AI Rory got the third deadbolt halfway turned before she remembered Eva never knocked like that.
Eva knocked in flurries, knuckles drumming, already talking through the wood. This knock had been low and deliberate. Three measured raps. A pause. Then one more, softer, as if the person on the other side had reconsidered.
She left the chain on and cracked the door two inches. The stairwell above the curry house always smelled of cumin and fried onions and damp carpet, but underneath it now was something colder, something clean like bergamot and rain.
Lucien Moreau stood on the landing with rain beading on the shoulders of his charcoal suit.
For a full second her brain refused to file him correctly. He was not supposed to be on Brick Lane. He belonged to the basement bars off Soho where the lights stayed low, where he leaned on that ivory-handled cane and traded names like currency. Not here, where the bulb buzzed and the paint peeled and Ptolemy was yowling to be fed.
"You've got to be kidding me," she said.
His mouth tipped, not quite a smile. "Bonsoir, Rory."
She stared at him through the crack. His platinum blond hair was slicked back from his forehead, darkened at the edges by the rain, and even in the bad hallway light she could see the difference in his eyes, one amber and warm as whiskey, the other black all the way through. Last time she had seen those eyes they had been half-closed against the smoke of Silas's back room, and he had told her not to call him again unless someone was bleeding .
"How did you know I was here?" she said.
"Eva told me." He shifted his weight, the ferrule of his cane clicking against the lino. "She said you were waterin the plant while she's in Manchester. She said you would pretend not to be home."
"Smart woman."
"She also gave me strict instructions not to let you do that."
Behind her, Eva's flat pressed close and cluttered, the way it always did. Every surface was stacked with books and scrolls and loose sheaves of research notes in Eva's frantic handwriting, towers of them on the kitchen counter and the arm of the sofa and the windowsill. There was barely room to turn around, and the tabby cat was winding himself around her ankles, purring loud enough to be heard through the door.
Rory didn't open it wider. Her left sleeve had ridden up when she reached for the deadbolt, exposing the thin white line on her wrist, a small crescent from where she'd gone through a greenhouse pane when she was nine. She yanked it down.
"You can't just show up," she said. "It's been three weeks."
"Twenty-six days," he said.
The precision of it landed like a hand around her throat. She had counted too, and hated that she had counted. She'd counted while doing delivery runs for the Golden Empress, balancing takeaway bags on her handlebars through Soho rain, while trying not to think about the last night at Silas's, the way he'd looked at her across the table and said, if you walk out with that name in your mouth you're going to get yourself killed, and she'd walked out anyway.
She was supposed to be cool-headed about this. That was what everyone said about her, what her father had praised in her back when he'd still thought she'd make a decent barrister, what had gotten her through Cardiff and then out of Cardiff and away from Evan and all the way to London with nothing but a duffel and Eva's spare key. Cool-headed. Quick. Out-of-the-box.
Her pulse was hammering in her ears.
"What do you want, Lucien?"
"To come in before your neighbor calls the police." He glanced pointedly down the stairs, where Mrs. Begum's door was already cracked open an inch. "I am dripping on a very clean floor, and I have information you asked for."
"I didn't ask you for anything."
"You asked Eva to ask me." He lifted his eyebrows . "Which is a very Cardiff lawyer way of asking, by the way."
Despite herself, heat climbed up the back of her neck. She hated that he remembered that, that she'd told him about the Pre-Law degree she'd abandoned, about Brendan Carter in his wig and Jennifer Carter with her red pens, about how she'd fled instead of sitting finals because Evan had started checking her phone and she'd started flinching when doors slammed. She'd told him too much that night. That had been the problem.
She slid the chain off. She opened the door.
He was taller than she remembered, or maybe the hallway was just narrow. She was five-six in socks and he was five-eleven without even counting the cane, and he had to duck slightly under the doorframe Eva had hung with drying lavender. He stepped inside and brought the rain and the cold in with him, and suddenly the cramped one-bedroom felt half its size.
Ptolemy took one look at him and trotted straight over to rub his tabby head against Lucien's polished shoe.
"Traitor," Rory muttered, and shut the door and threw all three deadbolts again, one by one. The clicks sounded obscenely loud.
Lucien stood very still among Eva's mess, taking it in without touching anything. He set his cane carefully against the table leg. Water dripped from his cuffs onto a pile of photocopied maps. He noticed and moved his hand with an apologetic flick.
"You cut your hair," he said.
She touched it without thinking. Straight, black, shoulder-length, still damp from the shower. "It's the same."
