AI The door swung open on the third deadbolt's reluctant clunk, and there he was.
Rory had known it would be him. Nobody else knocked like that: two raps, a pause, a third, polite and patient and faintly insufferable, as if the door ought to be grateful for his attention. She had stood on the other side of it for a full ten seconds with her hand on the chain, telling herself she could simply not answer. That Eva's flat had no lights showing from the street. That he couldn't possibly know she was here.
But Lucien Moreau knew most things. That was, after all, the whole point of him.
He stood on the narrow landing with rain beading on the shoulders of his charcoal suit, platinum hair slicked back but coming loose at the temple, as if he'd walked the last stretch of Brick Lane without an umbrella. The ivory handle of his cane rested beneath his gloved hand. Below them, the curry house was doing its Friday roaring trade, and the stairwell smelled of cumin and frying onion and wet wool.
"Aurora," he said.
Not Rory. He'd never once called her Rory.
"You're dripping on Eva's floor."
"I am standing on the landing. The landing, I believe, belongs to the landlord."
"Then you're dripping on his floor." She didn't move out of the doorway. "What do you want, Lucien?"
His eyes found hers. The amber one caught the bare bulb overhead and turned it to honey. The black one gave nothing back at all. Six weeks, and she'd forgotten what it was like to be looked at by both of them at once, one warm and one bottomless, like being weighed on two different scales.
"To talk," he said.
"You had six weeks to talk."
"Yes." He didn't argue it . That was worse, somehow. "May I come in?"
She should have said no. She had rehearsed saying no in the shower, on the back of Yu-Fei's delivery scooter, lying awake on Eva's sofa with Ptolemy's weight on her shins. It had been a very good no. Clipped and final.
What came out was, "Wipe your feet."
The corner of his mouth moved. He stepped past her, close enough that she caught the scent of him under the rain, bergamot and something darker, like struck matches. She shut the door and did the deadbolts one by one, slowly , because it gave her hands something to do and her face somewhere else to be.
When she turned, he was standing in the middle of the flat looking at the chaos with visible dismay. Eva's research had colonised every surface: towers of leather-bound books on the floor, scrolls weighted open with mugs, index cards pinned in feverish constellations across the wall above the kitchenette. Ptolemy sat on top of the fridge and regarded Lucien with the flat yellow contempt of a cat who has seen men come and go.
"She's still in Prague?" Lucien asked.
"Edinburgh. Prague was last month." Rory crossed her arms. "You'd know that if you'd been around."
"I knew she had gone. I did not know where." He turned the cane a quarter-turn against the floorboards. "And I knew you were staying here instead of above Silas' bar."
"Of course you did."
"You stopped going home. Silas told me."
"Silas has a big mouth."
"Silas was worried ." A pause. "So was I."
She laughed. It came out harder than she meant it to, a small, ugly sound. "You were worried . That's rich. You sell my name to the Harrow Court, you vanish for a month and a half without a single word, and you were *worried *."
"I did not sell your name."
"You gave it to them."
"I gave them *a * name." His voice stayed level, but something tightened along his jaw. "Laila. A courier with no history and no family and nothing to find. I gave them a woman who does not exist so they would stop looking for the one who does."
Rory opened her mouth and found nothing in it.
"They had your description," he went on, quieter . "Black hair. Blue eyes. A scar on the left wrist. They were a week, perhaps less, from Cardiff. From your mother's school. So I gave them a ghost, and then I spent six weeks making sure the ghost was convincing enough that they would stop asking questions." He looked down at the cane. "It required me to be elsewhere. It required me not to be seen with you."
"You could have told me."
"If I had told you, you would have argued ."
"Yes, I would have *argued *, Lucien, because it was my life—"
"Which is precisely why I did not want you to spend it arguing." He lifted his eyes again, and this time there was no polish on them at all. "*Je suis désolé*. I am. I know it is not enough."
