AI The knock came after ten, sharp and impatient against the door of the flat on Brick Lane.
Rory had her hand on the middle deadbolt. Three of them, all mismatched brasses that Eva had installed herself after the second break-in last spring, and they stuck if you didn't jiggle them just right. The curry house below was still open, and the whole flat smelled like cumin and fried onions and old paper. Every surface was covered in Eva's organized chaos, stacks of books with cracked spines, scrolls held shut with rubber bands, research notes taped to the walls in Eva's frantic handwriting. Ptolemy the tabby was perched on top of the refrigerator, watching her with flat, judgmental eyes.
"Evie's not here," Rory called out, thinking it was one of Eva's university colleagues. Eva was in Oxford for the weekend at a symposium and Rory had offered to feed the cat. "She'll be back Sunday."
The person on the other side knocked again. Same rhythm. Not a colleague.
Rory frowned and undid the third deadbolt. Her straight black hair was still damp from the shower, hanging just to her shoulders, and she was wearing one of Eva's oversized jumpers that swallowed her frame and a pair of leggings with a hole at the knee. Not how she would have chosen to answer the door to anyone, let alone him.
She pulled the door open.
Lucien Moreau stood in the narrow hallway, taking up too much of it.
He was exactly as he had been four months ago, which felt somehow worse than if he had changed. His platinum blond hair was slicked back, not a strand out of place despite the rain spotting his shoulders. His charcoal suit was tailored within an inch of its life, the jacket buttoned, the white shirt crisp beneath it. One hand rested on the ivory handle of his cane, the other in his pocket. He looked impeccably, annoyingly put together, and completely out of place against the peeling paint and flickering bulb of Eva's building.
His eyes found hers. One amber, warm as honey in the dim light. The other all black, depthless. Heterochromatic and impossible not to stare at.
"Rory," he said.
Her name in his mouth still had that faint Marseille accent, soft at the edges. She felt it like a touch.
"You've got to be kidding me," she said.
For a second neither of them moved. The air between them went tight. Rory was acutely aware of the crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist, suddenly visible where the too-long sleeve had ridden up. She tugged it down.
Lucien's gaze flicked down to the movement and back up. "You are not at Silas's," he said, as if that explained his surprise. "I went there first."
"Observant as ever. Eva asked me to look after Ptolemy." The cat chose that moment to jump down from the fridge with a thump and weave between her ankles. Rory didn't bend to pick him up. She kept her hand on the door, blocking the entrance with her body. It was a small body, five foot six to his five eleven, but she made herself as solid as she could. "How did you even know I was here?"
"I asked Yu-Fei," he said. "She said you traded your evening shift."
Of course he had. Lucien knew everyone and owed favors to half of London's supernatural underbelly. Information was his currency. He was a fixer, a broker, the man you called when you had a problem no one else could solve quietly. He also had a terrible habit of using that network for personal matters.
"You could have called," she said.
"I did. Three times."
Rory's phone was on Eva's cluttered kitchen counter, face down. She had seen his name light up the screen and deliberately not answered. That had been the whole point of how they left things.
The last time they had spoken, it had been in the back room of Silas's bar after hours. He had told her she was being reckless, taking jobs for the Golden Empress that ran too close to the other side of London, the part that didn't show up on maps. She had told him he didn't get to tell her what was reckless, not when he made his living walking the line between human and demon and pretending it didn't cost him anything. He had looked at her with those impossible eyes and said, very quietly and in French, that he worried because she mattered to him. And she had said, if she mattered that much , he wouldn't have waited until she was already bleeding to show up. Then she had walked out.
"So you decided to show up unannounced instead," she said. "That's very respectful."
"Rory."
The way he said it, low and exasperated, made her jaw clench. He leaned his weight slightly on his cane, though she knew he didn't need it to stand. The ivory handle concealed a thin blade. She had seen him draw it once, fast and brutal and elegant, when a man with too many teeth had cornered her in an alley off Whitechapel.
"May I come in?" he asked. "For a moment. It is raining."
It was, in fact, raining quite hard now. She could hear it hitting the windows, the flat roof. His shoulders were damp. Some ridiculous, soft part of her wanted to step aside and let him in and hand him a towel.
She didn't.
"What do you want, Lucien?"
He exhaled through his nose. A little cloud in the cold hallway air. "Eva's research," he said. "She told me she had found something. About the Avaros gate. She said she would leave her notes here for me."
Rory stared at him. "That's why you're here? For Eva's notes?"
"Partially."
"Partially."
He looked down the hallway, then back at her, and the careful composure slipped a fraction. "And because we did not finish our conversation."
