AI The third deadbolt gave a heavy clunk, and Rory pulled the door open expecting Mrs. Haq from downstairs, come to complain again about Ptolemy yowling at two in the morning.
It wasn't Mrs. Haq.
Lucien Moreau stood in the narrow hallway of Eva's building, dripping rain onto the cracked linoleum, and for a moment Rory forgot every clever thing she'd ever rehearsed saying to him. He was soaked through — the charcoal suit ruined, the platinum hair plastered dark against his skull, water running off the ivory handle of his cane and pooling around its ferrule. One eye amber, one eye black, both fixed on her with an expression she'd never seen on him before. He looked, for the first time since she'd known him, uncertain.
"No," she said, and moved to shut the door.
His cane shot out, not through the gap — he wasn't stupid — but against the frame, a soft tap of ivory on wood that stopped her more out of surprise than force. "Five minutes, Rory."
"You don't get to call me that." She kept her hand on the door, holding it at half-mast like a barrier that could actually keep him out. Six months. Six months since he'd looked at her across his desk in that office off Whitechapel and told her, in a voice like cut glass, that she'd been a useful distraction and nothing more. Six months since she'd walked out with her dignity in pieces and her heart somewhere behind her, and he'd let her go without a single word.
"You're cat-sitting," he said. "Eva's in Glastonbury until Thursday. You've been coming here every evening at six, because Ptolemy sulks if he's fed late, and you take the long way from the Golden Empress so you can walk past the bookshop on Fournier Street." A pause. "I'm not here by accident."
"That's supposed to make me feel better? That you've been keeping a dossier on me?" Behind her, Ptolemy had appeared in the gap of the door, tail high, and before Rory could grab him the tabby flowed past her ankles and began winding, purring like a small engine, around Lucien's ruined shoes. Traitor. "Even the cat has no loyalty."
"May I come in? I'm drowning, and your landlady's curry is making me hungry, which is a humiliation I'd rather not endure in a hallway."
Rory looked at him — really looked — and found the anger she'd been banking for six months was still there, hot and reliable, but underneath it something worse had started up at the sight of him bedraggled and waiting. She stepped back and let him in.
Eva's flat was a disaster of paper. Books on every surface, scrolls weighted down with mugs, index notes pinned to the walls in a system only Eva understood. The rain hammered the window above Brick Lane, and the smell of the curry house below rose up through the floorboards, cumin and onion and frying ghee. Lucien stood in the middle of it, dripping, looking absurdly out of place and somehow not, because she had spent three months of last autumn learning that Lucien could look at home anywhere if he decided to.
She didn't offer him a towel. She sat on the arm of the sofa, arms crossed, and waited.
"I owe you information," he said.
"No. You owe me an explanation. There's a difference."
His jaw tightened. He shifted his weight off his cane — she noticed the small wince he'd never let anyone else see — and lowered himself onto a stack of Eva's hardbacks as though it were a chaise. Ptolemy leapt into his lap immediately. Lucien's hand came down to stroke the cat automatically, and Rory hated that she remembered that gesture , his hands, what they'd felt like the night he'd kissed her in the alley behind the Golden Empress with the rain coming down just like this.
"Your ex-boyfriend," Lucien said quietly. "Evan."
Everything in her went cold and still. "What about him."
"He was in London in September. Asking after you. At Silas' bar, at the restaurant, at your old gym in Camden." Lucien's mismatched eyes lifted to hers. "He was asking after everyone close to you. Building a list."
The cold spread. "And you knew. In September." Six months ago. The arithmetic assembled itself in her head with terrible, mechanical precision — the timing, the sudden coldness, the cruelty that had come out of nowhere. "That's when you — that's why you—"
"Yes." He said it plainly, no ornament on the word. "A man with a list is a man I can work with. I made certain your name came off it. It cost me a favor I'm not proud of owing, and it would only hold if you were, visibly, connected to no one. If Evan's people watched me, they saw a broker discarding an asset. A nobody." His voice thinned . "I needed you to believe it, Rory, because you cannot lie. You never could. It's the most infuriating thing about you."
"So you decided for me." Her voice cracked and she hated that too. "You decided what I could handle, what I was allowed to know, and you let me walk out of there thinking — God, Lucien, do you know what I thought? I thought there was something wrong with me. After Evan, I finally let somebody in, and you made me feel like the same stupid girl who let a man hurt her for two years."
"No." He was on his feet now, the cat tumbling off his lap with an offended sound, and he crossed the room to her in three strides. "No. That was never — Rory, look at me."
She wouldn't. She looked at the window instead, at the rain, at Brick Lane smeared gold below through the wet glass. His hand found her wrist — the left one — and his thumb settled, unerringly, over the small crescent scar there, the one she'd carried since she was nine and fell off a wall in Cardiff, and she had never told him the story of it, and he held it anyway like it was something he'd been wanting to do for six months.
"I have done ugly work for ugly people," he said, low . "I've sold information that got men killed. My father's realm runs in my blood, and most days I can feel it, this arithmetic in me, everything priced and weighed. And then you'd sit across a desk from me with ink on your fingers from your delivery manifests, arguing with me about a map, and for whole minutes at a time I forgot the arithmetic entirely. Do you understand what that's worth, to something like me? I didn't discard you. I broke something I wanted more than I have wanted anything in thirty-two years, and I did it so that he would never get near you again."
The rain filled the silence . Rory's heart was going hard enough that she could feel it in her throat.
"Say it plainly," she whispered. "No brokering. No French. Say what you came here to say."
He laughed — a short, helpless sound, nothing like his usual polish. "Tu me manques doesn't translate properly anyway. It means you are missing from me." His thumb moved once over the crescent scar, and his amber eye caught the lamplight. "I'm in love with you, Rory Carter. I have been since the alley behind that restaurant, in the rain, when you had garlic sauce on your sleeve and you didn't care. I'll say it in every language I know if that's what it takes. I only have four, so I'd start recycling."
A laugh broke out of her, wet and surprised, and the tears came with it, and she swiped at her face with her free hand because she would not cry in front of him, she would not. "I'm so angry with you," she said.
"I know."
"I'm going to be angry with you for a long time."
"I've made arrangements," he said. "I'm told I'm very patient."
"You should have told me. About Evan. About all of it. You should have let me choose."
"I know." He bowed his head, and for a moment she saw him stripped of the suit and the cane and the four languages: a man from Marseille with a demon's arithmetic in his blood, standing in the rain-drowned clutter of a flat that smelled of curry, terrified. "I can't undo it. I can only stand here and be un-done by it, and hope that's worth something."
Rory looked at him for a long moment. Then she turned her wrist in his grip, took his hand — his cold, rain-soaked, immaculately steady hand — and pulled him toward the kitchen.
"You're dripping on Eva's scrolls," she said. "There's a kettle. You're going to sit down, and you're going to tell me everything about this favor you owe, because I don't like debts with your name on them. And then—" her voice softened, and she glanced back at him over her shoulder, " "then you're going to tell me what you said in the alley. Word for word. I was too busy being kissed to listen."
Lucien smiled then, slow and real, and followed her in out of the rain.