AI The third deadbolt stuck, like it always did.
Rory jiggled it, swore at it under her breath, and threw her shoulder into the door of Eva's flat. The wood caught on a stack of books on the other side and scraped open six inches, spilling the smell of cumin and frying ghee from the curry house below up into the hallway.
She hadn't expected anyone else to be on the landing. Eva was supposed to be at the British Library until close.
Lucien Moreau was not supposed to be at the top of the stairs.
He stood there in the narrow gloom , one hand resting on the ivory head of his cane, the other in the pocket of his charcoal suit. The suit was perfect despite the rain hammering Brick Lane outside. Not a crease. Not a drop on his polished shoes, which was impossible. His platinum blond hair was slicked back exactly the way she remembered, and when he looked up at her struggling with the door, she caught it - one eye amber, catching the low hallway light, the other flat black and unreadable .
Her hand went to the doorframe.
For a second neither of them moved.
"Rory," he said. His voice was low, his accent still edged with Marseille even after years in London. He said her name like he was trying it out again to see if it still fit.
She stared. Her pulse had jumped without her permission, hard against her ribs. "Luc."
Rain drummed on the flat roof. Somewhere below, a pan clattered. Ptolemy, Eva's tabby, appeared from behind Lucien's legs and wound himself through the crack in the door, tail high.
"You've changed the locks," Lucien said.
"We haven't. It's the same three deadbolts. That one sticks." She said it automatically, cool-headed, as if a year hadn't passed since she'd last seen him standing in a doorway. As if the last time hadn't been at Silas' after hours, her shouting, him refusing to shout back, his cane left leaning against her kitchen counter because he'd walked out too fast to remember it. "What are you doing here, Lucien?"
He tilted his head. The black eye seemed to absorb more light than it should have. "Eva called me. She said you had a problem."
"Eva called you?" Rory let the door fall shut another inch, as if that would help. "Eva doesn't even like you."
"Eva tolerates me when she requires a translator who can read Infernal without bursting into flame. This qualified."
That was Lucien all over - impeccable, indirect, making a joke out of information that could get you killed. She'd missed it more than she wanted to admit.
She pushed the door all the way open. Books slid. Parchment rustled. Eva's flat was the same as ever, every surface covered with open volumes, scrolls half-unrolled, Post-its in Eva's furious scrawl stuck to mugs and lampshades. It smelled like old paper and sandalwood and cat. Rory's own bag - the red insulated box she used for deliveries for the Golden Empress - was dumped by the sagging armchair where she'd been crashing since the leak above Silas' bar had finally won.
"You can come in for two minutes," she said, because Eva had taught her to never leave a half-demon standing in a hallway. "Then you leave."
He stepped inside, careful with his cane. Ptolemy jumped onto a pile of grimoires and knocked one to the floor. Lucien didn't flinch.
"Your flat above Silas' is compromised," he said, without preamble .
Rory froze in the act of toeing off her wet trainers. "How do you know where I live?"
"Rory."
Right. Fixer. Information broker for London's supernatural underworld. He knew where everyone lived. He probably knew what she had for breakfast and how much Yu-Fei still owed her in tips this week. She pulled her damp socks off, annoyed at the heat crawling up her neck.
"It's just a leak," she said.
Lucien's amber eye swept the flat, then came back to her, sharp. "It is not a leak. The boy who runs numbers for Silas saw someone chalk the threshold last night. Avaros script. A binding mark."
The small crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist throbbed , a sympathetic ghost. She rubbed at it without thinking. That mark was from ten years ago, falling off a wall in Cardiff. Nothing to do with demons. Except now everything seemed to be about demons.
"And you came yourself because you're so concerned about my threshold?" she said. Her voice came out lighter than she felt, bright blue eyes narrowing at him. "You could have texted Eva."
"I did text Eva." He reached into his inner breast pocket and produced his phone, showed her the screen for half a second. It was, absurdly, a string of messages in French, Eva replying in terse English. "She told me you threw your phone in the Thames."
"I dropped it. While I was on a delivery. On Bethnal Green Road. It was wet."
"You said you never wanted to see me again."
The words landed clean. No venom in them. That was worse. If he'd been cruel she could have been angry properly.
He stood only a foot away now, and she had to tilt her chin up to hold his gaze. At five eleven he wasn't that much taller than her five six, but the way he carried himself - straight, precise, the ivory handle of his cane gleaming - made him seem taller. She could smell his cologne, something dark and expensive, cedar and smoke.
"You asked me to choose," she said quietly. "Between you and the job. Between knowing about your world and staying ignorant. You didn't give me a third option."
"I was trying to keep you alive."
"By lying to me for six months?"
