AI The third deadbolt dragged in its housing before giving way with a resentful scrape. Aurora opened the door six inches, kept the chain on, and found Lucien Moreau standing beneath the flickering landing light.
For one stupid second, she forgot how breathing worked.
Rain darkened the shoulders of his charcoal suit. His platinum hair, usually slicked into immaculate submission, had come loose at one temple. The ivory handle of his cane rested beneath one gloved palm. He looked much as he had three months ago—expensive, composed, and wholly capable of ruining her evening with a single lift of his eyebrow .
Only the blood on his shirt was new.
“Bonsoir, Rory.”
She shut the door in his face.
Or tried to . His cane slid through the gap before the latch caught. Not forcefully. Lucien never needed force when audacity would do.
“Remove that,” she said.
“I would prefer not to bleed to death on Eva’s doormat.”
“Try the pavement.”
“The pavement lacks your warmth .”
“You’ve confused me with someone who doesn’t hate you.”
“No.” His voice softened . “I have not.”
That landed exactly where he intended. Rory tightened her hand around the door. The small crescent scar on her left wrist flashed pale beneath the pushed-up sleeve of her jumper.
Behind her, Ptolemy sprang from a mound of books onto the narrow hall table. The tabby peered around Rory’s hip and chirruped.
“Traitor,” she told him .
Lucien’s black eye appeared in the gap beneath the chain, swallowing the weak light. His other eye, amber and bright, was narrowed with pain. “The cat has always been an excellent judge of character.”
“The cat eats cobwebs.”
“Then I stand corrected.”
A drop of blood fell from beneath his jacket and struck the landing carpet.
Rory stared at it. Her anger remained perfectly intact, which was inconvenient. So did every other feeling she had spent three months boxing up and shoving into the least accessible corners of her mind.
“Who knows you’re here?”
“If I have done this correctly, no one.”
“And if you haven’t?”
“Then we will discover how effective Eva’s wards are.”
Rory’s gaze snapped to his face. “You brought something here?”
“I brought myself. Something followed.”
“Of course it did.”
The curry house below sent cumin, frying onions, and hot oil curling through the floorboards. Somewhere on Brick Lane a car horn blared. Ordinary London noises, thin armour against the things Lucien carried in his wake.
She could still refuse him. She ought to. Eva was away in Leeds chasing a reference in a seventeenth-century grimoire, and Rory had promised to feed Ptolemy, not admit wounded half-demons with a talent for betrayal.
Lucien swayed.
It was barely perceptible, a tiny surrender of weight into the cane. On anyone else, she might have missed it. On him, it was as subtle as a church collapsing.
“Damn you,” she muttered.
“I believe someone already has.”
Rory closed the door enough to slip the chain free, then hauled it open. “Inside.”
He crossed the threshold without triumph, which frightened her more than blood did. She slammed the door and drove all three deadbolts home. The air changed at the third metallic clunk. Eva’s wards stirred in the walls, a pressure like thunder behind Rory’s teeth.
Lucien leaned against the bookcase, dislodging a rain of handwritten notes.
“Don’t bleed on the first editions,” Rory said.
He glanced at the tottering shelves. “Which are the first editions?”
“Knowing Eva? All of them.”
Ptolemy wound around his polished shoes, purring hard enough to vibrate. Lucien bent to scratch between the cat’s ears and went white.
Rory caught his arm before he hit the floor.
His body struck hers with a solid, startling heat. One hand closed around her shoulder. His breath brushed her cheek, sharp and unsteady. Beneath rain, blood, and London grime, he smelled the same: bergamot, smoke, and some darker spice she had never identified.
Memory was a vicious animal. It gave her the press of his mouth against hers in a Soho alley, his hand cupping the back of her neck while hellhounds bayed two streets away. It gave her his voice murmuring her name as if it were something precious. Then it gave her the empty hotel room the next morning and the note on the pillow.
Do not look for me.
As if she ever followed instructions.
“Sit down,” she said.
“I am entirely capable—”
“Lucien.”
He looked at her. Up close, his composure had cracks. Rain clung to his lashes. There was a bruise along his jaw and another disappearing beneath his collar. His amber eye held hers; the black one reflected nothing.
“Sit,” she repeated.
He obeyed.
Getting him into Eva’s sitting room required stepping over two stacks of books, a rolled map, and a brass instrument Rory had learned not to touch. She pushed a heap of papers off the small sofa. Lucien lowered himself onto it, cane braced between his knees.
“Jacket off.”
One corner of his mouth moved. “You used to ask more sweetly .”
“I used to think you were worth being sweet to.”
The almost-smile vanished.
Good, Rory thought, and hated the hollow satisfaction that followed.
He set the cane within reach and shrugged out of his jacket. The motion pulled a hiss from him. His white shirt was soaked red along his left side, the fabric torn in four parallel slashes.
Rory crouched in front of him. “What did this?”
“A disagreement.”
“With a garden rake?”
“A vargheist.”
“Right. Obviously.” She reached for the shirt, then stopped. “May I?”
His gaze dropped to her hand. “Since when do you ask?”
“Since I discovered people can disappear after you touch them.”
