AI The knock came again, three raps, patient as a debt collector.
Rory set down Eva's copy of the Malleus Maleficarum and looked at Ptolemy. The tabby had gone rigid on the windowsill, tail puffed to twice its size, eyes fixed on the front door.
"Friend of yours?"
The cat said nothing. Cats never did, which was half the reason she preferred them.
She crossed the cramped sitting room, stepping over a drift of scrolls Eva had sworn she'd catalogue weeks ago. The flat above the curry house smelled of turmeric and old paper, and the floorboard by the door creaked the way it always did, a warning shot for anyone clever enough to listen. Rory put her eye to the peephole.
Her stomach dropped through the floorboards and kept going.
Platinum hair, slicked back. Charcoal suit cut so sharp it could file a statement. An ivory-handled cane resting against his thigh with the casual menace of a man who had never once needed it for walking.
Lucien Moreau. Eight months. Eight months of silence , and here he stood on a Tuesday, immaculate as sin.
She opened one deadbolt. Then the second. She left the third on and pulled the door to the length of the chain.
"No."
"Good evening to you too, chérie."
"That's not a greeting, it's a negotiation tactic, and it's not working." She kept her voice level . Cool-headed, Eva always called her. Cool-headed people did not notice the way lamplight caught the amber of his left eye, or how the black one swallowed it whole. "Eva's in Edinburgh. Whatever you're selling, she's not buying."
"I'm not here for Eva."
"Then you're definitely not coming in."
He tilted his head. The hallway light threw his cheekbones into relief, and she hated that she noticed, hated the small treacherous part of her that had memorised the geography of his face sometime last spring and refused to surrender the map.
"You opened the door," he said.
"To tell you to go away. Politely. This is me being polite. You should see the alternative."
"I have seen the alternative. Cardiff, last March. You threw a stapler at my head."
"You deserved the stapler."
"I did." No hesitation. No defence. That unsettled her more than any argument could have. "Open the door, Rory."
The way he said her name. Not Aurora, never Aurora, none of that Laila business from the restaurant either. Just Rory, in that Marseille-accented rumble, like the name belonged in his mouth.
"What do you want, Lucien?"
"Five minutes."
"You had eight months of minutes."
"And I regret the arithmetic." His fingers adjusted on the cane's ivory handle. A tell. She'd catalogued his tells once, back when cataloguing Lucien Moreau felt like a worthy use of a law student 's mind. Pressure on the cane meant stakes. Real ones. "Please."
The please cost him. She watched it cost him.
She shut the door, slid the chain, and opened it again. She did not step aside far. He filled the doorway anyway, the way smoke fills a room, uninvited and everywhere.
Ptolemy bolted from the windowsill and vanished under Eva's bed.
"Even the cat remembers you," Rory said.
"That cat has never liked me."
"The cat is an excellent judge of character. Sit anywhere that isn't covered in summoning diagrams. Good luck."
He moved through the flat the way he moved through everything, like he'd surveyed it before entering, noting the books stacked on every surface, the chalk circles half-erased from the floorboards, the kettle whistling itself into hysterics on the stove. Rory killed the flame. She did not offer tea. Hospitality was a door she refused to open twice in one night.
"Four minutes," she said.
He turned to face her, and something in his expression made the room feel smaller than it already was.
"You look well."
"Don't."
"I mean it. London suits you better than fear did."
Her hand found the edge of Eva's desk. Anchored. "Is that what this is? A wellness check? You vanish off the face of the earth in April, no note, no call, nothing, and now you're standing in my friend's flat telling me I look well?"
"I vanished because staying would have put a target on your back the size of the Millennium Stadium."
"And now?"
"Now the target found you anyway."
The flat went quiet except for the pipes ticking in the walls.
"Three minutes."
"Evan Holloway made a bargain, Rory."
The name landed like ice water down her spine . Evan. Her Evan, or the man she'd thought was hers, the one whose apologies always arrived with flowers and whose hands never matched his promises. She'd left Cardiff with one bag and a bruise shaped like his grip on her upper arm. She had not spoken his name aloud in two years.
"Evan's a solicitor from Pontcanna," she said. "Evan's biggest bargain is getting his mother to pay his car insurance."
