AI The deadbolt slid back with a sound like a rifle crack in the quiet flat.
Rory’s hand stayed on the brass knob, fingers still tingling from the vibration. Three deadbolts. Eva had installed them after Rory moved in, after Rory had jumped at every creak in the stairwell, after the first month of waking with her heart hammering against her ribs. Three locks between her and whatever waited in the narrow hallway beyond.
Ptolemy wound between her ankles, tail flicking, and meowed once — a low, suspicious sound.
“I know,” she murmured. “It’s late.”
The doorbell rang again. Sharp. Unhurried.
She pressed her eye to the peephole and her stomach dropped.
The distorted fisheye view made him look even more severe: perfect charcoal suit, slicked-back platinum hair, ivory-handled cane planted between polished oxfords. He stood with his weight tilted slightly to the left, the way he always did when his knee bothered him. The way she remembered.
Lucien.
Rory’s breath left her in a slow, controlled stream. Her free hand pressed flat against the door, as if she could feel his heat through the wood. She’d spent four months scrubbing him from her life — four months of not thinking about the way his accent curled around her name, four months of deleting text threads and pretending she didn’t see his face every time she crossed into Soho after dark.
And now he was on the other side of her door, one thin layer of painted timber away.
“I know you’re standing there, cara mia.” His voice slipped through the door like smoke. British Public School polish over French vowels. “Your shadow is visible through the gap.”
Rory looked down. Light from the hallway bled beneath the door, and her silhouette cut a dark wedge through it. She closed her eyes.
“What do you want, Lucien?”
A pause. She could almost hear him smile.
“To speak with you. May I come in?”
“It’s almost midnight.”
“I am aware.”
Ptolemy meowed again, more insistent this time, and butted his head against Rory’s ankle. She wanted to be annoyed with the cat, but the truth was that Ptolemy always knew when something was wrong. And there was always something wrong when Lucien Moreau appeared without warning.
She unlocked the second deadbolt. Then the third.
When she opened the door, the hallway light hit him full in the face. One amber eye, one black. The asymmetry unnerved people — she’d watched strangers flinch when they first noticed it. But Rory had long since stopped seeing it as strange. It was just Lucien: half light, half shadow, entirely dangerous.
“Hello, Rory.” His gaze moved across her face with a precision that made her feel peeled open. “You look well.”
“Don’t do that,” she said quietly .
“Do what?”
“Talk like we’re strangers making small talk at a gallery opening.” She crossed her arms over the thin fabric of her t-shirt, suddenly aware that she was barefoot and wearing faded pyjama shorts with cartoon cats on them. “We haven’t spoken in four months. You can’t just show up and say I look well.”
Lucien’s lips curved — not quite a smile, but something adjacent . “Would you prefer I mention that you look exhausted? That there are shadows under your eyes? That your hair is damp, which tells me you couldn’t sleep and took a shower to pass the time?”
Rory’s jaw tightened. “That’s better. That’s honest.”
“Honesty was never our problem,” he said.
The words landed between them like a stone into still water. Rory felt the ripples spread through her chest — anger, grief, want, all tangled together.
“Why are you here?” she asked.
He tilted his head. “May I come in first? I’d rather not announce my business to Mrs. Okafor across the hall. She is, I believe, very interested in the comings and goings of young women.”
Rory glanced down the hallway, half-expecting to see the elderly Nigerian woman’s eye pressed to her own peephole. When she looked back at Lucien, he had shifted his weight again — just slightly , just enough that his cane bear more of his load.
“You’re in pain,” she said.
“I’m always in pain.”
“It’s worse now. The damp in London makes it worse.”
Something flickered across his face — surprise, or something softer. “You remember.”
“I remember everything,” she said, and hated how her voice wavered . “That’s rather the point.”
She stepped back from the doorway. A silent invitation. A surrender.
Lucien crossed the threshold with the quiet grace of someone who had spent decades moving through spaces that were not his own. He smelled like rain and sandalwood and expensive whisky — smells that settled deep into the fabric of the flat, claiming territory even as he stood perfectly still in the narrow entryway.