She hated how easily the French undid her. Hated that he knew it, too, and that he hadn't said it for effect. It had slipped out of him the way it did when he was tired, or angry, or when he forgot to perform.
Her thumb had found the crescent scar on her wrist, the way it always did when she was trying not to feel something. She made herself stop.
"The last thing I said to you," she said, "was that I never wanted to see you again."
"I remember."
"I meant it."
"I know you did." He said it without reproach, just a man stating the weather. "That is why I stayed away as long as I did. Longer than I needed to, perhaps."
"Then why now?"
For a moment he didn't answer. Rain ticked against the single window. Downstairs, someone shouted an order for two lamb bhunas, and the kitchen shouted back.
"Because it's finished," he said at last. "They've closed the file. Laila Morgan died in a canal in Amsterdam eleven days ago. Very tragic. They sent flowers to no one." He tried for a smile and didn't quite reach it . "And because I found I could not go another week without knowing whether you were all right. It turns out I am a coward about most things, but not that."
She looked at him properly then. Past the suit and the cane and the careful hair. There were shadows under both of his eyes she'd never seen before. He'd lost weight ; the jacket sat differently at his collarbones. And there, on the back of his left hand where the glove had pulled down, a thin pink line of newly healed skin.
"You're hurt."
"I was. I'm not now."
"Lucien."
"It is nothing, Aurora. A disagreement in Rotterdam." He tugged the glove back up. "The other gentleman disagreed more strenuously than I did, and then less."
She crossed the room before she'd decided to. He went very still as she took his wrist, turned his hand over, and peeled the glove back again. The cut ran from his knuckles almost to his cuff. Someone had stitched it badly, and it had healed in spite of them, the way things did with him. Half-demon blood was good for that.
It wasn't good for everything.
"You should have come to me," she said, and her voice didn't come out the way she wanted. "Before. Instead of doing it alone."
"You would have come with me."
"Yes."
"That," he said softly , "is the whole of the problem."
His pulse was quick under her fingers. She could feel it. For all his stillness, all that tailored calm, his heart was going like he'd run the length of Brick Lane in the rain, and maybe he had. She thought about the rooftop in Shoreditch, two months ago now, the night before everything went wrong. The city spread out orange beneath them, and his hand an inch from hers on the parapet, and neither of them closing the inch. She'd thought about it more than she'd admit to Eva. More than she'd admit to herself, on the bad nights.
"I was so angry at you," she said.
"I know."
"I'm still angry at you."
"I would expect nothing less. You are very good at it." The amber eye warmed; the black one, for once, seemed to warm with it. "I have always admired that."
She should let go of his hand. She didn't.
"You don't get to just come back," she said. "You don't get to knock on the door like it's nothing and say sorry in French and look at me like that and have it all be fine."
"No," he agreed. "I don't."
"So what are you actually asking for?"
He was quiet for long enough that Ptolemy yawned on top of the fridge, a long pink insult of a yawn. Then Lucien lifted his free hand, slowly , giving her every chance to step away, and tucked a strand of black hair back behind her ear. His gloved fingertips barely touched her.
"A cup of tea," he said. "And the chance to earn the rest."
Rory closed her eyes for one second. Two. When she opened them he was still there, still waiting, rain drying in his hair.
"Eva only has the terrible bags," she said. "The ones from the corner shop."
"Then I will suffer them nobly."
"You'll complain the whole time."
"In four languages," he promised.
She let go of his wrist. The absence of it stayed in her palm, warm, like something she'd set down and meant to pick up again. She turned toward the kitchenette so he wouldn't see her face, filled the kettle, and flicked it on. Behind her, she heard him lean the cane against the bookshelf, heard the soft protest of Eva's sofa springs as he sat, heard Ptolemy thump down from the fridge and pad over to inspect him.
"*Bonsoir *, monsieur," Lucien murmured to the cat.
Rory stared at the kettle as it began to hiss and tick, and found, to her quiet irritation, that she was smiling.