AI The knock came after midnight, and it wasn't the right knock.
Rory knew the knocks in this building the way other people knew voices. There was the delivery guy from downstairs with his two quick raps and a mumbled sorry. There was Mrs. Alby from 2B with her arthritic, patient five-tap. There was Silas when he came up to complain about the pipes, one heavy thump with the side of his fist. Three deadbolts on the front door of Eva's flat on Brick Lane required negotiation, and everyone who lived here had a rhythm for it.
This one was three even beats, too precise. Pause. Two more.
She was sitting cross-legged on Eva's sagging couch in an oversized t-shirt that said GOLDEN EMPRESS in faded gold letters, her straight black hair still damp from the shower and sticking to her neck. Ptolemy the tabby was loafed on top of a precarious stack of library books on demonology that Eva had left open to page 212, his tail flicking against a scroll that was threatening to unroll off the coffee table.
She didn't move at first. It was cold in the flat; the curry house below had shut off its ovens an hour ago and the heat went with it, and the October air found every crack in the window frame. Her laptop was open to a draft email to her father she hadn't sent. Brendan Carter's last voicemail still sat unplayed on her phone.
The knock came again. Same pattern. Patient.
"Eva's not here," she called out, finally .
"I am aware," a voice said through the door. Low, French-accented, exhausted.
Her stomach dropped straight through the floor.
Rory stared at the three deadbolts. She hadn't seen him in four months. Not since the night at the Avaros gate when he'd looked at her like she was a liability he couldn't afford and told her, very calmly, in that impeccably tailored charcoal suit, that sentimentality was a good way to get killed . She'd still gone through. She'd still gotten burned.
Ptolemy lifted his head and stared at her, round-eyed.
She got up. Her bare feet found the cold floorboards between the piles of books. She was five-six and the chain on the door made her have to stand on her toes to unhook it, and that annoyed her. Everything about this annoyed her. The way her hand was shaking slightly . The way the crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist, small and pale from a childhood accident, showed white against her skin.
She unlocked the top bolt. Then the middle. Then the bottom.
Lucien Moreau stood in the dim hall light of the Brick Lane building, and he looked wrong.
He was always perfect . That was the point of him. Slicked-back platinum blond hair not a strand out of place, suits that cost more than her rent, the ivory handle of his cane polished to a shine. Now his suit was charcoal but rumpled at the shoulders, dust at the cuffs. His hair was still slicked back but damp at the temples, as if he'd been walking in the drizzle. He leaned heavier than usual on the cane, the one that hid a thin blade, and when she looked down she saw a dark stain on his white shirt just under the line of his waistcoat.
Blood.
"You're hurt," she said, and hated how quickly it came out.
"Observant as ever, Aurora," he said. His heterochromatic eyes found hers - one amber, one pure black - and lingered. The black one always unnerved her, a little. Not tonight. Tonight she just wanted to reach out and touch his face. "May I come in before I bleed on Eva's welcome mat? She would be very cross with me."
"You don't get to show up here." Her voice came out flat . Cool-headed. That was what she was good at. Quick, out-of-the-box thinking. Except her brain was not thinking at all, it was just cataloging him. The cut on his lower lip. The way his left hand was clenched too tight around the cane.
"You moved," he said. "From above Silas' bar. I went there first."
"You went to Silas."
"Silas was sympathetic. After he threatened to break my other knee."
Rory's fingers tightened on the door. She should close it. They had parted on complicated terms because he had decided for her what was safest, because she had told him she wasn't some human girl who needed his protection, because he had left her at the hospital entrance after the binding rite with only a note in four languages, none of which was I was scared .
The blood stain spread another centimeter.
"For fuck's sake, Lucien," she muttered, and stepped back and pulled the door open wide. "In. Now."
He exhaled, something that was almost a laugh, and stepped past her into the cramped one-bedroom. Ptolemy immediately leapt off the books and stalked over, tail high, and rubbed against Lucien's shined shoe. Even the cat remembered him.
Lucien lowered himself onto the arm of the couch with a wince he tried to hide, setting the cane across his knees. Up close, under the harsh bulb of Eva's desk lamp, she could see how pale he was. The bright blue of her own eyes reflected back at her in his amber one as she knelt in front of him before she could stop herself.
