AI The first knock came just as Rory was kicking off her shoes.
The second rattled through the thin walls of Eva’s flat above the curry house, making the glass in the kitchenette cabinets shiver. Rory froze with one hand on the back of a chair and listened. Whoever was at the door had the nerve to knock like they expected to be let in.
Ptolemy, curled on a heap of laundry at the end of the sofa, opened one eye and gave her a look full of feline contempt.
“I know,” Rory muttered.
She crossed the cramped living room, stepping around a stack of books on demon taxonomies and a spread of handwritten notes Eva had left under a paperweight shaped like a shark. The flat smelled faintly of cumin, old paper, and the damp wool of Rory’s coat. Outside, Brick Lane carried on in its usual late-evening rhythm—distant voices, a scooter zipping past, laughter from the pavement below—but the knocks came again, sharper now, and she felt them in her ribs.
Three deadbolts. Eva never used less than three.
Rory glanced toward the tiny hall mirror. Her black hair had escaped its clip and hung in a straight, messy curtain to her shoulders. There was a smudge of sauce on her sleeve from work. She looked tired, which was not unusual, but she also looked like someone who had learned to expect bad news at the door.
Another knock.
“Who is it?” she called.
A beat of silence .
Then, in a voice she would have known in a blackout, “Lucien.”
Rory closed her eyes.
Of all the possible people in London, the universe had chosen him.
She should have turned around. Pretended not to hear. Left him out there until he got bored and vanished back into whatever polished, dangerous corner of the city he preferred. But Lucien Moreau was not the type to get bored, and Rory was not the type to hide forever in a flat with a tabby cat and a borrowed kettle.
She unlatched the first deadbolt. Then the second. The third resisted for a second longer, as if it too understood the mistake she was about to make.
When she opened the door, Lucien stood in the corridor under the yellow hallway bulb looking infuriatingly composed. Tailored charcoal suit. Ivory-handled cane in one hand, the blade hidden inside and probably polished to a murderous shine. Slicked-back platinum hair. One amber eye, one black, both fixed on her with a steadiness that made her spine tighten despite herself.
He looked exactly as he always did: expensive, immaculate, and faintly like a threat.
For one absurd second, all Rory could do was stare.
Then she found her voice. “You’ve got some nerve.”
His mouth shifted, not quite a smile. “Bonsoir to you as well, Aurora.”
No one said her full name like that except people who wanted something.
Rory folded her arms. “How did you find me?”
Lucien’s gaze flicked over her face, brief and unreadable , and returned to her eyes. “You are not difficult to find when one knows where to look.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It is the only one you are going to get standing in a hallway.” His tone was smooth, but there was an edge under it. “May I come in, or do you intend to keep me in the corridor until dawn?”
Rory should have said no. She knew that with the part of her brain that handled self-preservation, the same part that had gotten her out of Cardiff and into London and away from Evan with her heart still beating and her hands still shaking.
But Lucien was here. At her door. Not in a bar, not in some back room lit by a single lamp, not across a crowded room where she could pretend she didn’t track the angle of his shoulders when he moved. Here, where she could see the faint line of tension at the corner of his mouth and the way one glove had been pulled on slightly too fast, as if he’d been in a hurry.
He was never in a hurry.
That was what bothered her most.
Rory stepped back. “Fine. Come in before the neighbors start gossiping.”
His cane tapped once against the threshold as he crossed into the flat. The hallway was too narrow for his height and his arrogance, but he carried both through it without apology. Rory shut the door behind him and threw every deadbolt back into place with more force than necessary.
Ptolemy, sensing a disturbance in the natural order, leaped silently to the top of the bookshelf and fixed Lucien with narrow yellow eyes.
Lucien looked up at the cat. “Still alive, then.”
Ptolemy blinked once.
Rory let out a short, disbelieving laugh. “You’ve met before?”
“Unfortunately.”
“Rude,” she said, though her voice came out less sharp than she intended.
Lucien’s gaze moved over the room in a quick, practiced assessment: the books and scrolls, the pinned notes on Eva’s corkboard, the half-drunk mug on the table, Rory’s coat draped over a kitchen chair because there was no other place for it. Something in his expression tightened almost imperceptibly, and she caught herself wondering what he saw. A nest. A refuge. A mess.
A place she had no business inviting him into.
He looked back at her. “You are well.”
It was a statement, not a question. A dangerous one.
Rory leaned her hip against the counter and crossed her arms tighter. “I’m not dead if that’s what you mean.”
“Once again, not what I asked.”
Her pulse gave a traitorous little jump. She hated that he could do that, hated even more that he knew it. Lucien had always had a way of making a room feel smaller, quieter, more honest than it wanted to be.