Silence tightened between them.
Lucien inclined his head. “You may.”
She unfastened the blood-slick buttons. Her fingers stayed steady because she refused to allow them any alternative. Beneath the shirt lay hard muscle, old scars, and four black-edged wounds curving from his ribs toward his abdomen. The flesh around them had taken on a faint grey cast.
“That’s poisoned.”
“Yes.”
“And you came here instead of a healer?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Eva keeps powdered sunroot in a blue ceramic jar.”
Rory sat back on her heels. “You came for Eva.”
His jaw flexed. “I came to the only warded flat in East London whose occupant might not immediately sell me to the Court of Ash.”
“Eva isn’t here.”
“I noticed.”
“Did you?”
His eyes returned to hers. Whatever answer he had, he chose not to give it.
Rory rose and crossed into the kitchenette. Every surface there, too, had surrendered to Eva’s work. Scrolls crowded the draining board. A mortar and pestle sat inside the microwave. Rory opened three cupboards before finding a line of mismatched jars behind a box of tea.
“Blue ceramic,” she called. “There are four.”
“The one marked S.”
“They’re all marked S.”
“Eva’s filing system has deteriorated.”
“Her filing system tried to bite me on Tuesday.”
“That would be the Sumerian shelf.”
Rory uncorked the first jar. Silver vapour spilled out. She shoved the stopper back in.
Not that one.
The second contained something that screamed faintly. The third held yellow powder smelling of cut grass and burnt sugar.
She carried it back with a bowl, clean cloths, and the bottle of vodka Eva kept behind a stack of demonological dictionaries.
Lucien eyed the vodka. “Is that for the wound?”
“Depends how much you annoy me.”
She mixed the sunroot into a paste according to his instructions. Outside, footsteps creaked on the stairs.
Both of them froze.
Lucien’s hand closed around his cane. The ivory handle twisted with a quiet click, releasing an inch of narrow steel.
The footsteps stopped on the landing.
Ptolemy’s fur rose. A low growl emerged from the small cat, absurd and deadly serious.
Something scratched the other side of the door.
Once.
Twice.
Then a voice said, “Rory?”
Her own voice.
The skin tightened across her shoulders.
“Open the door,” the thing outside pleaded in her exact Welsh-tinged cadence. “Please. He’s hurt me.”
Lucien rose, though the effort nearly folded him. “Do not answer.”
“I wasn’t planning a reunion.”
The handle turned. One deadbolt shuddered.
Eva’s wards flared, lines of blue-white light racing across the walls beneath the wallpaper. Books trembled on shelves. The thing outside shrieked, Rory’s stolen voice splitting into a sound like metal dragged over bone.
Then it was gone .
The wards faded. A scroll rolled off the mantel and landed with a papery slap.
Rory stared at the door. “What the hell was that?”
“A witness-hound.”
“You said a vargheist followed you.”
“The vargheist clawed me. The witness-hound followed.”
“Any other horrors queuing downstairs? A plague demon? Tax collectors?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
She rounded on him. “You don’t get to do this.”
His expression closed. “I had little choice.”
“You always have a choice. You just never bother telling anyone else what it is.”
“I came because these wards can hold it until dawn.”
“You came because you knew I’d let you in.”
That struck him still.
Rory’s pulse hammered in her throat. She had not meant to say it. Or perhaps she had meant to say it for three months.
“You left me in that hotel,” she said. “No explanation. No goodbye. Just six words on a scrap of paper after you’d spent half the night making me think—”
Her voice caught. She hated that. Hated him for hearing it.
Lucien slid the blade back into his cane. “Making you think what?”
“That I mattered.”
The flat seemed to contract around them, every book and scroll leaning close.
“You mattered too much,” he said.
Rory laughed once, without humour. “That’s convenient.”
“It is the opposite of convenient.”
“Don’t.”
“Rory—”
“No. You don’t get to dress cowardice up as sacrifice because it sounds prettier in French.”
Anger flashed in his amber eye. “The Court had your name.”
She stopped.
Lucien’s breathing had gone shallow. Blood spread anew across his open shirt, but his voice remained precise.
“They had photographs of you making deliveries for the Golden Empress. They knew which entrance you used at Silas’ bar. They knew your parents’ names. Your father’s chambers. Your mother’s school.” His fingers whitened around the cane. “They knew about Cardiff. They knew about Evan.”
Cold moved through her, deep and clean.
“How?”
“Because I allowed myself to be seen caring for you.”
The words hung there, stripped of ornament.
Rory folded her arms to hide the tremor in her hands. “So you vanished.”
“I made a bargain. My absence in exchange for the destruction of the file.”
“And you trusted them?”
“No. I destroyed their copies myself.”
Something in his tone painted the rest: fire, perhaps, or blood. Lucien was a fixer. An information broker. He traded secrets for a living and carried a sword in his cane because sometimes information needed a sharper argument.
“You could have told me.”
“The bargain prohibited contact.”
“That note was contact.”
A faint, bleak smile touched his mouth. “I have never been gifted at obedience.”
“You could have trusted me.”
“With your own life? Perhaps. With your parents’?” He shook his head. “I had no right.”
