AI The knock came at half past midnight, and Aurora Carter nearly dropped her mug of chamomile onto the stack of Sumerian cuneiform translations that Eva had left splayed across the kitchen table.
She froze. Ptolemy, the tabby, froze too, his green eyes catching the light from the single bulb above the stove.
Nobody knocked on Eva's door after dark. Not unless they knew the three deadbolts well enough to bypass the first two with a coin and the third with a flex of the wrist, and not unless they were willing to risk the small brass bell Eva had rigged to ring in the bedroom if the chain wasn't set.
The chain was set.
Aurora set the mug down, bare feet silent on the cold floor, and picked her way through the narrow corridor of books toward the front door. The peephole was a fish-eye smudge of hallway light. She pressed her eye to it, and the rest of the evening drained out of her head like bathwater.
Lucien Moreau stood in the corridor in a charcoal suit that had no business looking that pressed at this hour, his platinum hair slicked back from a face that the tabloid papers would have called aristocratic if they ever thought to print it. His cane — the ivory-handled one she had once watched him use to fend off a man in a car park in Soho — hung loose at his side. One eye amber, the other black, and both of them looking, with infuriating accuracy, directly into the peephole.
He knew she was there.
She thought, very clearly, about not opening the door. She thought about going back to the table, picking up her mug, climbing the narrow stairs to Eva's bedroom, pulling the quilt up to her chin, and pretending that the sound of her own heartbeat wasn't currently a small embarrassing disaster.
She undid the chain. She undid the top deadbolt. She undid the second. She cracked the third and stopped, her palm flat against the wood, and said, through the gap, "You have got to be joking."
"Aurora." His voice was the same low, faintly accented thing she remembered, the consonants landing soft and the vowels unhurried . "You are not Eva."
"Eva is in Istanbul," she said, "and I am going to kill her when she gets back for not telling me you knew where to find me."
"She did not tell me. I deduced."
"Get better at deduction, Lucien. Deduce somewhere else."
She should have closed the door. She knew she should have closed the door. Instead she stood there with her hand on the knob and her heart somewhere up in her throat, and she waited, because the worst part of Lucien Moreau had always been the way he could simply wait, too.
He waited.
The fluorescent tube in the hallway buzzed, and Ptolemy chose that moment to materialize at her ankle, winding between her feet and meowing with the kind of theatrical outrage only a cat who had been recently adopted could muster. The sound was so absurd that Aurora almost laughed.
"Silas let me in downstairs," Lucien said. "I told him it was urgent."
"Silas would let the Antichrist in if he had a twenty and a sad face."
"I do have a sad face."
"You have an extremely stupid face."
"Rory."
The nickname landed low in her chest, a small hot coal of a thing, and she hated — she absolutely hated — that her hand was already moving to undo the last bolt. She pulled the door open the rest of the way, stepped back, and jerked her chin toward the cramped chaos of the flat.
"Come in, then. Don't touch anything. Don't talk to the cat. And if you ruin Eva's notes I will use that cane of yours on you."
Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. He stepped over the threshold the way he did everything, carefully , like a man who had learned long ago that thresholds meant something, and then he was inside, and the flat, which had been merely small before, became something close to claustrophobic .
He looked different. Older, maybe, in the way half-demons aged — which was to say, not at all, but with more weight behind the eyes . He had a fresh nick along the line of his jaw where a razor had been unkind, and there was a faint bruise, yellowing at the edges, just visible above his collar.
"You got hurt," she said. It came out more accusation than observation.
"It is nothing."
"That is not what I said."
He turned, then, and looked at her properly. She was aware, suddenly, of what she was wearing — one of Eva's old jumpers, too big, slipping off one shoulder; leggings; her feet bare. She was aware that her hair was unbrushed , that there was a tea stain on the cuff, that the small crescent scar on her left wrist was visible where she'd pushed the sleeve up. She was aware that none of this should have mattered and that all of it did.
"You look well," he said.
"I look like I was about to go to bed, Lucien."
"Yes," he said, and the way he said it made her feel seen in a way that scraped. "That is what I meant."
She turned away from him before her face could do anything stupid. She moved back toward the kitchen, clearing a stack of leather-bound journals off a chair to give him somewhere to sit, very deliberately not looking to see if he took it. He did. She could hear the creak of the wood.