Ptolemy approached him cautiously , tail high with suspicion, and sniffed at his trouser cuff.
“Ah,” Lucien said, looking down. “The guardian of the house.”
“He has good instincts,” Rory said, closing the door and sliding the middle deadbolt back into place. She didn’t lock the other two. She told herself it was because she might need him to leave quickly .
The flat was small — one cramped bedroom, a kitchenette, a living space overcrowded with Eva’s research. But with Lucien in it, the walls seemed to close inward. He was too large for this place, too polished for the stacks of books on every surface and the half-empty takeaway containers on the coffee table.
“Where is Eva?” he asked.
“Manchester. Research trip. She’s looking into a haunting at an old cotton mill.” Rory moved to the kitchenette, putting the breakfast bar between them — a pitiful barrier, but a barrier nonetheless. “You didn’t answer my question.”
Lucien set his cane against the wall and removed his gloves, one finger at a time, with the slow deliberation of someone unwrapping something fragile. His hands were long and pale, the nail beds neat, the knuckles bearing small scars that Rory remembered tracing with her fingertips in the dark.
“I need your help,” he said.
Rory laughed — a short, disbelieving sound. “No. No, you don’t get to do that.”
“Do what?”
“Disappear for four months and then show up like some brooding Byronic hero and say you need my help.” She gripped the edge of the counter, knuckles whitening. “You made it perfectly clear that you didn’t want me involved in your world, Lucien. You made the choice for both of us. I was just supposed to accept it.”
“And you have,” he said evenly. “You’ve built a life here. A quiet one. The delivery job, the cramped flat, the takeaway dinners and the cat. It’s what you wanted.”
“It’s what I chose because I didn’t have a choice!” Rory’s voice cracked, and she hated it, hated the way she could feel tears gathering at the back of her throat. She swallowed hard. “You don’t get to show up here and act like you did me a favour.”
Lucien watched her with those mismatched eyes, his expression unreadable . The silence stretched between them, filled only by the distant sound of traffic on Brick Lane and the soft patter of rain against the window.
“No,” he said finally. “I don’t suppose I do.”
He moved toward her — slowly , deliberately , the way one approaches a wounded animal. Rory held her ground, though every nerve in her body screamed at her to back away, to put more distance between them.
“Then why are you here?” she asked again.
Lucien stopped at the edge of the breakfast bar, close enough that she could see the faint stubble shadowing his jaw, the tiny scar through his left eyebrow , the way his throat moved when he swallowed.
“Because I am out of options,” he said quietly. “Because there is someone — something — hunting people in the supernatural underworld, and the only clue points to a name I cannot trace.” He paused. “Because the only person who could possibly untangle this mess with me is standing in this flat right now, wearing pyjamas with cartoon cats on them.”
Rory looked down at her shorts. A parade of tiny smiling felines marched across the fabric. She had bought them at Primark for three pounds because they reminded her of Ptolemy, and she had never loved them more than in this exact moment, when Lucien Moreau was standing in her kitchen and making her heart do things she’d spent months trying to forget.
“You’re an information broker,” she said. “You know everyone. Why would you need my help?”
“The clue is written in a language I can’t read.” He reached into his jacket and produced a folded piece of paper, worn at the edges, creased from too much handling. “It’s Welsh.”
Rory stared at the paper. Then at him. “Welsh.”
“Your mother was a Welsh teacher,” Lucien said. “I assumed you retained some facility with the language.”
“You manipulated this,” she whispered. “You found a clue in Welsh and showed up at my door because you knew I couldn’t say no to someone in trouble, because you knew I’d be curious, because you knew —”
“Because you are the only person in London I trust with this.” His voice had dropped to something raw, something that made the air in the flat feel thin. “Because I have spent four months trying to stay away from you and every single one of them has been a particular kind of hell.”
Rory’s breath caught.
The paper trembled between his fingers. The rain tapped against the window. Ptolemy jumped onto the sofa and began kneading a cushion with focused intensity , as if none of this mattered to him at all.
“You said you could keep me safe if I stayed away,” Rory said. Her voice was barely above a whisper . “You said your world would destroy me. That it already had started to. That Evan was just the beginning.”