“Why are you here?” she asked.
He did not answer immediately. Instead, he set his cane against the wall with precise care, removed one glove, then the other, and folded them together in one hand. The gesture was elegant enough to be insulting.
“I need to speak with you.”
Rory barked a humorless laugh. “That’s rich.”
His eyes sharpened. “Aurora.”
“No.” She pushed off the counter and took one step toward him before she could stop herself. “You don’t get to show up here after months and say my name like that. You don’t get to stand in Eva’s flat and look at me like I’m supposed to let you in just because you asked politely.”
A muscle worked once in his jaw. He had the look of a man holding several things in place at once with sheer will.
“That was not what I intended.”
“Then what did you intend?”
Lucien’s gaze dropped, briefly, to her mouth.
The air changed.
It was ridiculous, really , how quickly her body remembered things her mind kept trying to bury. The press of his hand at the small of her back when he guided her through a crowd. The dark amusement in his voice when he said her name in a room full of monsters. The first time he’d kissed her, like he had all the time in the world and was choosing to use it on her. The last time he’d looked at her and not told her the truth.
Rory lifted her chin. “Well?”
His black eye seemed almost bottomless in the flat yellow light . “I intended to ensure you were not in danger.”
That hit somewhere too familiar and too raw. She gave him a flat look. “You’re not my knight in expensive wool, Lucien.”
A flicker of something crossed his face. Pain, maybe. Or regret. With him, it was always hard to tell.
“No,” he said quietly. “I am not.”
Silence settled between them, thick enough to touch. Ptolemy shifted on the bookshelf and began washing one paw with pointed indifference.
Rory became aware, all at once, of how close Lucien stood in the narrow kitchen space. Close enough to smell the rain on his coat, the faint spice of whatever cologne clung to him, and something darker underneath—an animal heat she had never quite been able to name. Close enough that if she reached out, she could touch the line of his sleeve. She didn’t.
“Tell me what happened,” she said.
His eyes searched hers. “I should ask you the same.”
That was not an answer, and they both knew it. Rory felt her temper flare, fast and hot. “If you’re here because one of your underworld friends dragged you into some mess and you need a delivery girl with bad judgment to clean it up, you can leave.”
“Do you always assume I have come to use you?”
“Yes,” she said immediately.
The corner of his mouth moved, nearly a smile and nearly not. “Fair.”
It was such a small concession that it robbed her of momentum. Rory looked away first, which annoyed her even more. She stared at the cluttered counter instead: the kettle, the stack of unpaid bills, a teabag wrapper, a red string tied around a page of notes.
“Eva’s not here,” she said.
“I know.”
“Then why come here?”
Lucien was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke again, his voice had gone lower. “Because this is where you would be.”
Rory went still.
The words struck too cleanly, bypassing the defenses she’d spent months stacking up like furniture against a door. This is where you would be. Not because he’d tracked her with some spy and not because he thought he could pick her apart from a distance. Because he knew her routine. Knew the shape of her life now. Knew she ended up here after work, tired and stubborn and trying to help Eva with research she did not fully understand.
It was intimate in a way that made her chest ache.
“You don’t know anything about where I’d be,” she said, but it came out less certain than she wanted.
Lucien’s expression turned unreadable again, as if he had caught the crack in her voice and was choosing not to widen it in public. “No,” he said. “I know more than that.”
Rory swallowed. “Then tell me.”
He looked at her for a long second, and then, very carefully , “Someone has been asking questions about you.”
Her stomach dropped. “Who?”
“A name would be useful, yes.”
“Lucien.”
Something in her tone must have landed, because he exhaled through his nose, just once, and his fingers tightened around the brim of his glove.
“A broker in the east end. Not one of mine.” He said the last word with a faint, proprietary bitterness that made Rory’s brows twitch. “He has heard that you are of interest to certain parties who would prefer you remain untraceable.”
Rory stared at him. “That’s reassuring.”
“It is not meant to be.”
“Obviously.”
He glanced toward the window, toward the street beyond the curtains, and for the first time since she’d opened the door Rory saw it: not fear, exactly, but vigilance . A readiness in his body like the coiled pause before a blade comes free.
That made her own nerves sharpen.
“What kind of parties?” she asked.
Lucien turned back to her. “The kind that do not ask twice.”
Rory let out a slow breath and rubbed at the scar on her left wrist with her thumb without meaning to. Her mind moved quickly , fitting pieces together, refusing panic the way it always did in a crisis. If someone had been asking about her, it meant her name had surfaced somewhere it should not have. Maybe because of work. Maybe because of Eva. Maybe because Lucien—
She stopped that thought before it became useful.
