AI The knock came wrong.
Three sharp raps, too patient, too even, and Rory knew before she looked that it wasn't Eva. Eva never knocked. Eva had keys, and a shoulder-check, and a running commentary audible from the stairwell. And nobody else knocked on Eva's flat unless they were lost, drunk, or looking for the curry house downstairs and had missed the smell.
She'd been camped on Eva's floor for two days. A nest of blankets, Eva's chipped Merry Xmas mug gone cold on a stack of grimoires, Ptolemy kneading her socked feet like he was trying to punish her for existing in his space. Her phone was dead. Her flat above Silas' was empty because Silas had said, very gently , "Ror, love, give it a week after what happened," and Yu-Fei had told her not to come in for deliveries until the bruising on her cheek faded. She had not argued.
The knock came again. Same rhythm.
She pushed herself up. Her shoulder-length black hair was still damp from where she'd tried to wash it in Eva's temperamental sink. She was wearing Eva's too-big sweatpants and her own thermal that had a tear at the collar. Her left wrist twinged as she put weight on it, the little crescent scar there pulling white against her skin.
"Eva forgot her keys again, huh?" she called, and flipped the first deadbolt. Then the second. Her fingers were stiff. "You know you're supposed to—"
She flipped the third deadbolt and pulled the door open.
The smell hit her first — not curry, not rain off Brick Lane. Clean wool and cigarette smoke and something metallic underneath it, like a struck match. Then the suit. Charcoal, tailored so sharply it made Eva's cramped hallway look even more like a paper avalanche. Then the cane. Ivory handle. Then the face.
Lucien.
He looked exactly the same and that was offensive. His platinum hair was slicked back, untouched by the rain hammering the bricks outside. His eyes were impossible in the dim stairwell light, one amber, one pure black, both fixed on her. Not on the bruise. She watched him practice not looking at the bruise.
"Rory," he said.
His voice had that low Marseille curl to it even when he spoke English. She had not heard him say her name in four months.
"You're kidding," she said.
Ptolemy chose that exact moment to wind between her ankles and stalk into the hall to sniff at Lucien's polished shoes. Lucien looked down at the tabby cat, then back up at her, and his mouth did a small, terrible thing that might have been trying not to smile.
"You're not Eva," he said.
"No shit. What are you doing here?"
"I could ask you the same. Last I heard you lived above Silas' bar. Which is not here."
He was still holding his cane. He always held it, even though she knew he didn't strictly need it for walking. She'd seen him move fast enough to blur once, in the back of the Golden Empress after close, when a customer wouldn't take no for an answer. The cane was a prop and a threat. The blade inside was very real.
"You didn't answer," she said.
"Eva called me."
"Ice cold of her to not mention she'd invited the supernatural mafia."
"I am not the mafia," he said, with affront so precise it would have been funny any other day. "I am a fixer. Information. Discretion. Four languages. Some boundaries."
"Four languages and you still can't text first."
His heterochromatic eyes narrowed . That black one always unsettled her, not because it was demonic but because it was so still.
"I did text," he said. "Several times. Before. After."
The before and after hung there between them, fat and ugly. Before he'd walked out of her flat at two in the morning without his jacket. After she'd told him she couldn't do whatever this was, whatever they were, not with everything else.
She stepped back and the cold air from the stairwell cut through Eva's sweats. "You can't be here."
"I was told you might need help," he said, and then, quieter, "You look hurt, Aurora."
Rory. No one called her Aurora except him and her mother when she was in trouble. She felt her throat go tight.
"It's nothing. Eva's being dramatic. As usual."
"Her drama tends to be correctly sourced."
Behind her, the flat was chaos. Every surface covered in Eva's books, scrolls, post-it notes that read DO NOT SUMMON IN FLAT!!! and EVALY?? The kettle whistling but empty. Rory hadn't cleaned. She'd come here because she couldn't stand Silas' careful kindness for another night and because Eva had three deadbolts and a cat that hated everyone but would bite an intruder.
Lucien was still standing in the doorway like he was waiting for permission he would never ask for out loud.
"You going to let me in or am I to conduct this reunion in the hall where Mrs. Abernathy can listen?" he said.
"There's no reunion."
"Semantics, Rory."
She hated how he said it, like her nickname was something private. He'd started calling her that the third time she'd shown up at his office above the bookshop on Charing Cross to trade information for wontons, back when she still thought she was just a delivery girl who happened to know weird people.
She stepped aside because Ptolemy had decided Lucien's shoe was acceptable and because her leg was going numb and because she was tired of bracing the door.
