AI The door swung inward with the grudging scrape of three deadbolts retracting, and the scent of old paper, turmeric, and cat immediately washed over him. Lucien Moreau stood on the threshold of Eva’s flat, one gloved hand still raised to knock again, the other resting on the ivory handle of his cane. The hallway light behind him carved his silhouette into sharp edges—charcoal wool coat, platinum hair swept back from his forehead, the mismatched gleam of amber and black eyes catching like struck flint.
Aurora Carter—Rory—froze with her fingers still curled around the edge of the door. For one suspended second the years collapsed. She saw him exactly as he had looked the night everything fractured between them: elegant, dangerous, untouchable. Then the present reasserted itself. She was barefoot in an oversized jumper that slipped off one shoulder, a smudge of biro on her cheek, hair twisted up with a pencil. The flat behind her glowed under a single lamp, every horizontal surface buried beneath Eva’s chaotic scholarship. Ptolemy the tabby wound between her ankles, purring as if the tension in the air was merely an interesting new smell.
“You,” she said. The word came out flat, almost disbelieving.
Lucien’s mouth curved—half smile, half wince. “Hello, Rory.”
His voice still carried that faint Marseille lilt , softened by years in London but never erased. It slid under her ribs the way it always had, unwelcome and familiar . She tightened her grip on the door until the wood creaked.
“Eva’s not here. She’s in Prague until Thursday.”
“I know.” He lifted one shoulder in a small, elegant shrug. “I came to see you.”
The admission hung between them like smoke. Rory felt her pulse kick against the small crescent scar on her left wrist, an old habit of anxiety she thought she had outgrown. She wanted to slam the door. She wanted to step forward and breathe him in—sandalwood, gun oil, the faint ozone tang that always clung to him after he used power. Instead she simply stared.
Lucien’s heterochromatic gaze flicked past her to the disaster of books and scrolls, then returned to her face. Something softened around his eyes. “You look… well.”
“I look like I’ve been translating Akkadian for nine straight hours,” she retorted. “Which I have. You look like you’re about to attend a funeral in Mayfair. Same as always.”
A low chuckle escaped him. The sound loosened something treacherous in her chest. She had missed that laugh more than she had let herself remember.
“May I come in?” he asked quietly . “Or would you rather I bleed on your welcome mat?”
Only then did she notice the dark stain spreading across the left side of his tailored coat, low enough that his cane partially concealed it. Her stomach lurched .
“Damn it, Luc.”
She stepped back before her brain caught up with her body. Lucien crossed the threshold with the careful grace of a man trying not to drip on ancient grimoires. Ptolemy took one look at him, fluffed his tail, and vanished under the sagging sofa with a hiss. Smart cat.
Rory shut the door, threw all three deadbolts with sharp clicks, then turned to face him. The flat suddenly felt far too small. Lucien filled it the way he always had—too tall, too composed, too much. She gestured curtly toward the only chair not covered in paper.
“Sit. Before you fall.”
“I’m not going to fall,” he said, but he sat anyway, lowering himself with a barely perceptible grimace. The cane he laid across his knees like a sword. Up close she could see the waxy sheen of pain on his forehead and the way his black iris had dilated until it nearly swallowed the amber one.
She moved to the tiny kitchenette, filled the kettle, and began rummaging for the medical kit Eva kept under the sink. Her hands moved on autopilot while her mind spun. Six months. Six months since she had last seen him, since the night he had chosen a contract over her safety and she had chosen silence over screaming at him. The attraction between them had always been a live wire; that night it had burned the insulation clean off. She still carried the scorch marks.
When she returned with gauze, antiseptic, and a bottle of single malt that Eva saved for emergencies, Lucien had unbuttoned his coat and waistcoat. The white shirt beneath was ruined . Blood welled slowly from a deep slice just above his left hip. Not fatal, but ugly .
“Silver blade?” she asked, voice tighter than she wanted.
“Courtesy of the Hollow Court’s favourite bounty hunter. He took exception to my interference in the matter of a certain Grimoire.”
