AI The lock on Eva’s door turned with a gritty squeal, a sound Rory had meant to oil for months. She’d barely got the second deadbolt disengaged when the door gave a violent shove inward, catching her on the shoulder. A curse flew from her lips, sharp and instinctive, and she stumbled back a step into the cluttered abyss of the flat.
“Rory?”
The voice, a low, polished baritone with an edge of strained surprise, rooted her to the spot. It wasn’t Eva. It was a voice she hadn’t heard in three months, not since the night she’d walked away from that hotel room in Bloomsbury, leaving him with a whiskey-sour and a silence that felt like a chasm .
Lucien Moreau stood in the doorway, haloed by the sickly yellow glow of the hallway bulb. He looked thinner, the sharp lines of his face more pronounced beneath the artificial light. His tailored charcoal suit, usually impeccable, was rumpled , the jacket missing entirely. His platinum blond hair, normally slicked back with effortless precision, was disheveled , a few strands falling across his forehead. But it was the way he leaned, heavily, on the ivory handle of his cane that sent a jolt of alarm through her. His weight was settled almost entirely on his right leg, his left shoulder pressed against the doorframe as if for support.
“Lucien.” His name came out flat, stripped of the warmth it once held. She straightened, pulling herself to her full, unimpressive five-six. “What the hell are you doing here? How did you find this place?”
“I’m a resourceful man, as you well know.” His eyes, that unnerving heterochromatic pair—one a warm amber, the other a deep, fathomless black—swept over her, taking in the worn band t-shirt, the flour-dusted jeans from her shift at the Golden Empress. The observation was clinical, but beneath it, something else flickered . A hunger, perhaps. Or just pain. “Eva is away?”
“Conference in Edinburgh. You know that, or you wouldn’t be at her door instead of mine.” Rory crossed her arms, a useless shield. The flat was a chaos of Eva’s making—piles of occult texts and linguistic journals spilling from shelves, scrolls tied with twine scattered over the coffee table, charts of ley lines tacked to the wall. The tabby cat, Ptolemy, who had been investigating a sunbeam on a stack of untranslated grimoires, now sat alert, tail twitching.
Lucien’s lips, thin and pale, pressed together. He looked past her, into the room, as if assessing threats . “May I come in? It’s not… optimal, to be seen lingering.”
“Why?” she asked, not moving .
His gaze returned to hers, and for a moment, the mask of the suave information broker cracked. A raw, weary exhaustion was visible in the tightness around his eyes. “Because someone is following me, and I would rather not lead them to Silas’s doorstep, or to yours .”
The mention of her own name in that context—*yours *—was a carefully placed pinprick. He knew her defenses. He’d always known them.
Stepping back with a sharp sigh, Rory pulled the door wider. “Fine. Five minutes. Then you tell me what this is about, and you leave.”
He entered, and the scent of him filled the cramped space: expensive cologne, the faint, metallic tang of ozone that always clung to him, and underneath, something coppery and wrong. Blood. She watched him move, the click of his cane muffled by the threadbare rug. Every step was calculated , conserving energy. He bypassed the sagging armchair and sank carefully onto the edge of Eva’s desk chair, the wood groaning under his weight . Ptolemy, with the uncanny intuition of felines, leapt from the grimoires and wound around his good ankle, purring. Lucien’s hand dropped, a long, pale finger stroking the cat’s head in an automatic, tender gesture that made Rory’s throat tighten.
“You’re hurt,” she stated, her tone leaving no room for denial.
“A complication.” He shifted, and the fabric of his trousers pulled taut over his thigh. It was dark, too dark. Not charcoal. Wet. “An encounter that required… a rapid departure from a meeting in Southwark. I didn’t want to go to my usual safe houses. They’re likely being watched.”
“Who?”
His heterochromatic eyes met hers, the black one seeming to absorb the dim light. “Someone with an interest in a certain artifact I was negotiating for. Someone who doesn’t appreciate the subtlety of my methods. Your friend Eva’s work on Sumerian demonic bindings became… tangentially relevant.”
Rory’s jaw clenched . Of course. It was never just personal with Lucien. Or was it? That was the impossible, infuriating core of it. With him, the professional and the personal were a seamless, treacherous weave.
“So you brought your trouble to my doorstep. To Eva’s doorstep.” She moved to the tiny kitchen alcove, jerking open a cupboard. Her hands, she noted, were perfectly steady. Inside, she found the first-aid kit, a sad little plastic box amidst Eva’s teabags and packets of instant noodles.
“Not intentionally,” he said, his voice softer now . The fight seemed to be draining out of him. “I intended only to disappear for a few hours. I was… disoriented. I came here. Habit, perhaps.” He paused, and when he spoke again, the words were hesitant, a rarity for him. “I haven’t been to your new flat. I only have Eva’s address on file, from when we were tracking the Camden Lich. I thought it was empty.”
“Convenient,” Rory muttered, grabbing the kit and a clean tea towel. She crouched before him, the rough wood of the floorboards pressing into her knees. “Trouble always finds the convenient door.” She gestured with her chin. “Trousers. Now.”
A flicker of something—amusement? relief?—passed through his eyes. “You’re as bossy as ever, Laila.”