Lucien stepped inside and the flat shrank instantly. He was only 5'11", not huge, but he carried himself like he took up more air than he had a right to. He took in the place with one slow scan — the blankets, the cold mug, the stack of prenatal law textbooks she'd brought from Cardiff and never opened, Eva's scribbled map of ley lines taped over the window.
"You left London?" he asked.
"No. Silas asked me to give my flat some space. Eva offered."
"After Evan came by."
It wasn't a question. Of course Eva had told him. Eva told him everything, which was exactly why Rory was trying not to look at the way his knuckles tightened around the ivory handle.
"It was one time," she said, automatically, the old Pre-Law instinct to minimize, to argue the best version. "He was drunk. Silas handled it."
"And this?" He gestured, not touching, at her face .
She turned her head. The bruise had yellowed at the edge. "Door frame. I'm clumsy."
"Rory."
"Don't do that voice."
"What voice?"
"The fixer voice. The 'I have resources and moral ambiguity' voice."
He exhaled once, sharp through his nose. For the first time he looked not composed but annoyed . "You disappear for months, you stop answering, you tell Eva you're fine and then she calls me because she finds you on her floor looking like you lost a fight with your past, and you accuse me of a voice?"
"I didn't disappear, I — I needed to not be around you!" The words came out louder than she meant. Ptolemy bolted under the table. "You can't just walk in and fix this, Luc."
"Why not?" he said, and there it was — not the broker, not half-demon cool, but the man who'd once kissed her shoulder while she laughed into his charcoal jacket. "Give me one reason that is not you trying to prove you do not need anyone."
Her bright blue eyes stung. She hated crying. Her father always said Carters didn't cry, they cross-examined.
"Because last time you offered to fix things, you offered to make him disappear," she whispered. "Evan. And I didn't know if you meant paperwork or... you know . The other realm. Avaros."
The amber eye went dark. The black eye seemed to absorb light.
"I meant paperwork," he said, after a beat too long.
"You didn't."
"I did. Mostly. Sixty percent."
"Lucien."
He set his cane against Eva's radiator with careful precision. The jacket came off next, folded over a stack of books like he owned the place, like he had every right. Underneath, white shirt, sleeves pushed up just enough to show the tattoo at his inner forearm, script in a language she couldn't read. He was close now, close enough that she could smell rain on wool again.
"You left," he said. "You left because I scared you. Not because you did not want me. Say it correctly."
Her breath hitched. He was right and she hated him for it.
"I was scared," she said. "I am scared. You look at me like — like I'm something you want to keep. And I just got away from someone who thought that was love."
His expression cracked. Truly cracked.
"Oh, ma chère," he murmured, and it wasn't smooth, it was wrecked . "Never that. Never like him."
He didn't touch her. He had learned not to touch her without asking.
"May I?" he asked, hand hovering near, not near the bruise, near her other cheek, the cold one.
She nodded before she could talk herself out of it, and his palm was warm, impossibly warm, half-demon warm, against her skin.
"I cannot promise I am a good man," he said, his voice low enough that the traffic outside Brick Lane vanished. "I am half a bad thing from a cold place. I speak four languages and in all of them I am selfish when it comes to you. But I do not keep. I stay. If you let me."
Rory stared up at him, at the impossible eyes that had always seen too much, at the slicked-back hair she used to mess up just to annoy him, at the man who'd shown up unannounced because her best friend knew she'd never ask for help herself.
"You have terrible timing," she whispered.
"I have perfect timing," he said, and his thumb brushed, barely, under her lower lip. "Eva said you have not eaten."
"Eva needs to stop talking."
"She said you would say that."
Despite herself, despite everything, she laughed. A wet, stupid little sound. Ptolemy emerged to glare at them both.
Lucien's shoulders dropped an inch. "Stay here tonight," he said. "I will go. But let me have someone send food. From the Empress. Yu-Fei is worried."
She looked at the little floor nest, at the three deadbolts she'd locked against the world, at his hand still warm on her cheek.
"No," she said. "Don't go."
His breath caught.
"Don't go," she repeated, firmer now, cool-headed Rory putting her quick, out-of-the-box thinking to terrible personal use. "But if you stay, you have to sleep on the floor. Cat's rules. And you have to tell Eva you were useless and left."
The smile that broke across his face was slow and devastating and entirely human.
"I can be very convincing," he said, already shrugging back into that place beside her, not too close, just close enough that the cold couldn't get in.
"Shut up and order the dumplings," she said, and leaned her forehead, lightly , against his shoulder, and finally let the door stay closed behind them.