“But you had the right to make the choice for me?”
“No.”
The simple answer took the fight out of her more effectively than any excuse.
Lucien lowered himself back onto the sofa, one hand pressed to his side. “No,” he said again. “I did not. I told myself I was protecting you. Some part of me was. Another part was afraid that if I saw you again, I would fail to leave.”
Rory looked down at the bowl of golden paste on the table.
“Your talent for romantic declarations needs work.”
“I have had little practice.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“I did not say I lacked practice with romance.” His gaze lifted to hers. “Only declarations.”
Heat stirred beneath her anger, unwelcome and achingly familiar .
She knelt again. “This is going to hurt.”
“Your bedside manner remains enchanting.”
Rory pressed the sunroot paste into the first wound.
Lucien swore in French and seized her wrist. His grip stopped just short of painful. Their faces were inches apart.
“Let go,” she said softly .
He did at once.
She worked the paste into each slash. Smoke rose where gold touched blackened flesh. Lucien went rigid, head tipped back, throat exposed. Rory concentrated on the wounds and not the warmth of his skin beneath her palm.
When she finished, she bound his ribs with torn strips from one of Eva’s clean sheets. Eva would complain. Rory would buy her another.
“There.” She sat beside him because her knees had begun to ache. “You’ll live.”
“I had every confidence.”
“You nearly fainted in the hall.”
“A malicious rumour.”
Ptolemy jumped onto Lucien’s lap, circled twice, then settled directly against his bandaged side. Lucien winced but did not move him.
Rory stared at the cat. “He knows you’re evil.”
“He respects nuance.”
Rain whispered against the windows. Somewhere below, the curry house door banged shut, followed by a burst of laughter from the street. Dawn was hours away. Until then, the witness-hound waited beyond the wards, and Lucien could not leave.
Forced together. The idea should have felt like a trap .
Instead, with his jacket draped over Eva’s books and his blood beneath her fingernails, the flat felt less airless than it had a moment before he knocked.
“I looked for you,” she said.
His hand stilled on Ptolemy’s back.
“For six weeks. I called in every favour I had. I even asked Silas, and he charged me two bottles of whiskey just to say he hadn’t seen you.”
“I am sorry.”
“I don’t want sorry.”
“What do you want?”
Rory met his gaze. His mismatched eyes had always unsettled other people. She had never found them monstrous. The amber held too much feeling; the black held everything he feared to show.
“The truth,” she said. “All of it. No bargains made on my behalf. No noble disappearances. No six-word notes.”
“That may take until dawn.”
“We’ve nowhere else to be.”
His expression shifted, caution and longing crossing it too quickly for anyone who did not know him. Rory knew him. That had been the problem from the beginning.
“And after dawn?” he asked.
She glanced at his mouth. A mistake. His lips parted, and the room seemed to narrow to the small space between them.
“After dawn,” she said, “you can ask me properly.”
“Ask you what?”
“If there’s anything left to salvage.”
Lucien leaned closer, slowly enough that she could stop him. “Is there?”
“That wasn’t proper.”
“Rory.”
Her name in his voice undid one careful stitch inside her.
She touched the bruise on his jaw, letting her fingertips rest there. “You hurt me.”
“I know.”
“I’m still angry.”
“I would be disappointed if you were not.”
“And I’m not forgiving you tonight.”
His amber eye warmed. “I would not dare ask.”
“But you can kiss me.”
For once, Lucien Moreau had no clever answer.
His hand came up to cradle the back of her neck. He paused there, breath mingling with hers, waiting. The choice remained hers. It should always have been hers.
Rory closed the distance.
The kiss was gentler than their last and far more dangerous. No hellhounds bayed nearby, no frantic escape waited at the end of it. There was only Lucien’s mouth moving over hers with painful care, his thumb brushing the skin below her ear, and three months of anger melting into something no less fierce.
She caught his lower lip between her teeth.
He made a low sound and pulled her closer before pain checked him. Rory broke away at once.
“Bandages,” she murmured.
“Cruel things.”
“You’ve been mauled and poisoned.”
“Yes.”
“There’s a monster outside.”
“Also yes.”
“And Eva will kill us if you bleed on her sofa.”
His forehead rested against hers. “Then it appears I must behave.”
Rory smiled despite herself. “Can you?”
“No.”
Ptolemy, offended by the movement, dug his claws into Lucien’s thigh.
Lucien shut his eyes. “Your cat is attempting to murder me.”
“Eva’s cat.”
“An important distinction in my final moments.”
Rory eased Ptolemy aside and took Lucien’s hand. His fingers closed around hers, warm and certain, but not possessive. Outside, something padded softly across the landing and began to scratch at the door again.
The wards hummed.
Lucien looked toward the hall, then back at her. “I should tell you what the Court wants.”
“You should.”
“And why they sent the vargheist.”
“Yes.”
“And what, precisely , I destroyed to keep your name from them.”
Rory tightened her grip. “Start at the beginning.”
He studied her as though committing the moment to memory . Then he raised her scarred wrist and pressed his lips to the pale crescent there.
“This time,” he said, “I will tell you everything.”