AI The third deadbolt stuck, like it always did.
Rory had to put her shoulder into it, cursing under her breath as the smell of turmeric and frying oil from the curry house below bled up through the floorboards. She'd been at Eva's flat for three days while Silas had the pipes replaced in the bar and her own flat above it aired out, three days of sleeping on Eva's lumpy futon surrounded by stacks of books and half-unrolled scrolls and open notebooks filled with Eva's frantic handwriting. She'd just gotten out of the shower, her straight black hair still damp and dripping onto the collar of an oversized t-shirt, and Ptolemy the tabby had been yowling at the front door for a full minute like someone had set his tail on fire.
She wrenched the last bolt free and pulled the door open.
Lucien Moreau stood on the landing.
For a second her brain didn't file him correctly. It took in the tailored charcoal suit first, immaculate despite the April rain speckling the shoulders, then the ivory handle of the cane propped against the step, then his hair, that slicked-back platinum blond that caught the dim hall light. Then his eyes.
One amber, one black. Heterochromatic and impossible to lie to.
He looked at her the same way, taking inventory. Bare feet. The faded Cardiff University Pre-Law shirt that hit her mid-thigh. Hair wet, shoulder-length, black as ink. No makeup. Bright blue eyes gone wide.
"Rory."
His voice was low, French accent tucked neatly behind perfect English. The way he said her name had always done something stupid to her pulse .
She recovered first. Rory Carter had built a career out of being cool-headed when other people panicked. It was what made her good on a delivery bike in London traffic and what made Silas let her live above his bar in the first place.
"What are you doing here?" she said. And then, because her manners had been drilled into her by a Welsh teacher mother, "How did you know I was here?"
He lifted his cane slightly , not quite a shrug . "Eva texted Silas. Silas told me you were minding Ptolemy. I took a chance."
Of course he did. Lucien knew everything that happened in the supernatural underbelly of this city before it happened. It was his job. Fixer, information broker, half-demon son of a woman from Marseille and something from Avaros that she refused to ever be afraid of. He spoke four languages fluently and he used all of them when he was trying not to say what he actually meant.
"You didn't answer the first question," she said.
He looked past her into the flat. The cramped one-bedroom was worse than usual. Eva had left in a rush for a dig up north, leaving every surface covered. Books stacked two high on the kitchen counter, scrolls threatening to roll off the coffee table, Post-its stuck to the fridge, the kettle, the spine of the cat. Ptolemy wound himself around Rory's ankle and then, traitor that he was, went straight to Lucien and butted his head against the expensive leather of his shoe.
"I came to see if you were alright," Lucien said.
It landed wrong. Rory felt her jaw tighten.
"I'm fine."
"Are you?"
"Yes." The word was too sharp. She crossed her arms without thinking and felt the small crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist pull, thin and pale from a childhood accident in her parents' garden in Cardiff. "I'm fine. Which is what I told you three weeks ago when you decided I wasn't."
Lucien's mouth flattened. That amber eye flared a fraction, catching light. The black one seemed to swallow it.
"That is not what happened."
"That is exactly what happened." She was aware that she was blocking the doorway, that at five-six she had to look up at him at five-eleven, that her knees were still damp from the shower and her t-shirt was riding up. She didn't move. "You said I was in over my head. That I should go back to delivering noodles for Yu-Fei and leave the real work to people who know what they're doing. Then you left. No call. Nothing."
"I thought space would be useful."
"Whose idea of useful? Yours? Because mine of useful would have been you actually trusting that I can think on my feet."
He exhaled through his nose, a soft, frustrated sound. "Rory."
"Don't." She stepped back before he could say it in that voice, the one that made her want to forgive him just to make it stop. "If you came to apologize, you can do it from out there."
"May I come in?"
She wanted to say no. She wanted to slam all three deadbolts and go back to her tea getting cold on top of a pile of books about binding sigils. But Ptolemy was still purring against his leg, and rain was now visibly beading on Lucien's suit, and some small, humiliating part of her had missed the way he took up space in a room.
She turned and walked away, leaving the door open. "Fine. But don't touch anything. Eva will kill both of us."
She heard the soft tap of his cane on the linoleum, the muted thud as he closed the door behind him and, with a precision that irritated her, locked the deadbolts again. One. Two. Three. The stuck third one slid home without a fight for him.
"Show off," she muttered.
"I oiled it last time I was here," he said.
"You what?"
"Eva asked."