The old alias, the one he’d used when they’d first met in the crowded, magical chaos of a Lammas Night market, hit her with physical force. She’d been ‘Laila’ to him then, a mysterious courier. He’d been ‘the Frenchman,’ a name whispered in the same breath as dangerous favors. It had been simpler. And then it had become anything but.
“Trouser leg, Lucien. I’m not asking again.”
He complied, his movements stiff. The tear in the fabric was long and ragged, but the wound beneath was clean, precise—a deep slice along his outer thigh, missing the artery but weeping sluggishly. It didn’t look like a knife wound. The edges were too perfect , cauterized almost, as if by extreme cold or intense heat.
“Not a knife,” she said, her fingers hovering over the skin . It was hot to the touch.
“A shard of frozen shadow,” he murmured, looking away, his gaze fixed on a scroll of what looked like Akkadian script . “Painful. Not fatal. Slow to heal.”
Rory swallowed, then set to work, cleaning the wound with an antiseptic wipe. Her touch was clinical, detached. She had to keep it that way. His leg was warm and firm under her hands, the muscle rigid with pain. A thin scar, older, traced a path near his knee, a ghost from another life she didn’t know about. The crescent-shaped scar on her own left wrist, hidden by her sleeve, seemed to pulse in sympathy.
Silence stretched, thick and uncomfortable, filled only by Ptolemy’s rumbling purr and the distant, chaotic hum of Brick Lane traffic. It was Lucien who broke it.
“You look well, Rory.” His voice was low, intimate. It curled around her name in a way that made her fingers falter. “London suits you. Less harried than Cardiff.”
“Don’t,” she warned, dabbing too firmly . He hissed. “Don’t do that. Don’t pretend this is a social call. Don’t pretend we’re anything other than… this.”
“And what is ‘this’?” he asked, his gaze now fixed intently on the top of her head. “Two people who shared a few passionate nights and a fundamental misunderstanding?”
She paused, her hand still pressed against the bandage she’d just placed. She looked up, and his face was close, too close. She could see the faint lines around his eyes, the shadow of stubble on his jaw. The heterochromatic eyes held hers, and the world narrowed to the space between them.
“You lied,” she said, the words raw and quiet. “You let me believe you were just a broker, that your interest in me was just… transactional. You never told me what you are.”
“Half,” he corrected, his voice barely a whisper . “I am half of what you think. The other half is this.” He gestured weakly to the opulent, dilapidated room, to the arcane clutter. “To you, that mattered. It was a betrayal.”
“It was a secret that could have gotten me killed,” she countered, her own voice rising . “If I’d known what you were, what you were capable of, I would have been more careful . With the Camden job. With you.”
“You were careful with me?” A ghost of a smile touched his lips, a melancholy, devastating curve. “You stormed into my life in that market, all fiery blue eyes and a flash of that infernal scar when you reached for a tome, demanding answers. You trusted me with information that could have been leveraged. You let me into your bed.” He leaned forward, the movement costing him a wince of pain. “And you were *careful *?”
Her breath caught. He remembered the scar. He’d traced its crescent moon shape with his thumb one night, after, when the sweat was cooling on their skin and the city lights bled through the blinds. He hadn’t asked. He’d just touched.
“It was more than transactional,” he admitted, the admission seeming to drag from him . “For me. It always was.”
The air between them was charged , electric with the truth of it and the hurt it carried. Rory’s heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic, uneven rhythm. She wanted to shake him. She wanted to press her lips to his, to feel the impossible warmth of him, to taste the whiskey and magic on his tongue. She wanted to throw him out into the night.
“You should have told me,” she whispered, the anger giving way to a profound, aching weariness .
“I know.” His hand, the one not gripping the cane, lifted. It hovered near her cheek, a trembling question. “For what it’s worth, Rory, I am sorry. For the secret. For bringing this to your door tonight.”
Ptolemy, bored with the human drama, chose that moment to leap onto the desk, sending a cascade of papers fluttering to the floor. The spell broke. Rory sat back on her heels, putting necessary distance between them.
“Sorry doesn’t stop a frozen shadow shard,” she said, her voice regaining its briskness . “Finish the bandaging yourself. I’ll get you some water. Then you’re telling me everything. Every last detail about this meeting and who you’ve pissed off. Then we figure out your next move.”
She stood, turning towards the kitchen, her legs unsteady. His gaze followed her, a tangible weight on her back.
“As you command, Laila,” he said, and there was something in his voice that sounded dangerously like devotion.
Ignoring the shiver that traced down her spine , Rory filled a glass, her mind already racing , calculating routes, safe houses, contacts. This was the world she’d fled into, the world of hidden dangers and arcane artifacts. And Lucien Moreau, hurt and hunted, was now its undeniable, insufferable center in her living room. The complication she’d tried to leave behind had just resurfaced, bleeding on her best friend’s chair.
She took a deep breath, the scent of old paper, cat, and his bloody ozone filling her lungs. She had to help him. Not for the history, not for the attraction still humming in the charged air, but because it was the right thing to do . Because despite everything, the thought of him facing that shadow -shard wielding someone alone made something inside her clench with a fear she didn’t want to name.
Turning back, water glass in hand, she met his watchful, mismatched gaze. The romance was in ashes. The game was on. And they were, infuriatingly, in it together.