AI The door swung open on the smell of rain and frying onions, and the apology Rory had ready for the neighbour died somewhere behind her teeth.
Lucien Moreau stood in the stairwell with the grey evening light of Brick Lane behind him, holding a paper bag that was already leaking the ghost of saag paneer onto his cuff. The charcoal suit was dark across the shoulders where the rain had found him. A single lock of platinum hair had escaped its pomade and hung over the eye that wasn't amber. The other one, the black one, found hers across four feet of cramped landing and stayed there.
"Noswaith dda," he said.
Her Welsh, when it finally came out, was not polite.
For a moment neither of them moved. Downstairs the curry house was in full voice — a shriek of pans, a radio, someone laughing through the vent — and the stairwell filled with steam and cumin and the particular silence of two people with three months of unfinished business between them and a paper bag of food slowly going cold.
"Eva's in Oxford," she said.
"I know. The Bodleian, a fortnight. I checked before I came." His voice was as she remembered it, low and unhurried, a voice built for telling people things they didn't want to hear. "You've left the bolts undone."
She hadn't, actually — she'd left one undone. The bottom brass one, which stuck, because she'd been hauling boxes of Eva's books up from the kerb all evening and hadn't wanted to fight it every trip. The other two were thrown . She thought about saying so and decided the defensive arithmetic would cost her more than it gained.
"Anyone could have been standing on this landing," she said.
"Anyone was," said Lucien, and held up the bag. "I wasn't sure you'd eaten."
He had never once come to a door without buying his way in — information, favours, a bottle of something old enough to have opinions — and here he was, the most feared broker in London's underworld, damp as a stray, holding takeaway from the shop downstairs like a man calling on a girl he'd been properly introduced to. It was so precisely calculated to undo her that she almost admired it.
She stepped back and let him in.
Eva's flat was, as always, a flood waiting for a match. Books in drifts, scrolls pinned to the wardrobe, index cards taped three deep along the window where Eva's spidery handwriting climbed toward some conclusion Rory had never been allowed to read. Ptolemy lifted his head from a stack of medieval herbals, took one look at the guest, and poured himself under the desk with the affronted dignity only a tabby can manage.
"Even the cat," Rory said.
"The cat has never liked me. The cat is an excellent judge of character." Lucien set the bag on the one clear square of counter — the spot Eva kept sacred for the kettle — and leaned his cane against the wall, the ivory handle catching the light. Then he simply stood there, hands loose at his sides, in the middle of the clutter like a man standing in the ruins of a house he'd once been happy in.
"Talk," she said. "You have until the food's cold, and I'm not sharing."
He didn't dress it up. She'd forgotten how little he dressed things up when it mattered; it was everything else he dressed.
"A man came to one of my rooms on Tuesday. Very polite. Very well funded. He was asking after a courier — a woman, black hair, delivers for the Empress, Yu-Fei's little golden door on the Mile End road." He paused. "Blue eyes. And a scar, he said. A small crescent, left wrist."
The kitchen light buzzed. Somewhere below, the radio changed songs.
"So do I know about the scar," Lucien said quietly. "That's rather the problem. He knew it, and I didn't sell it to him. Which means either someone in my network is leaking, or he's had eyes on you long enough to watch you push your sleeves up."
"How long?"
"If it started before Tuesday? I don't know. That's why I'm here and not sending someone. Rory—"
"You don't get to say my name yet." It came out flatter than she intended, which was somehow worse. She braced a hip against the counter and looked at him, at the rain still drying in the seams of his suit, and the three months rose up like water finding a crack. "Three months, Lucien. You sold my routes. You sat across from me at Silas' bar and let me tell you about my week, and you'd already sold my routes to a broker in Spitalfields so he could use me as bait, and then when I found out — from Eva, from a photocopy, like I was a job you'd filed — you didn't even deny it. And then you were gone."
"Yes."
"Yes? That's it?"
"No. But you weren't finished, and I wasn't going to talk over you." He straightened, and she watched him choose, deliberately , to leave the cane against the wall. "You want the arithmetic. Fine. Those couriers were dying. Three of them between February and May, throats opened in doorways, and the pattern was tightening around the Empress whether I involved you or not. The man I sold your routes to wasn't the killer. He was the only person who knew who the killer was, and he wouldn't trade the name for money. He wanted something he thought was worth more."
"Me."
