AI The third deadbolt stuck, the way it always did, and Rory had to lean her shoulder into the door and wrench the latch sideways before it gave. She'd assumed it was Mrs. Begum from the curry house downstairs, come up with another foil tray of leftover saag because she'd decided Eva's houseguest looked thin.
It was not Mrs. Begum.
Lucien Moreau stood on the landing with rain on his shoulders and the stairwell's single bulb turning his hair to something almost white. Charcoal suit, dark with wet at the cuffs. The ivory-handled cane planted beside his polished shoe. His eyes found hers, amber and black, and for one terrible second she forgot to be angry.
Then she remembered.
"No," she said, and started to close the door.
His cane slid into the gap. It was a neat move, practiced. She didn't doubt he'd stopped doors that way in four languages.
"Rory."
"How did you find me?"
"You left Silas's without a forwarding address, which is to say you went to the only other person in London you trust." The corner of his mouth tilted. It wasn't quite a smile. "I am a fixer, *chérie *. Finding people is the least interesting thing I do."
"Don't call me that."
"Aurora, then."
That was worse. He said it the way her mother used to, all four syllables given their due, and it landed somewhere under her ribs. She kept her hand flat against the door. Behind her, Ptolemy wound around her ankles and made the low, curious trill he reserved for strangers and tins of tuna.
"Six weeks," she said. "You had six weeks to knock on a door. You picked tonight?"
"I picked the first night I could stand upright."
She looked at him properly then. He was holding himself with too much care. The cane wasn't an affectation tonight; his weight rested on it. There was a bruise yellowing along his jaw, half-hidden by the collar, and a thin healing cut through his left eyebrow that hadn't been there the last time she'd been close enough to notice his eyebrows.
The last time she'd been close enough, she'd had her hands in his lapels and her mouth an inch from his, and he'd said, *This is a mistake,* and walked out into the rain.
"What happened to you?"
"May I come in?"
"That isn't an answer."
"No," he agreed. "It's a request."
The rain drummed on the skylight above the stairs. Downstairs, someone shouted an order in Sylheti, and the smell of cumin and burnt onion drifted up the stairwell the way it did every night, seeping into the books, into her hair, into the jumper she'd been living in for three days.
She stepped back.
He came in slowly and stopped just inside, taking in the flat. There wasn't much to take in except paper. Eva's research climbed every wall: stacks of books with Post-its bristling from them like feathers, scrolls tucked into umbrella stands, loose notes pinned to the fridge in her cramped, furious handwriting. The one clear surface was the sofa, where Rory's duvet lay in a twisted heap beside an empty carton from the Golden Empress. She'd stolen it off her own delivery run. Yu-Fei had pretended not to notice.
Lucien's gaze lingered on the duvet, then on her.
"You've been sleeping here."
"Eva's in Edinburgh. Someone had to feed the cat." She shut the door and threw the deadbolts, one, two, the stubborn third, mostly to give her hands something to do. "And I didn't feel like being at Silas's."
"Because of me."
"Don't flatter yourself."
"I rarely have to." He said it lightly, but it didn't land lightly . He shifted on the cane and winced, a tiny tightening at the corner of his mouth that he smoothed over at once.
Rory sighed and pointed at the one armchair not buried in folios. "Sit down before you fall down. I'm not dragging you down those stairs."
He sat. Ptolemy immediately jumped into his lap, turned twice, and settled against his ruined trousers as if he'd been waiting all evening for exactly this man. Traitor.
Lucien looked down at the cat with an expression of mild betrayal. "He's shedding on me."
"He does that to people he likes. Consider it an honour."
She didn't sit. She leaned against the kitchen counter with her arms folded, which put the width of the room between them. It wasn't much. Eva's flat didn't allow for much distance between anything.
"Go on, then," she said. "You came here to say something. Say it."
He was quiet for a long moment, stroking the cat with two fingers along its spine. When he spoke, it was to Ptolemy.
"My father sent for me."
Rory went still.
"The night I left you." His thumb paused between the cat's shoulder blades. "There was a summons waiting in my flat. From Avaros. One doesn't decline those, not if one wants to keep one's skin." He lifted his head. "He had heard about you."
"About me." Her voice came out thinner than she wanted.
"About a human woman in London who asks too many questions and doesn't die when she should. Who the fixer Lucien Moreau has been seen with, far too often, in places he has no business bringing a human." The amber eye caught the lamplight; the black one swallowed it. "My father collects things I care about, Rory. He always has. It's how he keeps me on a leash."
The radiator ticked. Rory realized she was rubbing the crescent scar on her left wrist with her thumb, the old nervous habit, and made herself stop.
"So you walked out," she said. "You said it was a mistake."
"I said *this * was a mistake."
"That's the same thing."
"It isn't." He leaned forward, and Ptolemy complained, and he ignored him. "I meant me. Letting you close to me. That was the mistake. Not you. It was never you."
"You could have *told * me."
"And what would you have done?"
"I don't know. Something. Come with you. Punched someone. Made a plan." She pushed off the counter, and suddenly the room wasn't wide enough to hold how angry she was. "That's what I do, Luc. I think my way out of things. You didn't even let me try. You just decided for me, like—"
She stopped. The name sat on her tongue, bitter as old coffee. *Like Evan.* Evan, who'd decided what she could wear and who she could see and when she was allowed to cry.
Lucien saw it anyway. He saw most things.
"Like him," he said quietly.
"No." She shook her head, because it wasn't fair, and she knew it. "No. He wanted me small. You wanted me safe. I know those aren't the same." She swallowed. "But it felt the same, standing in the rain."
He closed his eyes. When he opened them again, something in his face had given way, some carefully tailored seam come loose.
"I went to Avaros," he said, "and I told my father that you meant nothing. That you were a useful human, a courier, a contact. That I had already discarded you." His voice was low and even and very precise, the way it got when he was holding something down by force. "He didn't believe me. So I had to make him believe me."
Rory looked at the bruise on his jaw. The cut through his eyebrow . The way he held his ribs.
"Lucien."
"He believes me now."
"*Lucien.*"
"It's done. You're off his ledger. That's what I came to tell you." He set Ptolemy gently on the floor and reached for his cane. "You can go back to Silas's. You can go wherever you like. No one from Avaros will come looking."
He began, carefully , to stand.
Rory crossed the room before she'd decided to. She put her hand flat against his chest and pushed, not hard, and he sat back down with a small, startled exhale. His shirt was damp. His heart was going fast under her palm, far faster than his voice had let on.
"You came here," she said, "to tell me I'm safe, and then leave again."
"Yes."
"Did it occur to you to ask me what I want?"
His throat moved. "It occurred to me," he said, "that I might not survive the answer."
This close she could smell rain on him, and bergamot, and underneath it, faintly, something like struck matches . She'd never asked him about that smell. She'd always meant to.
"Six weeks," she said again, but softer.
"I counted every one of them."
She kept her hand where it was. She didn't know yet whether she was going to forgive him, or kiss him, or throw him bodily down Eva's stairs. Possibly all three, in some order she hadn't worked out. She was good at plans. She didn't have one for this .
"Stay," she said. "Tonight. You're not fit to walk anywhere, and I'm not finished shouting at you."
Something moved in his mismatched eyes, something that looked painfully like hope.
"On the sofa?" he asked.
Rory glanced at the twisted duvet, the empty Golden Empress carton, the cat already reclaiming his lap.
"We'll see," she said, and didn't take her hand away.