His jaw tightened. The black eye seemed to flicker . "By not telling you that your boyfriend's business partner was trafficking in demon-touched children," he said in French, then caught himself and switched to English. "You were delivering for him then. For the Empress. I thought if you knew what was in the back of some of those vans—"
"I wasn't stupid, Lucien." Her hands had gone cold. She shoved them into the sleeves of her hoodie. "I knew Yu-Fei's cousin was shady. I asked you about it. You told me not to worry. You told me to trust you."
"I told you to trust me because I was handling it."
"You're not my minder."
"No," he said. "I was trying to be something else."
The flat was too small for this conversation. The piles of books made everything closer. Ptolemy kneaded at a scroll and watched them with slitted eyes. The curry fans below rumbled on.
Rory swallowed. She was good at staying cool-headed, at finding the side door out of a bad argument - it was what made her a good delivery girl in streets where other couriers got lost, what had made her father's barrister friends say she would have been brilliant at law if she'd stuck it out at Cardiff University. It didn't work with Lucien. He knew four languages and she'd only ever learned how to swear in two of them, but he always heard what she wasn't saying .
He reached out, slowly , giving her time to step back. She didn't. His fingers, warm, brushed the inside of her left wrist where the scar sat, pale as a fishing hook against her skin.
"You kept the scar," he murmured.
"You can't get rid of a scar by wanting it gone."
His thumb ghosted over it. Not quite a touch. The half-demon in him ran hot; she remembered that from winter nights when he would take his coat off in her flat above Silas' and the air around him would still feel like standing too close to a fire.
"You still at the Empress?" he asked.
"Part-time. Pays rent. Or it did before the ceiling fell in."
"You should not be above that bar. Not tonight. Whoever chalked it was not looking for Silas."
She wanted to be angry that he was still trying to order her life, and she was, but underneath the anger was something raw and frightened and horribly relieved that he was here. That Eva, meddling, brilliant, terrifying Eva, had called the one person Rory had been too proud to call herself.
"Eva said she had a ward she could put on my place," she said.
"Eva's wards are excellent if you want to keep out moths and minor hexes. For this-" He tapped his cane once on the floorboards, and for a second she thought she saw something ripple out from the ivory handle, a faint circle of pale light that licked at the stacks of books. Ptolemy hissed.
"Eva's flat is safe?" she asked.
"For tonight. I reinforced what she already had on the way up. Three deadbolts are charming but insufficient."
"Don't be a snob about locks."
"I am a snob about many things. Locks are one of them."
That startled a laugh out of her, short and unguarded. Her black hair, straight and cut to her shoulders, swung forward as she looked down at their hands - his still hovering over her wrist, not quite holding .
He noticed her laugh and his shoulders dropped a fraction. The perfect , tailored mask slipped.
"I missed you, Laila," he said, very softly , using the name no one else used anymore, the name from when they'd first met and she'd told him a lie at the bar because Evan was still texting her then and she hadn't wanted to be found.
"No one calls me that."
"I know. That's why I kept it."
She looked up. His eyes were both on her now, amber and black, heterochromatic and impossible and worried. The half-demon who could open any door in London with a smile and a veiled threat, standing in a cramped one-bedroom above a curry house, holding her scarred wrist like it was something breakable.
Her quick thinking, the out-of-the-box part of her that had gotten her out of Cardiff and out of worse, did the math. Eva wouldn't be back until morning. The flat had books on every surface, but it had a bed in the corner and a kettle that worked and the rain was still beating down and the thing that had marked her door was still out there and Lucien was here, warm and solid and not shouting back when she had shouted last year.
"Two minutes is up," she said.
Lucien's mouth twitched. "Do you want me to go?"
"No." The word came out before she could shape it into something cooler. "No. I want you to stay. But if you're staying, you have to do something for me."
"Anything."
"Stop being impeccable for five minutes."
He blinked. Then, slowly, deliberately, he leaned his cane against Eva's overcrowded desk and shrugged out of his suit jacket. The charcoal fabric folded neatly over the back of a chair that was already buried in notes. Underneath his white shirt was untucked at one side, damp at the cuff. His hair had come slightly loose from its slick.
"Like this?" he asked.
Rory stepped closer, close enough that her knees brushed his shins, close enough that she could see the faint stubble along his jaw that he always shaved away before noon.
"Closer," she said.
He reached for her then, not for her wrist, but for her shoulders, pulling her in . She went, her forehead finding the familiar spot below his collarbone. He smelled like rain after all, underneath the cedar. His hands settled low on her back, careful, as if she might pull away.
She didn't. She breathed. The third deadbolt was still stuck, and Ptolemy was trying to eat a scroll on Enochian verbs, and somewhere out on Brick Lane the night buses were hissing , and her ceiling was leaking back in Whitechapel and someone had chalked demon script onto her door. All of it could wait until morning.
For now, in the little warm pocket between the books and the storm, she let herself be held by the man she'd told herself she was done with, and who had shown up unannounced anyway because some histories don't end when you slam the door on them.