AI The knock came at half past ten on a Tuesday night, three sharp raps that made Ptolemy lift his head from where he’d been curled on a stack of research notes. Rory ignored it. Eva wasn’t due back until tomorrow morning, and the curry house downstairs had long since stopped delivering. Another knock. Harder this time.
She set down her pen and crossed the cramped flat, the floorboards groaning under her weight . Three deadbolts. She slid the first one open, then paused at the second, her fingers resting on the cool metal.
“Who is it?”
A pause. Then a voice she hadn’t heard in eight months. Low, with that slight roll of the *r * that had once made her stomach tighten. “Aurora.”
Her hand dropped from the lock. She stood there, palm flat against the cheap wood, and let the name settle into the spaces between her ribs. Aurora. Nobody called her that. Nobody except him, and he’d always said it like it meant something, like it was a secret he was letting her in on.
She slid open the second bolt. Then the third.
The door swung inward, and there he stood, Lucien Moreau, leaning on that ridiculous ivory-handled cane, his platinum hair catching the dim hallway light. He looked immaculate, as always. Charcoal suit, crisp white shirt, not a single crease to suggest he’d travelled any distance to get here. But his heterochromatic eyes were wrong—the amber one too bright, the black one too deep, and both fixed on her with an intensity that made her want to shut the door again.
“You look well,” he said.
“You look like you should be dead.”
He smiled, a thin, humourless thing. “May I come in?”
She stepped aside, because she’d never been able to say no to him, not really , and because the hallway was drafty and her flat slippers were doing nothing against the cold. He limped past her, the cane tapping against the floorboards, and she caught the faint scent of sandalwood and something metallic underneath. Blood, maybe. Or the residue of whatever hell he’d crawled out of.
She closed the door and slid the bolts home one by one.
The flat felt smaller with him in it. He stood in the centre of the main room, taking in the chaos of books and papers and Eva’s half-finished diagrams pinned to every available wall space. Ptolemy watched him from his perch, tail flicking once, twice, before deciding the intruder wasn’t worth the effort and going back to sleep.
“Nice place,” he said.
“It’s a shithole.”
“I didn’t say it wasn’t.”
She crossed her arms, leaned against the door frame, and waited. He turned to face her, and the lamplight caught the strange geometry of his features, the sharp cheekbones, the mouth she’d kissed more times than she cared to count.
“You disappeared,” she said. “Eight months. No word. No—” She stopped herself, swallowed the rest of the sentence. *No explanation. No goodbye.*
“I had business.”
“You always have business.”
He shifted his weight onto the cane, and for a fraction of a second, a grimace flickered across his face before he smoothed it away. “I also had a bullet in my thigh from a deal that went sour. Three weeks in a safe house in Lyon. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t send word.”
The words landed like stones in her chest. She wanted to ask who shot him. Wanted to ask if it hurt. Wanted to ask why he was here now, standing in her friend’s shitty East London flat, telling her this like it explained everything.
Instead, she said, “There are phones in Lyon, Lucien.”
“There are demons in Lyon who trace phone calls.”
She pushed off from the door frame, walked past him to the tiny kitchenette, and filled the kettle. The familiar motions gave her something to do with her hands. Flick the switch. Pull two mugs from the rack. She kept her back to him.
“Why are you here?”
“I came to warn you.”
“Warn me.” She turned, one mug in each hand. “About what?”
“The deal that went sour. It wasn’t mine.” He set the cane against the table and lowered himself into Eva’s worn armchair, wincing as he adjusted his leg. “I was working for someone. Tracking something. And what I found leads back to London. To a name you’re familiar with.”
She set the mugs down, the ceramic clinking against the countertop. Her chest felt tight, her throat dry. “What name?”
“Evan.”
The kettle clicked off. The silence that followed was heavier than the steam curling from the spout. She stared at him, and he stared back, and eight months of anger and confusion and the slow, grinding process of moving on collapsed into a single, terrible moment.
“Evan’s gone,” she said. “I left him. He doesn’t know where I am.”
“He knows Eva’s name. He knows she’s your friend. And he’s looking for something you took from him.”
“I didn’t take anything.”
“You took yourself.” Lucien leaned forward, elbows on his knees, that mismatched gaze boring into her. “That’s the one thing he can’t replace. And he’s hell-bent on getting you back, Aurora. I’ve seen what he’s become. What he’s willing to do.”
She pressed her palms flat against the countertop, the edge digging into her skin. The scar on her wrist, the crescent-shaped one from a childhood accident, caught the light. She’d told Lucien about it once. Late at night, tangled in his sheets, her fingers tracing the lines of his chest while he’d listened with that quiet, patient attention of his.
“You should have told me sooner,” she said, and her voice came out steady, even though her hands were shaking .
“I couldn’t.”
“Bullshit.”
“It’s not.” He stood, slowly , using the armchair for support, and the effort it cost him was plain. “I was compromised. Watched. If I’d contacted you, I would have led them straight to your door. I stayed away to keep you safe.”
She laughed, a sharp, ugly sound that made Ptolemy lift his head again. “You stayed away because it was easier. Because you don’t know how to stay. You show up, you fix things, you leave. That’s your pattern, Lucien. That’s who you are.”
He didn’t flinch. He stood there, leaning on the chair, his jaw tight, and let her words hit him.
“You’re right,” he said.
The admission caught her off guard. She blinked, opened her mouth to say something, and found she had nothing.
“You’re right,” he repeated. “I run. I always have. It’s what I know. It’s what I was taught.” He took a step toward her, then another, his limp more pronounced without the cane. “But I came back. I came here. Not because I had to. Because I wanted to.”
“You wanted to warn me.”
“That too.” He stopped an arm’s length away, close enough that she could see the faint lines of exhaustion around his eyes, the shadow of stubble along his jaw that was so unlike his usual immaculate presentation. “But I could have sent a message. Could have paid someone else to deliver it. I didn’t.”
She held his gaze. The amber eye, warm and searching. The black one, depthless and dark. She’d fallen into those eyes once, let herself drown in the mystery of him, and she’d spent the last eight months learning how to breathe again.
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” she whispered.
“Say you’ll let me stay.” His voice dropped, rough at the edges. “Say you’ll let me help. And when this is over, say you’ll give me a chance to explain. Properly. Without a door between us.”
The kettle sat cold on the counter. The mugs waited, empty. Somewhere below, a car passed on Brick Lane, its headlights sweeping across the ceiling before vanishing.
Rory looked at him, at the man who’d walked out of her life and then limped back into it, and felt the familiar ache settle into her bones. Trust was a muscle she’d let atrophy. But he was here, bleeding and tired and asking for something she wasn’t sure she had left to give.
“Take off your jacket,” she said.
He hesitated.
“If you’re going to stay, I want to see the wound. I want to know exactly what I’m dealing with.”
Something shifted in his expression. Relief, maybe. Or fear. They looked the same on him.
He reached up and undid the first button of his jacket.