"Let me see," she said.
"It's shallow."
"Lucien."
He held her gaze for a beat, that old push-pull still there, humming between them like a low current. Then he undid the waistcoat, one-handed, carefully . She leaned forward to help, her black hair falling forward to curtain them both. Her fingers brushed his. Cold.
Underneath, the shirt was soaked through on the left side. She breathed out slowly through her nose, the way she did when she was trying not to panic on a delivery run that went sideways.
"Who did this?" she asked, lifting the hem.
"Arovian hound. Poorly trained. I have spoken to its owner about labor standards."
"You're lying."
"Yes. Do you want to kiss it better?"
Her hands stilled. She looked up at him, inches away. She could smell his cologne, faint, and underneath it copper and rain. His mouth was that close. That impossible, infuriating mouth that spoke four languages fluently and had once, four months ago, told her in a whisper against her throat in the back room of Silas' bar that she was exquisite when she was angry.
"Don't," she said, but it came out soft.
"Why not?" His voice dropped. He wasn't smiling anymore. "You are angry. You have every right to be angry. I left. You were right to tell me to go to hell. But Rory—"
"Don't call me that."
"Aurora," he corrected, and his free hand came up, hesitated, then tucked a damp strand of black hair behind her ear. His knuckles brushed her cheek. "I have not slept properly since you left that tower. Every time I close my eyes I see you walking into that circle."
"And you decided I couldn't handle it. Again."
"I decided I could not handle it," he said. "There is a difference. One I have had four months in very boring company to contemplate."
She stared at him. The heat of him was getting through now, through the cold flat. Her t-shirt had ridden up slightly on her thighs and she felt suddenly , acutely, underdressed, sitting on the floor between his knees while he sat bleeding in her best friend's flat surrounded by books and scrolls and research notes that Eva had left for her about how not to die.
"I'm supposed to be immune to this," she whispered. "Your whole... French tragic demon prince thing."
"Half-demon. My mother would be very offended to have her contribution erased."
"Lucien."
He leaned forward, and the cane clattered to the floor, forgotten. His forehead touched hers. It was cool. She shivered.
"The flat above Silas' bar is empty," he murmured against her skin. "He kept your spare key."
"You came to tell me about real estate?"
"I came to tell you that I was an idiot. An impeccably dressed idiot, but still." His amber eye closed, his black eye, somehow, softened . "You were never the thing that needed protecting, Laila. You were the thing that made me think I might survive it."
Laila. The name he had called her only once, in Marseille, when she was half-asleep on a train.
Her bright blue eyes burned. She grabbed his shirt with both hands, fisting the bloody fabric, and kissed him. Hard, angry, all the things she hadn't said in four months poured into it. He made a low sound against her mouth - surprise, pain, relief - and his hand slid into her damp hair, holding her there like he was afraid she'd pull away.
She didn't. She pressed closer, knees to the floor, cold forgotten, until Ptolemy made an indignant chirp and inserted himself firmly between them, tail whipping.
Lucien broke the kiss laughing, breathless, his forehead still pressed to hers. "The cat has a sense of timing."
"Shut up," Rory said, and kissed him again, gentler this time, tasting the cut on his lip. She pulled back just enough to look at the stain on his side. "You need stitches."
"I need you to keep looking at me like that."
"Lucien."
"Yes. I need stitches."
She got up, her legs pins-and-needles, and went to Eva's chaotic bathroom to get the first-aid kit Eva kept for occult paper cuts that probably required tetanus shots. When she came back he was watching her - really watching her, in that hungry, heterochromatic way that had first made her heart kick sideways in a back alley when she'd thought he was just a too-pretty fixer.
"Sit up," she ordered, and knelt again and took his shirt in her hands and tore it the rest of the way.
He winced, then smiled. "Such bedside manner. Your mother the teacher would be proud."
"You don't get to bring my mum into this while I'm about to sew up your stab wound with a sewing kit."
"It is romantic," he said.
"It's disgusting," she said, but her hands were steady now, cool-headed again . Rory-steady. The one who thought quick and out of the box. And while she worked, with Ptolemy supervising from the top of a stack of scrolls, he kept his eyes on her face like she was the only warm thing left in London.