AI The knock wasn't Eva's knock.
Rory knew Eva's knock the way you knew a sibling's footsteps on the stairs, three quick raps and then a pause while she fished for her keys. This was different. Two soft, deliberate taps, low on the door, patient enough to be polite and confident enough to know she'd be heard through the layers of the flat.
She was already standing in the cramped kitchen alcove of Eva's flat, a chipped mug in her hand gone cold, Ptolemy winding figure eights around her ankles. The smell of cumin and fried onions bled up from the curry house below and clung to everything, to the stacks of books on the counter, to the scrolls half-unrolled over the sofa arm, to Rory's own sweater. She'd been camped here for three days while Silas had the pipes in her flat redone, sleeping on Eva's sagging couch, trying not to displace too many of Eva's meticulously piled research notes. Eva was at the university library until ten.
Rory set the mug down and crossed the three steps to the door. The tabby cat darted ahead of her and sat directly in front of it, tail curled neat around his paws, staring up as if he expected whoever was on the other side.
"Who is it?" she called.
A pause. Then a voice through the wood, low and familiar enough to make her fingers tighten on the edge of the counter.
"Rory."
Her stomach dropped.
She undid the deadbolts one by one. Three of them, stiff and loud in the quiet flat. Eva had installed the third one herself after the thing last autumn with the warding gone wrong. Click. Click. Click. Each one louder than the last.
She pulled the door open.
Lucien Moreau stood in the narrow hallway, too elegant for the peeling paint and the flickering overhead light. He wore a tailored charcoal suit that had no business being on Brick Lane on a damp Thursday night, the jacket cut sharp over his shoulders, the collar of his white shirt open just enough to be informal. His platinum blond hair was slicked back as always, though a few strands had come loose in the rain and stuck to his forehead. In his right hand, his ivory-handled cane rested against the floor, rain beading on the polished shaft. His eyes caught the hall light, one amber, warm and human, the other black from edge to edge, depthless. Both fixed on her.
For a second neither of them moved.
He looked her over in that way he had, like he was cataloging everything and letting her see him do it. The straight black hair cut at her shoulders, still damp from the shower. The oversized cardigan she had borrowed from Eva that hung to her knees. Her bare feet against the cold floorboards.
"You're here," he said, finally, in English, his accent softening the words at the edges.
"Obviously I'm here. You knocked on the door I opened." Her voice came out sharper than she'd intended. She felt her pulse hammering against her throat. "What are you doing here, Lucien?"
His mouth twitched. Not quite a smile. "May I come in? The hallway smells of ghee and poor decisions."
Ptolemy meowed, loud and indignant, and butted his head against the doorframe.
Rory stepped back before she could talk herself out of it. The flat was too small to make a grand gesture of anything; opening the door was invitation enough. Lucien stepped inside, bringing the smell of rain and something colder, a faint metallic scent that always clung to him, with him. He closed the door behind him and, without being asked , turned the three deadbolts again. Click. Click. Click.
She watched his hands. Long fingers, elegant, the nails cut short. She remembered those hands on her face, the night before he'd left for Marseille and hadn't called for two months.
"You shouldn't just show up," she said, folding her arms across her chest. The sleeve of the cardigan rode up and exposed the small crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist, pale against her skin. She tugged it down. "You don't get to do that. Not after—"
"After I left without properly explaining myself," he finished for her . He didn't move any closer. He stood just inside the door, his cane held lightly , giving her the whole length of the tiny living room as space. Books and scrolls were piled on every surface, Eva's handwriting frantic in the margins. It made the space feel even smaller. "I know."
"Do you?" The hurt cracked through before she could keep it cool. That was always the problem with him. He made her want to be cool-headed and he dismantled it with a look. "You said you had business. You said it was a few days. Then nothing. No message. No call. I had to hear from Yu-Fei that you'd been seen at the Golden Empress asking about a shipment, like you couldn't even be bothered to tell me you were back in London."
Lucien's heterochromatic gaze didn't waver. The amber eye was apologetic. The black one was unreadable .
"I was ashamed," he said simply.
That stopped her.
"I told you once my father was from Avaros. I did not tell you what that means when you are summoned back." His fingers tightened on the ivory handle of his cane. "It is not a polite business trip. It is not a place where phones work or where time moves the way it does here. And I did not want you to see what I become when I am there, Rory. So I stayed away until I was sure I was... myself again. That was cowardice. And unkind to you."