“I know what I said.”
“I walked away because you asked me to. Because I thought…” She stopped. Swallowed. “I thought if you really loved me, you would have asked me to stay.”
Lucien’s jaw tightened. For the first time since he’d stepped through the door, the mask cracked — just a fraction, just enough for Rory to see the exhaustion beneath.
“I was trying to protect you,” he said.
“I didn’t need your protection.” Rory moved around the breakfast bar, closing the last of the distance between them. She stood close enough to touch him now, close enough to feel the heat radiating from his body, close enough to see the way his pulse jumped at the base of his throat. “I needed you to choose me.”
The words hung in the air between them, heavy and undeniable.
Lucien closed his eyes. When he opened them, the amber one was burning with something that looked like grief .
“Rory,” he said. “I chose you the moment I met you. I chose you so completely that it scared the hell out of me. And I am a half-demon fixer who has stared down things that would make most people go mad.” He reached up, slow enough that she could have stopped him, and tucked a strand of damp black hair behind her ear. His fingers grazed the shell of her ear, and the touch sent electricity racing down her spine . “I have loved you from the minute you told me my tie was crooked and then fixed it for me in the middle of a crowded bar, completely unaware that I could have snapped your neck without breaking a sweat.”
Rory’s breath came shallow and fast. She remembered that night — the low amber lighting, the noise, the way his tie had been just slightly off-centre, annoying her until she couldn’t take it anymore. She hadn’t known what he was then. She’d just seen a beautiful man with beautiful eyes and a crooked tie.
“Then why did you tell me to go?” she asked.
“Because your ex was a danger I understood,” Lucien said. “A human danger. A cruelty I could anticipate. But my world…” He shook his head. “There are things in my world that would look at a human woman with bright blue eyes and see nothing but leverage. And I could not bear the thought of being the reason you got hurt.”
Rory pressed her palms against his chest. She felt his heartbeat beneath her fingertips — strong and steady, too fast to be calm. The fabric of his suit was cool and smooth.
“I’m not afraid of your world,” she said. “I’m afraid of not being trusted to choose it. To choose you.”
Lucien’s hand slid from her ear to cup the back of her neck, his thumb tracing the line of her jaw. “Cara mia,” he breathed. “You terrify me more than anything in either realm.”
Rory rose onto her toes and kissed him.
It was not a soft kiss. It was four months of silence and sleepless nights and unanswered questions, poured into the press of lips and teeth and breath. Lucien made a sound low in his throat — surprise, relief, need — and his other arm wrapped around her waist, pulling her tight against him. The paper with the Welsh clue fluttered to the floor, forgotten.
Rory’s fingers found their way into his hair, ruining the perfect slick-back, and she didn’t care. She didn’t care about anything except the heat of his mouth on hers and the way his hand had slipped beneath the hem of her t-shirt to rest against the small of her back, palm hot against her skin.
When they finally broke apart, both breathing hard, Lucien pressed his forehead against hers.
“I should not have come here,” he said. “It was selfish.”
“Yes,” Rory said, her voice unsteady . “It was.”
“I will probably do it again.”
“Good.” She pulled back just enough to meet his gaze. “Because I’m going to help you with this Welsh clue. And then we’re going to have an excruciatingly long conversation about everything that happened. And then,” she added, “you’re going to pay for the takeaway you interrupted.”
Lucien’s lips curved into a genuine smile — small and surprised and utterly disarming. “Is that so?”
“It is if you want to stay.”
The word lingered between them, weighted with possibility. Outside, the rain had slowed to a soft drizzle against the glass. Ptolemy had apparently decided Lucien was acceptable, because he had abandoned his cushion and was now winding around the Frenchman’s ankles with a rumbling purr.
Lucien looked down at the cat. Then back at Rory. “I want to stay,” he said quietly. “If you’ll have me.”
Rory reached down and picked the paper up from the floor. She smoothed it flat against her palm, feeling the raised texture of old parchment, the unfamiliar shapes of words that waited to be decoded. Then she looked up at the man who had broken her heart to save it, and nodded toward the sofa.
“Sit,” she said. “Let’s see what you’ve brought me.”