"A pattern," Lucien said. "Times, streets, the nights you carried the second bag. I'd already quietly taken the real cargo off your runs — you were carrying curry and prayer candles and nothing else, and I have never lied to you about that part. Your routes bought me a name. The name bought a shallow grave in Walthamstow. You walked home every night since through streets that were clean, and you hated me for it, and I decided that was an acceptable price, which is the only genuinely evil thing I have ever decided." His voice stayed level all the way through, and she hated how well she knew him, how she could see the effort of the levelness like a seam in cloth. "I didn't tell you because telling you meant you'd have said no. And you'd have been right to."
The anger went out of her all at once, which frightened her more than the anger had. She looked down and found she'd been gripping the edge of the counter hard enough to whiten her knuckles.
"And the disappearing," she said. "Three months. Not a card. Not a — Lucien, I thought you were dead. I checked. I did the awful thing Eva tells everyone not to do, I asked around the underworld about you, and everyone I asked got very quiet and wouldn't look at me."
"My father's people." He said it the way other men say a diagnosis. "They noticed I'd stopped moving. A half-demon of Avaros with an address is a half-demon with hostages, and I had — " he stopped, and the amber eye and the black one both came to rest on her face. "I had acquired a reason to have an address. So I gave them a chase. Marseille, then Trieste, then a freighter out of Izmir with a dishonest captain. I came back nine days ago. It took me eight of them to climb these stairs."
She should have said something then. There were things queued up behind her teeth — that she'd started keeping the bar downstairs open an hour later, that she'd stopped, that she'd spent June flinching at men with umbrellas who walked like him. But what came out, because she was tired and the food smelled like the first week she'd known him, was:
"Noswaith dda. You've never spoken Welsh to me in your life. You speak four languages and you picked the one from Cardiff."
"Five, now." For the first time he looked, if not sheepish, then at least a man caught out. "Badly. I had three months and no one to talk to and a great deal of money for books. There are four languages I can lie in fluently. I wanted one where I couldn't. Everything I say in it is true — it's the only language where that's guaranteed, because I don't know it well enough to cheat."
"Say it again."
"Noswaith dda."
"Again."
"Noswaith dda, cariad." And her eyes stung, because cariad was her mother's word, worn soft as an old coin, and hearing it come out of Lucien Moreau's careful mouth in that flat Marseilles-tinted attempt was more than the evening had any right to ask of her.
"You came back for the job," she said. "The courier. That's why you're here."
"I came back in June for no reason I was willing to say out loud. The courier is the reason I knocked tonight." He crossed the small room in two steps, and she let him, and he stopped close enough that she could smell rain and cedar and the curry house under everything. His hand came up, and she let it, and his thumb found the little crescent on her left wrist and rested there. "He'll use this to find you."
"It's from a bicycle chain. I was nine. I told my mother a cat did it."
"I know what it looks like from across a room," he said. "I've been looking at it for a year. They described your eyes on Tuesday and the man said blue, and I've never once managed to describe them, which is how I knew he hadn't really seen you and I had."
"Lucien."
"I'm going to fix this. It's the one thing I'm for." His head bent, unhurried, giving her the whole length of the moment to move. She didn't move. "But first I am going to do something I should have done in December, and if you tell me no I'll pick up my dinner and my cane and go back into the rain forever."
"I'm not going to say no," Rory said, "but you're standing on Eva's index cards ."
He looked down. The cards were, in fact, a ruin beneath his shoes. He said something in French that she chose not to have translated, and then he kissed her, and his cane went over with a clatter against the bookshelf, and the blade somewhere inside it stayed exactly where it belonged.
The kiss tasted of rain and cumin. One of his hands came up to cradle the back of her head like something breakable, which from him was practically a marriage proposal, and her fingers found his collar and held on, and three months of unsaid things passed between them in the space of a breath and did not, after all, need saying.
When they broke apart, Ptolemy had emerged from under the desk and was threading himself through Lucien's ankles with slow, deliberate forgiveness, which was more than Rory had managed in a quarter of a year.
"The food's cold," she said, not moving away .
"I know the number downstairs," said Lucien. "I'm told I'm charming on the telephone."
She laughed — the first real one since May — and reached past him to slide all three deadbolts home, the sticky brass one last. Outside, the rain kept coming down on Brick Lane, and for the first time since she'd known him, the man with a blade in his cane and an exit in every language was locked in with her on the inside.
"Cariad," she said, just to watch his face.
It was a very good face.