Rory set the supplies on the coffee table with more force than necessary. “And you brought that exception to my door. Brilliant.”
“I brought it to the only door in London I trust.” His voice had dropped, the cultured tones fraying at the edges. “You may hate me, Rory, but you have never betrayed me. That is rarer than you know.”
She met his eyes—those impossible, beautiful, mismatched eyes—and felt the old pull tighten like a fist around her lungs. Hate him? She wished it were that simple. What she felt was far more dangerous: the memory of his mouth on hers in the rain outside Silas’s bar, the way he had whispered her name like a prayer and a curse, the way he had walked away when she asked him to stay.
“Take the shirt off,” she said brusquely.
Lucien’s brows rose a fraction, but he complied, peeling the blood-soaked fabric away from his skin with a sharp inhale. The sight of him half-naked in Eva’s cluttered flat was almost obscene. Lean muscle corded under pale skin, old scars crossing newer ones, the elegant line of his collarbones leading down to the vicious cut at his side. Rory forced her gaze to the wound.
She knelt between his knees without asking permission, because asking would have meant acknowledging the way the air between them had thickened. The antiseptic smelled sharp and clean. When she pressed the soaked gauze to the gash, Lucien’s breath hitched. One of his hands came up instinctively, fingers brushing her shoulder before he caught himself and let it fall.
“Sorry,” he murmured.
“Don’t.” The word left her harsher than intended. “Just… don’t.”
Silence stretched while she cleaned the cut. His skin was fever-warm beneath her fingers, the demonic half of his blood fighting the silver poison. She could feel the tremor running through him, small but constant. The urge to press her palm flat against his chest and feel the strange dual heartbeat was almost overwhelming .
“You left without saying goodbye,” he said at last. The words were so soft she almost missed them beneath the wet sounds of gauze.
Rory’s hands stilled. “You chose a job over warning me that Evan had sold my name to the Hollow Court. Forgive me if I didn’t feel like waiting around for flowers.”
“I thought distance would keep you safe.”
“You thought wrong.”
She finished bandaging with quick, efficient movements, tying off the gauze with perhaps more force than strictly necessary. When she sat back on her heels, their faces were level. She could see the faint white scar through his left eyebrow , the one she had given him the night they met—her elbow, his face, too much gin, and a bar fight that turned into the best mistake of her life.
Lucien lifted a hand and, very slowly , as though she might bolt, brushed the stray lock of black hair from her cheek. His thumb lingered just beneath her eye.
“I have spent six months trying to convince myself I did the right thing,” he said. “Every night I fail a little more. You are the only weakness I have never been able to afford, Rory Carter, and yet here I am. Bleeding on your floor. Asking for help I don’t deserve.”
Her heart hammered so hard she was sure he could hear it. The flat felt impossibly warm. Ptolemy chose that moment to creep out from under the sofa and leap onto the arm of Lucien’s chair, sniffing at the bloody shirt with fastidious disapproval. The absurdity of it almost made her laugh.
Almost.
Instead she rose to her feet, suddenly unable to bear the intimacy of kneeling between his legs. She crossed to the kitchenette and poured two generous measures of whisky, hands only slightly unsteady. When she returned, Lucien had pulled his coat back on but left it unbuttoned, the white bandages stark against his torso. He accepted the glass with a murmured thanks.
Rory curled into the opposite corner of the sofa, knees drawn up, studying him over the rim of her drink. The lamplight painted gold across the sharp planes of his face. She remembered how those features had looked softened by pleasure, slack with wonder, and felt heat crawl up her throat.
“Why now?” she asked. “Why come here tonight?”
“Because the Grimoire I was protecting contains a clause that binds half-demons to their human bloodlines. A clause that names you, Rory.” His black eye gleamed like polished obsidian. “Your father’s bloodline, to be precise. Brendan Carter made a bargain once, before you were born. The Hollow Court has decided it’s time to collect. I have spent the last six months burning every favour I possess to keep your name off their ledgers. Tonight they stopped taking no for an answer.”