The flat was too warm. The curry smell was too strong. Rory felt the familiar , infuriating prickle behind her eyes and swallowed it.
"You could have said that in a text," she said, but the edge was gone from her voice . "One line. 'In demon realm, brb, don't worry.' I can handle a lot, Lucien. What I can't handle is you deciding what I can handle for me."
"I know," he said again. He took a half step forward and then stopped, as if checking for permission . Ptolemy, traitor that he was, left Rory's ankles and went to twine around Lucien's polished shoes, purring. Lucien glanced down, surprised, and then nudged the cat gently with the tip of his cane. "Eva's cat likes me now. Last time he tried to claw my eye out."
"He has good instincts," Rory said.
Lucien huffed a quiet laugh. "He does."
Silence settled again, but it was different now, charged . She could hear the rain against the single window, the sizzle from the kitchen below, the soft tick of the old radiator. She could see the faint lines at the corners of Lucien's eyes that hadn't been there before, the tiredness he was trying to hide with perfect tailoring. He had always looked immaculate. He had never looked rested.
"You cut your hair," he said softly , looking at her again. His voice had dropped, and with it came the faintest slip into French, the way it always did when he wasn't guarding himself. "C'est joli. It suits you."
Her hand went self-consciously to the ends of her black hair, brushing her shoulders. "Eva did it in the kitchen. With craft scissors. So if it looks like a child attacked me, that's accurate."
"It looks beautiful," he said. No deflection, no cleverness. Just the statement, plain and direct, and his amber eye held hers.
She felt her face get hot. She hated that she still reacted like this, that two months and hurt and sleepless nights could be undone by him standing in her friend's cluttered flat looking at her like that.
"Why are you really here?" she asked, quieter .
Lucien's jaw worked. He looked down at his cane, at Ptolemy's tail flicking against it, and then back up at her.
"Because I was a fool. Because I missed you every day in a place where missing someone feels like a physical wound. Because Eva told me you were here and that if I did not come and fix this, she would hex me herself, and I believe her scrolls are correctly translated." He said it all in that calm, precise way he had, but his knuckles were white around the ivory handle. "And because I could not stand one more night knowing you thought I had left you the way he did."
The reference to Evan landed like a slap, not because it was cruel but because it was accurate. Evan who had made her flinch at loud knocks, Evan who had made her flee Cardiff for London and for Eva's couch in the first place. Rory felt her throat close.
"I didn't think that," she whispered. "Not exactly. I just... I thought maybe I imagined how much you cared. Which is worse, somehow."
"You didn't imagine it."
He closed the last step between them then, slowly enough that she could have moved away. She didn't. He was close enough now that she had to tilt her chin up to meet his eyes, close enough to see the rain still caught in his hair, the faint stubble along his jaw that meant he hadn't slept properly. He smelled like rain and wool and him .
He lifted his free hand, hesitated. "May I?"
She nodded before she could second-guess it.
His fingers brushed her cheek, barely a touch, tucking that uneven black hair behind her ear. His hand was cool. She shivered and leaned into it despite herself, her eyes fluttering shut for half a second. Bright blue to black and amber. When she opened them, he was watching her mouth.
"Rory," he said, her name a little rough now . "If you want me to go, I will go. I will not show up unannounced again. But if you will let me... I would like to take you to dinner. Properly. Not takeaway eaten over Eva's notes. Or just sit here with you and the cat who hates me while the rain stops. Anything you want."
She looked at him, at this half-demon fixer who spoke four languages fluently and could talk his way out of any deal in the underworld and who was standing in a too-small flat above a curry house looking at her like she was the only negotiation he was afraid to lose. The hurt was still there, a tight knot under her ribs, but underneath it was the same relentless pull that had been there since the first night he'd followed her after a delivery for Yu-Fei to make sure she got home safe, cane tapping against the pavement behind her.
She reached up and covered his hand on her cheek with her own, her small crescent scar pressing against his wrist.
"You're already here," she said, and her voice was unsteady, but she was smiling now, a real smile that she felt break across her face . "You might as well stay. Ptolemy has clearly chosen your side."
Lucien exhaled, a sound that was almost a laugh, almost relief, and his forehead dropped to rest lightly against hers. His cane clacked softly as he shifted his weight , and Ptolemy meowed in protest at being ignored .
"Thank you," he whispered against her skin, in French this time, and then in English, "for opening the door."
Rory closed her eyes and breathed him in, and after a moment, she lifted onto her toes and answered him the only way she had wanted to for months.