"There wasn't anything to finish," she said, but her voice wasn't as cool as she wanted it to be . It wavered . Cool-headed, Eva always called her, the one who thought quick and outside the box when everyone else panicked. She didn't feel cool-headed now. She felt raw and seen and angry in a way that had nothing to do with gates or demons.
"There was," he said quietly.
Ptolemy pushed his head against her calf and mewled. Rory finally stepped back, just enough to let the door swing wider. The smell of curry grew stronger with the draft from the hall.
"Fine," she said. "Five minutes. Don't touch anything, you'll cause an avalanche."
He stepped inside and she closed the door behind him, turning all three deadbolts again out of habit, the clicks loud in the small space. Up close he smelled like rain and wool and the faint, sharp cologne he always wore. He had to duck slightly to avoid a hanging paper lantern Eva had strung up.
He took in the flat with a single sweep. Books, scrolls, notes, the cat. His amber eye lingered on the little kitchenette where Rory's delivery bag for the Golden Empress was slumped against a chair, the red logo faded.
"You are still working for Yu-Fei," he said.
"It's a job. It pays rent. My flat above Silas's doesn't pay for itself."
"I know. I did not mean it as a judgment."
"No, you just meant it as concern," she said. She crossed her arms, which made the jumper sleeves bunch. "Which is the same thing when you do it."
Lucien's mouth twitched. Not quite a smile. "You always do this. You translate what I say into something harsher so you do not have to hear what I am actually saying."
"I translate what you say into what you mean," she shot back. "My dad was a barrister. I'm good at it."
"Your father taught you to argue. I am trying to apologize."
That stopped her. She blinked, her bright blue eyes wide. "What?"
He shifted his grip on his cane. The ivory was warm from his hand. "In Marseille, there is a phrase. Qui s'excuse s'accuse. He who excuses himself, accuses himself. I did not come sooner because I did not have the right words. In any language. I speak four, and none of them were sufficient."
Rory felt her throat get tight. She hated when he did this, dropped the fixer persona and spoke like a man instead of a half-demon who traded secrets for a living.
"You left me standing in that bar," she said, quieter now. "You told me I mattered and then you just let me go. Like it was a fact you were reporting, not something you were going to do anything about."
"I thought giving you space was doing something," he said. "You had just left Evan. You had just moved to London. You told me you did not want to be handled. So I did not handle you. I waited. Perhaps I waited too long."
The name Evan hung in the air for a second. Her ex. The reason she had fled Cardiff and law school and the life her parents had mapped out for her. Lucien never said his name with anything but careful neutrality, but his black eye always seemed to darken.
"You didn't wait," she said. "You disappeared."
"I am here now."
He was. Too close. In Eva's tiny flat, there was nowhere to go that wasn't within arm's reach. Rory could see the rain caught in his eyelashes, the faint stubble along his jaw that his usual clean shave hadn't quite erased today . He looked tired. She wondered when he slept.
She let out a breath she hadn't realized she was holding . "Eva's notes are on the desk. Under the stack with the blue string around it. She said you'd know which one."
He didn't move to look. He was looking at her.
"Rory," he said again, softer this time. "If I come closer, will you tell me to leave?"
Her heart did a hard, ridiculous thump against her ribs. The history between them was a live wire, attraction and hurt twisted together so tightly she couldn't pull one without feeling the other. The nights he had walked her home after her late delivery shifts, his hand hovering at her elbow but never quite touching. The way he had looked at her when she finally told him about the crescent scar on her wrist, not as a flaw but as a story . The fight that had felt like a breakup even though they had never been together.
She should say yes. She should tell him five minutes were up.
Instead she said, "Try it and find out."
Lucien took one step, then another, until the tip of his cane was almost touching her foot and she could feel the heat coming off his suit jacket. He didn't touch her. He waited, amber and black eyes asking a question she could answer.
Slowly, deliberately, Rory reached out and brushed a raindrop from his lapel. Her fingers lingered. The wool was soft and damp.
"You know," she murmured, "for an information broker, you're really bad at saying what you want."
A real smile broke through then, small and crooked and all for her. "What I want," he said in that low accent that made her shiver, "is terribly simple. I want to not be shown the door."
She looked up at him, at the impossible face she had tried very hard not to miss, and felt the tight knot in her chest loosen one notch.
"Then stop knocking like a debt collector," she said, and finally, she smiled back. "You can take your hand out of your pocket, Luc. You're making me nervous."
He did, and his hand found hers where it rested against his chest, his fingers closing around hers, warm and sure. Ptolemy jumped up onto the cluttered desk and knocked a stack of scrolls to the floor with a thud neither of them bothered to look at.
Outside, the rain kept coming down on Brick Lane, drumming on the windows, sealing them in the small, book-filled, curry-scented world of Eva's flat together, just the two of them and the things they finally had space to say.