"You shouldn't be here," she said, filling the kettle because she needed something to do with her hands. "You shouldn't know where I am. You shouldn't —"
"Knock on your door at midnight?"
"Exist in the same postcode as me, frankly."
She heard the soft tap of his cane against the floor. "I have information."
"I don't want it."
"It is about the man from the alley in Borough. The one who followed you home from the restaurant two weeks ago."
Her hands went still on the kettle. The alley. The man. The way she had walked faster and faster along Tower Bridge Road with her delivery bag clutched against her chest and the sound of his footsteps behind her in perfect , patient rhythm. She had not told Eva. She had not told Silas. She had certainly not told anyone who might tell the tall, dangerous Frenchman who had no business still being in her life.
"How do you know about that," she said, and her voice had gone very flat and very calm, the way it always did when she was frightened .
"I have eyes, Rory."
"You have *spies *, is what you have."
"Sometimes they are the same thing." A pause. "He has been dealt with. He will not trouble you again. I would have told you sooner, but I could not find you."
She set the kettle down. She turned around. He was sitting with the cane across his knees, the lamplight catching the amber in one eye, and he looked, she thought, exactly as tired as she was.
"You moved," he said. "I could not find you."
"I moved because you—"
She stopped. She had been about to say *because you were too much * or *because you were not enough * or *because I cannot tell the difference with you *. She had been about to say a dozen things that had been rattling around inside her ribcage for the better part of a year. She bit down on all of them.
"I moved because I needed to," she said instead.
He looked at her for a long moment. Then he said, very quietly, "You moved because of me."
The kettle began to hiss behind her, the small domestic sound impossibly loud in the room. Ptolemy had jumped onto the table and was making his way through Eva's translations with the focused malice of a cat who knew exactly what he was doing . Somewhere in the walls, the curry house below was finally closing up, the heavy clatter of steel shutters going down.
"Lucien," she said, and her voice came out softer than she wanted it to. "Why are you really here."
He was quiet. He uncurled his fingers from the handle of the cane. He looked, for the first time since she had known him, as though he were about to say something honest.
"Because I was told," he said, "that you had been hurt. And I discovered that I could not bear the thought of it. Even if you never wanted to see me again. Even if you hated me. Even if —" he made a small gesture with his hand, as if pushing something away "— even if you closed every door in London against me. I could not bear the thought of you being hurt and me not having done something about it."
The kettle was screaming . She could not hear it. She could not hear anything except the way her own breath was coming in shallow now, and the small thunder of her pulse .
"You don't get to do that," she said. "You don't get to disappear for nine months and then turn up at midnight and say something like that and expect me to —"
"To what."
"To just —" She gestured helplessly . "To *be fine * with it. To forgive you for leaving the way you did. To —"
"I left," he said, "because I was not safe to be near. And I was right."
She stared at him. "What does that mean."
He lifted his chin slightly . He tugged, with one finger, at the edge of his collar. Beneath the bruise, beneath the edge of the shirt, she saw, for the first time, the pale ridge of a scar that had not been there a year ago. It ran the length of his collarbone and disappeared beneath the fabric.
"Lucien," she breathed.
"It is not your fault," he said, very quickly . "It is not. I would not let it be your fault. But there are people in my world who do not appreciate the way I have —" he paused, searching for the word "— attached myself to certain humans. And I thought, if I left, they would leave you alone."
"And did they."
"No," he said. "Which is why the man in the alley is dealt with. And the two men who sent him. And the woman who sent them."
The kettle had stopped screaming. The flat was very quiet. Ptolemy had given up on the translations and was washing his face on Eva's reading list.
"You should have told me," she said.
"You would have tried to help. You would have put yourself in the middle of it. You would have been hurt."
"I am not a child, Lucien."
"No," he said. "You are not." He looked at her. "You are the most stubborn, infuriating, brilliant woman I have ever met. And I have met a great many women."
She made a small, wet, surprised sound. It might have been a laugh. It might have been something else.
"Stay for tea," she said, and the words felt enormous in her mouth .
He nodded, once.
She turned to the kettle with hands that were not quite steady, and behind her, in the lamplight, in the small wrecked room, she heard the soft sound of his cane being set aside.