"No. You used to push it behind your left ear when you were lying." His amber eye held hers. "You're doing it now."
"I'm not lying. I'm annoyed." But her hand dropped. "You look the same. Annoyingly immaculate for a man caught in a downpour."
He laughed, a short surprised sound, and the tension in his shoulders eased a fraction. God, she had missed that sound . She had missed the way he switched languages when he was tired , dropping into French without noticing, the way he could untangle any knot with four different tongues. She had missed sitting across from him while he talked, feeling like the only person in the room he wasn't trying to sell something to.
Which was exactly why she'd stopped calling.
"I told you not to come after me," she said quietly.
"You walked out in the middle of a negotiation with people who collect teeth, Rory. Forgive me if I took that personally."
"You told me I was reckless."
"You were reckless." His voice stayed even, but his hand tightened on nothing, where the cane would have been. "You are still reckless, staying here alone with three deadbolts and a cat while that man is still looking for you."
The name hung unspoken between them. Evan. Not a demon, not a fixer, just a human boy from university with a sweet smile and a temper that left bruises in the shape of fingerprints. Lucien had offered to make him disappear in Marseille French so soft she'd almost said yes. That had terrified her more than anything.
"I can handle Evan," she said.
"I know you can." The black eye seemed to drink the lamplight. "That was never the question."
Ptolemy jumped onto the sofa and kneaded Eva's afghan, watching them with round green eyes. The extractor fan from the curry house rattled below the floorboards. Somewhere a bus hissed on Brick Lane.
Rory crossed her arms to stop herself from reaching for him. She was close enough to see the rain caught in his eyelashes, the faint scar at his temple she had once traced with her fingertip in the dark above Silas's bar, listening to the bass thump through the floor while he told her about his mother in Marseille and a father he never named except as from Avaros, as if saying it louder would summon him .
Twenty-six days of telling herself it had only been proximity and adrenaline. Twenty-six days undone by bergamot and rain.
"Why are you really here?" she asked.
He reached inside his jacket, slowly , letting her see his hands, and withdrew a folded slip of paper. He held it out between two fingers. A name. An address in Limehouse. A time.
"He's paying a broker to find you," Lucien said. "Not one of ours. A human one. Cheap. Stupid. I bought the contract off him."
Her stomach dropped. "You what?"
"I bought it, Rory." He said it simply, like he'd picked up milk. "It's done. He thinks you went back to Cardiff."
She stared at the paper. Her cool head, the thing she prided herself on, felt suddenly very far away. "That must have cost you."
"It did."
"Why?"
He looked at her then, really looked, and the careful broker's mask slipped. He looked thirty-two and exhausted and furious, mostly at himself.
"Because the last time you were in my sight you had your chin up and your eyes bright blue and furious and you told me you didn't need a keeper," he said. "And you were right. But I have spent twenty-six days checking my phone to see if Silas had called to say you'd turned up dead in an alley, and I am very tired, ma chérie. I am too old for this kind of worry."
The endearment slipped out in French and he winced as soon as he'd said it.
Rory's throat closed. She unfolded the paper with fingers that weren't quite steady, then refolded it. The information was real. It was clean. It was exactly what she would have asked for if she'd been brave enough to ask.
She stepped closer. The books wobbled on the counter as her hip brushed them. A scroll rolled and she caught it without looking, her reflexes kicking in, and Lucien's hand came up at the same time to steady the stack, and their fingers brushed.
Static, or heat, or something older than either. Half-demon, she reminded herself wildly. His father was a thing from another realm. But his hand was warm and human and shaking very slightly .
"You could have sent this with Eva," she whispered.
"I know."
"You wanted to see if I'd slam the door."
"I wanted to see if you'd let me in."
She was still holding the scroll. He was still holding the tower of books. Ptolemy meowed loudly in protest at being ignored . Neither of them moved.
Three weeks of hurt rose up in her, all the unsaid things crowding her mouth. That she'd left because she was falling for him and it felt like falling back into Evan's hands, needing someone to stand between her and the world. That his warning had sounded like control even though she'd known, she'd known, it was fear. That she didn't know how to be kept safe without being kept .
"I don't need you to fix this for me," she said, and her voice cracked on the last word.
"I know." He let go of the books and, very carefully , as if she were something that might bolt, tucked her damp hair behind her left ear. His thumb grazed her cheek. "Let me stand in the room while you fix it yourself."
The deadbolts held. The rain hammered the window above the curry house. The cat settled, purring, into the hollow of Eva's sofa.
Rory leaned, just slightly , into his touch.