers. Clean nails. The cane’s ivory handle catching the lamp light. He looked exactly as he had the last time she’d seen him and not at all like the man she’d spent three months trying not to think about after he left.
She crossed to the table and braced her palms on the edge. “Who asked?”
Lucien stayed where he was. “You will dislike the answer.”
“I dislike your face right now. Get on with it.”
“A broker in Soho. Human, by the look of him, though he wore enough warding to make a priest uncomfortable.”
Rory’s eyes sharpened. “Name.”
“Brodie Vale.”
The name meant nothing and too much at once. She searched memory, old faces, old corridors, Cardiff rain, university hallways, Evan’s fingers bruising her arm, the taste of panic, the long running fact of having to reinvent herself just to keep breathing. She hated that the city still held loose threads from her past. Hated more that Lucien had reached into them without asking.
“I don’t know him.”
“He knew enough about you to use the wrong name.” Lucien’s eye darkened. “And enough about me to believe I would take an interest.”
“Why would he think that?”
Lucien’s mouth flattened. “Because he was not wrong.”
The words landed between them with a heat that turned the room smaller.
Rory looked up slowly . “What does that mean?”
Lucien’s gaze held hers. He didn’t blink. “It means the part of your life you buried has begun to claw at the surface.”
She let out a breath and laughed once, bitter. “You really know how to ruin an evening.”
“And yet you still let me in.”
“That was a mistake.”
His eye tracked the line of her throat, the pulse there. “You have made worse.”
The answer should have annoyed her. It should have sent her straight to the door, all three bolts and a final kick for emphasis. Instead it sat there like a hand pressed against a bruise. Rory looked away first, and the movement made her furious.
“Tell me what you want,” she said. “Plainly. No velvet , no riddles.”
Lucien’s fingers tightened on the cane. He seemed to choose each word with care. “I want you to come with me tonight.”
Rory barked a short laugh. “No.”
“I expected resistance.”
“You expected me to pack a bag and follow you into whatever knife trap you’ve walked into?”
“I expected you to ask where.”
She folded her arms tighter. “All right. Where?”
“Covent Garden.”
“And?”
“And if I tell you everything here, I risk placing both of us in danger before we reach the street.”
Rory stared at him, then at the rain silvering the window, then back to him. He stood so neat and composed in the middle of Eva’s crowded flat that the contrast made him look unreal, like a dangerous illustration cut from a magazine and placed by mistake in the middle of her life.
“You show up after months, tell me someone’s digging through my past, and want me to trust you enough to follow you out into the rain.” Her mouth twisted. “You must miss me more than I thought.”
For the first time since he’d arrived, Lucien’s composure cracked into something visible. Not much. A tremor in the jaw. A fraction of pain in the set of his mouth.
“Yes,” he said.
The word hit the room and sat there.
Rory went still.
Lucien stepped closer, not enough to crowd her, just enough to change the air between them. “I did not come because this was convenient. I came because I heard your name in a place it should not have been spoken, and because I knew you would not hear it from anyone else without deciding you preferred ignorance.”
Her throat tightened. She hated that he knew her like that. Hated that he might be right.
“And what,” she said quietly, “if I don’t go with you?”
His gaze dropped to her wrist, to the crescent scar hidden beneath her cuff, then lifted again. “Then I will spend the night ensuring no one else reaches this flat.”
Ptolemy gave a low, offended chirp from the sofa.
Rory looked at the cat, then at Lucien, then at the door with its three deadbolts and all the half-forgotten rules she had made for herself after London had swallowed her whole. She should have sent him away. She knew that. She also knew he’d never come here unless something had broken his usual restraint.
She grabbed her coat from the chair and shrugged it on in one hard motion.
Lucien watched her without moving. “That was quicker than I expected.”
“Don’t sound so pleased. I’m not agreeing with you. I’m postponing the argument until after I find out why you dragged your expensive shoes into my life again.”
His mouth curved, small and unwilling. “As you wish.”
Rory snatched her keys from the dish by the sink and turned back toward him. “If this turns into a set-up, I’ll introduce you to the stairs myself.”
Lucien opened the door for her, one hand on the frame, cane angled close to his leg. “I would be disappointed if you did not threaten me properly.”
Rory stepped into the hallway, rain damp and close, and glanced back as he followed her out into the narrow landing—