"Evan is a solicitor from Pontcanna who got drunk in the wrong club in Splott and promised something he shouldn't have to something that collects." Lucien's voice stayed level, which made it worse. "He gave them a name. Yours."
The kettle clicked as it cooled. Somewhere below, the curry house's extractor fan hummed its endless note.
"You're lying."
"I have never lied to you. Omitted, certainly. Strategised, frequently. But never lied."
"Why would he, why would anyone," she stopped. Reordered her thoughts the way her father had taught her, barrister's daughter, facts before feelings. "When?"
"Six weeks ago. The contract surfaced in Avaros last month. My father's people flagged it because the name was attached to a secondary clause." He reached into his jacket, slowly , the way a man moves when he knows he's standing near someone with a history of throwing staplers. He produced a folded sheet of heavy cream paper. "The debt isn't transferable. But there's a retrieval clause. Whoever brings you to the signing table inherits what Evan owes."
She didn't take the paper. "What's the secondary clause?"
Silence.
"Lucien."
"Me."
The word sat between them on Eva's cluttered floor.
"He named you," she said. "As part of the price."
"He knew I got you out of Cardiff. He knew what I am. Clever boy, in his vicious little way. He wagered that my, " a pause, the cane's handle creaking under his fingers, "associates would choose the debt over me, and that I'd be too occupied staying alive to warn you."
"Eight months," she said. "That's what the silence was. You staying alive."
"Mostly."
"You could have sent a postcard. Wish you weren't here. Having a lovely time not being murdered."
"Any contact would have led them to you. I chose, "
"You chose." The words came out flatter than she intended, and somehow that was worse than shouting. "You chose for both of us. Again. Just like April, when you decided I couldn't handle knowing what you were, and I had to find out from a fangbanger in a Soho stairwell while you were conveniently across the Channel."
"You had just escaped one man who controlled your life. I refused to become another who frightened you."
"That wasn't your call!"
"No," he said quietly. "It wasn't."
The admission stole the wind from the argument. She hated that too. She'd prepared for deflection, for charm , for the smooth Moreau deflection she'd once watched dismantle a roomful of Veryon syndicate men without a single raised voice. She had not prepared for surrender.
Ptolemy crept out from under the bed, wound once around Lucien's ankles, and looked up at her as if to say, he smells like gunpowder and grief, this one.
"Traitor," she told the cat.
"He likes me," Lucien said.
"He's lending you warmth so you live long enough for me to kill you properly. There's a difference."
Something shifted in his face then. The polished mask cracked at the corner, just slightly , and she caught a glimpse of the man underneath, tired, hollowed out, eight months of running written in the shadows beneath those mismatched eyes.
"Every day," he said. "Every single day I drafted the letter. Je m'ennuie de toi. That's the closest French comes to it. It means you are missing from me. As if a piece of me stayed behind in that miserable flat above Silas' bar and the rest of me has been walking around incomplete."
"Don't do this."
"You asked why I came. That's why. Not the contract. Not Evan. I could have handled both from Marseille. I came because the thought of you facing this alone, thinking I abandoned you, "
"Your five minutes are up."
They both heard it at the same time. The stairwell door, two floors below. It never closed on its own. Mrs Bhatti from the curry house propped it open with a brick every morning and kicked it shut at midnight, and it was barely nine.
Ptolemy's spine arched. A sound came out of the cat that Rory had heard exactly once before, the night Eva's wards failed and something with too many joints tried the window.
Lucien moved. The cane came apart in his hands, ivory handle in his left, a thin gleaming blade in his right, and suddenly the courteous fixer was gone and something older stood in his place, something that had learned its manners in a realm where courtesy was a blood sport.
"How many?" she asked, already reaching for Eva's emergency kit under the sink, chalk, salt, the little silver knife.
"Three heartbeats on the stairs. One on the fire escape." His head cocked, listening to things she couldn't hear. "Rory. The window behind the bookshelf. It opens onto the neighbour's roof."
"I'm not leaving you."
"I wasn't asking you to." The black eye gleamed. "I was asking you to cover me while I open it. We're leaving together, chérie. This time, I swear it on my father's name, we leave together or not at all."
The footsteps on the stairs had stopped.
That was worse. That was so much worse.
The three deadbolts on Eva's door began, one by one, to turn.