AI The third deadbolt stuck, like it always did.
Rory jiggled the key and swore under her breath, shoulder against the door of Eva's flat, the smell of curry fat and frying onions from the restaurant below clinging to everything. Inside, she could hear Ptolemy yowling his indignant yowl, the one that meant you are late and I have been abandoned .
When the bolt finally gave with a hard clack, she pushed the door open with her hip, balancing two paper grocery bags against her chest.
And stopped.
Lucien Moreau was sitting on Eva's sofa.
He wasn't supposed to be on Eva's sofa. No one was supposed to be in Eva's flat except Rory while Eva was at that archive in Edinburgh, and Ptolemy, who was currently draped across Lucien's polished shoes like he had been paid to be there.
For a second, her brain couldn't make sense of the image. The flat was a disaster as always — every flat surface covered in Eva's books and half-unrolled scrolls and teetering stacks of research notes — but he was immaculate in the middle of it. Tailored charcoal suit despite the heat. Platinum blond hair slicked back. Legs crossed, his ivory-handled cane resting against his knee. He looked like someone had dropped a knife into a pile of laundry.
"Hello, Aurora," he said, in that soft Marseille accent that got thicker when he was tired.
Her grip tightened on the grocery bags. "You broke in."
"I knocked," he said. "For quite some time."
"There are three deadbolts on this door, Lucien."
"Yes. Charming mekanism. Very trusting neighborhood, Brick Lane." His eyes caught the light . One amber, one black. The black one always made people look away. Rory refused to. "Eva gave me a key. Two years ago. When you—"
"I know when." She kicked the door shut behind her with her heel and didn't move any closer. The cat began to purr loud enough to rattle the floorboards. "She shouldn't have."
"No," he agreed easily . "She shouldn't have many of the things she does. How is London treating you? Still delivering for the Golden Empress?"
The question was so casually intimate that it stung. She set the bags down on the only clear corner of the counter with more force than necessary. A tin of tomatoes slipped, and she caught it before it could roll off. Her left wrist flashed, the small crescent-shaped scar there pale against her skin.
"What do you want?"
He exhaled, and for the first time she noticed the line of tension around his mouth, the faint shadow under his mismatched eyes. His suit was perfect, but the knot of his tie was just a fraction off.
"You left Silas' building," he said.
"I moved. People do that."
"To here? Above a curry house? Aurora, you have damp in the walls. I can smell it."
"It's dry enough," she snapped. "And it's not your concern where I live. It hasn't been your concern for six months."
That landed. Something flickered in the amber eye. He uncrossed his legs, leaned forward, both hands now resting on the head of his cane. Rory knew what was inside the ivory handle — a thin blade she had once watched him use to open a letter and, another night, to make a man twice his size sit back down very quickly .
"I heard about Evan," he said, quieter .
Her whole body went rigid.
"Don't."
"He came back from Manchester. Came looking around your old flat. Asking questions downstairs at the bar."
The air in the cramped kitchenette suddenly felt too hot. The curry smell, the pile of unwashed mugs, Lucien's cologne — something clean and expensive that didn't belong here at all.
"I can handle Evan," she said. Her voice came out flat, the same voice she had used when she was nineteen and leaving Cardiff and again when she was twenty-four and telling her mother she wasn't going to finish her final year at Cardiff Law. Cool-headed. That was what people called her.
Lucien's mouth tilted. Not quite a smile. "Of course you can. You are terrifying when you want to be, ma petite avocate. That is not what I said."
"What did you say, then?"
He stood in one smooth motion, cane taking his weight . He never used it in front of other people unless he needed to, and he didn't need to now. It was affectation, armor. He took two steps toward her and stopped when she didn't step back, leaving a careful arm's length of space between them that felt more charged than if he'd crowded her.
"I said I heard about Evan," he repeated in French this time, then caught himself, switched to English. "And that I did not like hearing it. From Silas, not from you."
"You want me to report in?" She laughed, a sharp sound. "Like one of your little strays you keep tabs on?"
"I want you to let me help you."
"I didn't need your help then, I don't need it now."
"Yes," he said, and his voice finally cracked a little. "You made that very clear. Six months ago, in this very flat, you told me you needed space. That you needed— what was the phrase? — to not have someone fix your life for you."