“Why tell me?” she asked. “Why not just send a warning and disappear again?”
Something flashed in his gaze, dangerous and almost tender in a way that made her chest tighten. “Would you have believed a warning from me sent by post?”
“No.”
“Exactly.”
Rory laughed under her breath despite herself, then immediately wished she hadn’t. The sound hung between them, oddly soft.
Lucien’s attention fixed on her face like a hand. “You are angry.”
“You noticed.”
“You are also frightened.”
“Don’t psychoanalyze me in my own kitchen.”
His gaze dipped to her hand on her wrist and then back up. “Then do not tremble in front of me.”
Rory looked down.
Her hand was, in fact, shaking.
The realization made heat rise to her cheeks. She curled her fingers into her palm and tucked both hands under her arms, but the damage was done. Lucien had seen. Of course he had.
His face changed at once, the hard edge softening into something she could not bear to name. He took one step closer before he seemed to catch himself and stopped.
“Rory,” he said, and this time her nickname sounded like an apology .
The room felt too small for the years between them. Too small for the things she had never said and the things he never explained. She had spent so long insisting she was done, that whatever had happened between them was over, that seeing him now should feel like reopening an old bruise and nothing more. Instead it felt like someone had pressed a thumb to a crack in glass and everything inside her had gone bright and dangerous.
“Don’t,” she whispered.
He did not ask what she meant. That was one of the worst things about him: he understood too much.
“I should have told you,” he said.
The words came quietly, but they landed with the force of a slammed door.
Rory stared at him. “That is the ugliest understatement you’ve ever made.”
His mouth tightened. “Perhaps.”
“You vanished.”
“I left.”
“You disappeared after saying you’d—”
She stopped, because the rest of the sentence would have been a confession. After saying you’d call. After saying you wouldn’t make me feel foolish for believing you. After saying all the careful things that had sounded like promises at the time .
Lucien’s expression sharpened with old hurt, and there it was: the thing under the immaculate suit, under the cane and the charm and the polished danger. The wound she had left in him when she’d told him to go.
Or maybe the wound he’d left first.
“I did not come here to argue,” he said.
“No,” Rory said, voice gone thin . “You came here because someone’s asking about me and you thought I should know before I end up on the wrong side of a supernatural knife.”
“Yes.”
She stared at him. Honest, infuriating Lucien. He could still make her want to scream and kiss him in the same breath.
“Fine,” she said. “I know. Now you can go.”
His gaze did not move from her face. “No.”
“No?”
“No.”
Rory blinked. “You don’t get to no me in my own flat.”
“I do tonight.”
She let out a sharp laugh. “You’re unbelievable.”
“And yet you are still looking at me.”
The words slipped in between them like a hand at the waist. Rory’s breath caught. She hated that he was right. Hated that her eyes kept finding his face, the strong line of his nose, the slight asymmetry in the set of his mouth, the impossible contrast of amber and black, beautiful in a way that felt unfair. Hated that all the anger in her was braided through with a deeper, more dangerous thing that had never fully gone away.
Lucien saw it, too. Of course he did.
When he spoke again, his voice was lower still. “Let me stay until morning.”
Rory’s pulse kicked hard. “Absolutely not.”
“Rory.”
“No.”
He inclined his head, barely. “Then let me see that your windows are locked. Let me check the hall. If someone is following you, they may already know where you live.”
She should have told him no again, should have slammed the door in his face and gone back to bed with the deadbolt key under her pillow. But the flat had gone suddenly quiet in a way she did not like, the kind of quiet that made every distant sound on Brick Lane seem staged and intentional.
Ptolemy hissed at the window.
Rory looked toward the cat, then back at Lucien. “If this is a trick—”
“It is not.”
“That was a threat, not a promise.”
A shadow of a smile touched his mouth. “I know.”
She hated that smile . She hated that it reminded her of every night she had spent trying not to look at him across a room and failing.
Rory stepped aside with bad grace and waved a hand toward the window. “Fine. Lock the damn windows. Then you leave.”
Lucien’s eyes held hers a second longer than necessary, and in that look was a dozen things he did not say: I missed you. I’m sorry. I came because I could not not come. I should have done better.
Then he moved past her into the little flat with the same measured elegance as if she had invited him for dinner instead of into the wreckage of her nerves. Rory watched him cross to the window, cane tapping once against the floorboards, and knew with a sickening, exhilarating certainty that letting him in had been a mistake.
She also knew, just as surely, that if he turned around and asked her to make the mistake again, she might say yes.