Of course Eva had asked. Eva collected strays and Lucien collected favors. Rory went to the kitchenette to rescue her mug, her bare feet sticking slightly to a patch of floor where Ptolemy had knocked over honey last week. She could feel Lucien behind her, not approaching, just standing in the tiny living room and looking at the chaos.
"You should not be staying here alone," he said after a moment. "Not after the Empress job."
And there it was. The real reason.
Rory had taken a delivery run for Golden Empress into Limehouse three weeks ago and ended up in the middle of a turf dispute between two minor courts. She'd gotten out by talking, by lying, by doing the quick out-of-the-box thinking that had always been her only real magic. She'd gotten out with a thin cut across her ribs and a story she hadn't wanted to tell anyone twice. Lucien had arrived ten minutes after she'd called Silas, taken one look at her bloody shirt, and gone absolutely still in that way half-demons did when they were furious.
He'd told her she was reckless. She'd told him she wasn't his to protect. He'd left.
Now he was here, soaked at the shoulders, holding his ridiculous ivory-handled cane that she knew from experience concealed a thin, vicious blade.
"I'm not alone, I have Ptolemy," she said, trying for flippant and missing. "He's very menacing."
"Rory." He said her name again, softer this time. "I was afraid."
That stopped her.
She turned. He was closer than she'd thought, near enough that she could smell rain and his cologne, something clean and woody. His suit jacket was open. The waistcoat underneath was charcoal too, perfect stitching. Nothing about him ever looked accidental. Except his eyes, perhaps. The amber one kept flicking down to her mouth and then away.
"Afraid of what?" she asked.
"That you would get yourself killed because I have grown accustomed to you being alive and opinionated in my city." He said it with that old dryness, but there was a fray at the edge. "Afraid that you think I do not respect your mind. I do. It is the best thing about you. It is distracting, in fact. I cannot think properly when you are using it to argue with me."
Her throat went dry.
"You told me to go back to delivering noodles," she said, but her voice was quieter now .
"I was angry," he admitted. "I speak badly when I am angry. In French, usually. This time I managed it in English. I should have said—" He stopped, adjusted his grip on his cane. The knuckles were white. "I should have said that when I saw blood on your shirt I remembered that you are human. Entirely. And I am not. And there are things in this city that do not care how clever you are."
"I'm not stupid, Lucien."
"I know." He took one step forward. The floor creaked. Ptolemy jumped up onto the tower of books by the futon and watched them both with a judge's indifference. "You left law. You fled Cardiff after Evan. You rebuilt a life here, brick by brick, above a bar, on a bicycle, with no magic and no lineage to protect you. Of course you are not stupid. You are formidable."
She felt her eyes start to sting, which was absurd. She was not going to cry in front of him in a t-shirt that had a hole under the left arm.
"I missed you," she said, because if he could be honest, she could be too. "Which is annoying, because you were being an ass."
A ghost of a smile touched his mouth. "I am frequently an ass. It is part of my charm . Or so I am told."
"Who told you that?"
"I made it up."
She laughed before she could stop herself, a wet, startled sound. The bright blue of her eyes was very bright now. He was close enough to see the way her damp hair was starting to curl slightly at the ends. Close enough that if she shifted her weight , her bare knee would brush his trousers.
"Come here," he said, in French this time. Viens ici. His French was different, less polished, the Marseille underneath showing through.
"I don't speak French," she lied. He knew she understood at least that.
"You understand perfectly ."
She did. She'd understood him since the night they'd met at Silas' when he'd ordered whisky and she'd told him she was only there because she could get free crisps and he'd looked at her like he'd never seen anyone quite like her before.
She stepped forward. He didn't move his cane. He didn't need to. His free hand came up, hesitant, and tucked a strand of her black hair behind her ear, fingers barely grazing. His skin was warm.
"You left," she whispered.
"And you let me," he whispered back.
"So come back properly this time."
Lucien's heterochromatic gaze dropped, caught, held. His hand slid down to cup her jaw, thumb brushing the corner of her mouth.
"Is there still room on that futon?" he asked, low .
"No," she said. "But you're small."
He huffed a laugh. "Five eleven is not small."
"For a half-demon with a complex ."
He leaned in then, slowly enough that she could have stopped him. She didn't. She rose onto her toes, her hands finding the lapels of that perfect charcoal suit and ruining them, and the kiss was warm and a little damp and tasted like rain . It felt like coming home to a place she hadn't realized she'd been locked out of.
Ptolemy made a disgruntled meow as Lucien's cane clattered to the floor, forgotten, and Rory smiled against his mouth, cool-headed and quick-thinking and entirely unable to think at all.