The room tilted. Rory set her glass down before she dropped it. “My father?”
“An Irish barrister with a taste for dangerous clients,” Lucien said gently . “He thought he was buying protection for your mother. Instead he mortgaged his firstborn’s future.”
She laughed, but the sound cracked in the middle. “Of course. Because my life wasn’t complicated enough.”
Lucien leaned forward, ignoring the pull at his stitches. “I can fix this. But I need your help. And I need you to trust me again, even if only for a little while.”
Rory stared at him. The history between them felt like a living thing, coiled and restless in the narrow space. She remembered the way he had kissed her the first time—desperate, as if he had been starving for her. She remembered the way he had looked at her the last time, regret like a blade behind his eyes as he chose duty over love.
She also remembered that no one had ever made her feel as seen as Lucien Moreau. Not Evan, not the safe, boring law students at Cardiff, not anyone. He looked at her like she was a puzzle worth solving and a fire worth burning for.
Slowly, she unfolded from the sofa and crossed the distance between them. Lucien watched her approach with the stillness of a man expecting a blow. Instead she reached out and rested her fingertips against the bandage, feeling the heat of his skin through the gauze.
“I don’t trust you,” she whispered. “But I trust what we were. And I’m not letting some demonic book club collect on a debt my father signed before I could walk.”
Relief flooded his expression so completely it stole her breath. Lucien caught her wrist—the one with the crescent scar—and pressed his lips to the small mark with something perilously close to reverence.
“Rory—”
“Shut up.” She climbed into his lap with the ease of old habit, knees bracketing his hips, careful not to jar the wound. His hands settled on her waist as though they had never forgotten the shape of her. “Just… shut up for five minutes, Luc. I need to remember how much I hate you before I remember how much I don’t.”
His laugh was ragged. “Five minutes. I can manage that.”
She leaned down and kissed him.
It was not soft. It was six months of fury and longing and things left unsaid, poured into the press of mouths and the scrape of teeth. Lucien made a low sound in the back of his throat and pulled her closer, one hand sliding up to cradle the nape of her neck. The taste of whisky and blood and relief flooded her senses. She felt the tremor in his fingers, the way his breath stuttered when she nipped at his lower lip. Beneath her, his body was solid and alive and hers in a way no contract or court could claim.
When they broke apart, foreheads pressed together, Rory was shaking .
“I still want to throttle you,” she breathed.
“Understood.” His voice had gone rough, amber eye molten. “Later. After we save your future from your father’s mistakes.”
She traced the line of his jaw with her thumb, feeling the faint rasp of stubble. “You came here bleeding because you were afraid for me.”
“I came here bleeding because the thought of losing you permanently was worse than any silver blade.” He turned his head and kissed her palm. “I have never been good at choosing the safe path, Rory. But I am trying to learn how to choose you.”
The words lodged behind her ribs like a key in a lock she had pretended didn’t exist. Outside, the night traffic of Brick Lane hummed on, oblivious. Inside Eva’s chaotic flat, with its deadbolts and grimoires and disapproving tabby cat, something old and wounded began—cautiously —to heal.
Rory slid her arms around his neck and held him, careful of his injury, letting herself feel the full weight of his presence. Lucien’s arms came around her in return, strong and certain, his face buried in the curve of her shoulder. The scent of him wrapped around her like memory and promise at once.
“Five minutes are up,” she murmured against his hair.
He laughed softly , the sound vibrating through both of them. “Then I suppose we had better get to work, mon coeur. The Hollow Court waits for no one.”
Rory pulled back just enough to look at him. The mismatched eyes that had haunted her dreams for half a year gazed back, open in a way they had never been before. She saw fear there, and hope, and a love he had never quite known how to name.
She kissed him again, slower this time. A promise of her own.
When she spoke against his mouth, the words were steady.
“Let them come. We’ll burn their bloody Grimoire together.”
And for the first time in six months, Lucien Moreau smiled like a man who had finally found his way home.