Rory felt heat climb up her neck. Six months ago, Eva had been away then too, and the flat had looked exactly like this, and she had just done a ten-hour shift in the rain for Yu-Fei, and Lucien had shown up with dry clothes and soup and information on Evan's debts and a look like she was something fragile. She had shouted. He had gone very still, very polite, very French, and left.
She hadn't seen him since.
"You were trying to pay my rent, Lucien."
"I was trying to keep your ex-boyfriend's friends from kicking in your door. The rent was incidental."
"It never feels incidental with you."
Ptolemy had decided this was boring and jumped onto the counter, tail flicking against Rory's arm. She scratched his head without looking, her fingers restless.
Lucien watched her hand. Watched the scar.
"You're right," he said after a moment.
That threw her.
"I'm sorry," he added, in careful English, then again in French like he wanted to be sure she understood it in every language he knew. "Je suis désolé, Aurora. I overstepped. I do that. My father — well. My mother used to say demons do not know how to love without owning. I thought I was better than that."
The word love hung in the air between them, far too heavy.
She swallowed. "Don't do that either. Don't use the — the half-demon tragic backstory thing to get out of—"
"I'm not." His amber eye crinkled. "I'm using it because it is true, and because you like facts. Fact: I am half a creature from Avaros who does not understand boundaries. Fact: I missed you. Fact: when Silas told me Evan was back, I thought of nothing else for three days."
Rory's chest hurt. She hated how good he was with words. Four languages fluently, and he always knew exactly which one would undo her.
"You didn't have to break into Eva's flat to tell me that."
"No. I could have waited outside your work like a very well-dressed gargoyle. I considered it." He took another small step. Now she could see the faint unevenness of his shave, the way his collar had rubbed his neck. He wasn't as composed as he wanted her to think. "May I?"
He didn't reach for her. Just held his hand out, palm up. An asking.
For a second she thought about being Rory Carter, cool-headed, intelligent, out-of-the-box thinker who did not make the same mistake twice. Then she thought about six months of not hearing the tap of that cane against the pavement under her window above Silas' bar, of not having someone who looked at her straight black hair cut at her shoulders and her bright blue eyes and didn't see a girl to be managed, but a woman who could ruin his perfectly tailored life and probably would.
She put her hand in his.
His fingers were warm. He turned her wrist gently , thumb brushing that small crescent scar she got at ten years old climbing her father's bookshelves in Cardiff.
"I still dream about you telling me to leave," he murmured, his head bowed, his voice low enough that the traffic outside on Brick Lane almost covered it. "And I still dream about you on the night before. Do you remember?"
She did. Of course she did. Rain against the windows of her tiny flat above the bar, his suit jacket hung over her chair, his platinum hair mussed for once, both of them laughing at something stupid because she had finally told him why her friends called her Rory — because Aurora sounded like someone who had her life together and she never had.
"I remember," she whispered.
Lucien lifted his gaze then, both eyes on hers, and there was no guard in them at all.
"If you want me to go again, I will go," he said. "I will set all three deadbolts behind me and give Eva her key back. But if you—" He hesitated. Actually hesitated. "If you want me to stay, just for tonight, because there is damp and curry fumes and a cat who has clearly taken my side, I would like that very much."
Ptolemy meowed as if on cue.
Rory wasn't cool-headed at all at that moment. Her heart was hammering against her ribs. She stepped forward — all of five foot six of her against his five eleven — and closed the careful distance he had left.
"You're terrible at leaving," she said.
"I am excellent at it," he protested, but his free hand had already come up, hovering at her waist like he was asking permission a second time. "I left for six months."
"You left badly."
"Then let me stay badly for once."
She laughed then, wetly, and it startled both of them. She reached up with her other hand and fixed his tie, her knuckles grazing his throat, and felt him shiver.
"Stay," she said. "But you're cooking with what's in those bags and explaining to Ptolemy why you abandoned him."
His smile, when it came, was real and crooked and entirely human.
"Oui, cherie," he said, and let her pull him further into the messy, too-hot, book-strewn flat, his cane tapping once, twice against the floor before he leaned it against the wall and didn't need it anymore.