AI Three knocks. Not Silas's knock, he used his elbow and made the whole door shudder. This was knuckle on wood, twice, then once on the frame, polite as a visiting priest.
I opened the door on the chain and found an amber eye waiting in the gap.
"Bonsoir, Aurora."
"You're supposed to be dead."
"Reports of my death are a service I pay for quarterly." A pale smile behind the eye. "May I come in? Standing upright is becoming negotiable."
I should have shut the door. I'd rehearsed shutting the door, some nights, with the sort of detail that worried me. Slam, bolt, pour wine, toast my own good sense. Instead I studied him through the gap, the platinum hair slicked back save for one strand loosed by sweat, the charcoal suit still immaculate from the collar down. Then the suit ended at his left side, where a dark bloom had spread across the waistcoat and kept spreading.
I closed the door. His expression folded into something wry through the wood.
"Aurora."
I slid the chain off. Principles are cheaper at midnight.
He came in sideways, the way injured men do, and lowered himself onto my kitchen chair without being invited, because Lucien Moreau had never once in his life waited for an invitation. The ivory handle of his cane clicked against the table. His gloved hand stayed pressed below his ribs.
"Your floor is new."
"Your blood is on it now, so we're even."
"Still the Welsh wit." He winced as he shifted . "I've missed it."
"No, you haven't. You didn't come here for wit." I fetched the first aid tin from under the sink and set it on the table harder than necessary. "You came here because you were bleeding out somewhere between here and Whitechapel and my flat is the one address nobody would guess you'd be stupid enough to use."
"Flattering, and accurate." He peeled the glove off with his teeth. "A rare combination."
His hand was wrong. Black threads crawled out from under his cuff, up the back of his wrist, thin as ink dropped in water. Not blood poisoning. Something older. I'd seen a man in Silas's bar with marks like that once, and I'd watched two undertakers carry that man out before last orders.
"That's Avaros work."
"Perceptive."
"That's fatal, Lucien."
"Not tonight." He loosened his tie one-handed, unhurried, as if the black threads weren't climbing past his elbow. "The blade that made it belonged to one of my father's collectors. Nasty pieces of iron. They don't cut so much as, how do you say, claim."
"Claim what?"
"Whatever they touch." His mismatched eyes lifted to mine. "I'd rather it didn't claim me, so here I am, hat in hand."
"Here you are." I crossed my arms . "Eight months. You left a note on my pillow with three hundred quid and a line of Baudelaire, and now you're in my kitchen at midnight bleeding Avaros into my floor, and you want me to, what, dig it out with tweezers and a spoon?"
"A spoon would be beneath the dignity of the injury." He considered. "Tweezers, yes. And the salt."
"The salt."
"Iron doesn't care for salt. Basic chemistry, Aurora, do keep up."
Something in my chest wanted to laugh. I strangled it. He watched me strangle it, too, because of course he did, and something flickered behind the amber eye that I refused to catalogue.
"You don't get to do the charming thing."
"I wasn't attempting charm ."
"You're always attempting charm . It's your native language. You do it in four others." I pulled the chair around to face him and sat, close enough to smell him, cedar and cigarette smoke and underneath it something scorched, like a struck match. "Why my flat?"
"Because a collector tracks debts, and I owe you one." He said it lightly, but the words came out level, stripped of the Marseille lilt he wore like cologne. "The night I left, I left because a collector had my scent and a habit of collecting people near the debtor. You were the nearest person. So I made certain the trail went cold, and I made certain it went cold away from you."
"The note."
"The note was a coward's instrument. I'm not proud of it."
"The money was worse."
"Yes." He looked at his ruined hand instead of me. "I've since had it explained to me."
"By who?"
"By the eight months of thinking about your face when you read it."
The radiator ticked. Downstairs, muffled through the floorboards, Silas's sound system thudded its slow Friday heartbeat, and I hated that I could hear it, because it meant this was still an ordinary night, because it meant he was real and sitting two feet from me and not a story I'd told myself to make the leaving hurt less.
"The salt," I said, and stood, because my hands needed employment. "And you'll tell me everything while I work. What collector, what debt, and why a fixer who charges five grand a question couldn't buy his way out of it."
"The debt is my existence. There's no exchange rate on that." He unbuttoned the waistcoat and eased the fabric back from the wound, and I heard myself inhale through my teeth. The cut itself was clean, almost surgical, but the flesh around it had gone grey as candle wax, and the black threads pulsed . Gently. Like something breathing. "My father died in the spring. His debts did not die with him. I inherited a name, half a bloodline, and a ledger I never signed."
"So you ran."
"So I negotiated. Twenty years of my particular talents, in exchange for the ledger torn in half." His mouth curved without any humour in it. "The collector tore it in half tonight. Then he pinned me to a wall in Bermondsey and told me the second half comes due when I'm dead. They're traditionalists in Avaros. They prefer to collect in full."
I set the salt box on the table. My hands had stopped being steady somewhere around the word wall, and I pressed them flat against my thighs until they were.
"Shirt off."
"Aurora, at least buy me, "
"Shirt. Off." I snapped on the gloves. "And if you say one charming thing while I've got tweezers inside you, I'm going to leave them there."
He laughed, a real one this time, low and surprised, and obeyed, and I made the mistake of looking at the crescent of his shoulder and the old scar beneath his collarbone that I already knew the shape of, and I made a second mistake, which was letting him see that I remembered.
"Ah," he said softly .
"Don't."
"You kept the, "
"I said don't." I gripped the tweezers and leaned in. "This is going to hurt. Think of Baudelaire."
I found the iron on the first pass, a sliver no bigger than a fingernail, drinking his light. It fought the tweezers like a living thing, and sweat slid down Lucien's temple and he didn't make a sound, and I hated him a little for that too, the way he could take pain like a man settling a bill.
The sliver came free with a sound like a sigh. I dropped it in the salt and it hissed, curled, blackened to nothing.
Lucien exhaled, long and ragged, and for one unguarded second his head tipped forward until his forehead nearly rested against my collarbone. I felt the heat of him through my shirt. I did not move. That was the mistake I'd remember later, the not moving.
"Merci," he murmured.
"Don't thank me. Tell me how long we have before the collector realises you're not in Bermondsey."
"An hour, perhaps. He's thorough. He'll walk the scent street by street." He straightened, and the wry mask slid back into place, but slower than usual, like a man dressing while exhausted. "There is a second matter."
"There would be."
"The collector doesn't only want me. My father's ledger has other names on it. Debts inherited, debts owed, names of people who hid debtors." He reached into his jacket with his good hand and laid a folded paper on the table. "I took this off the collector's man before I left. It's the list of collateral."
I unfolded it. My blood went cold before my eyes finished reading, because I knew the handwriting at the top of the page, knew the way the E looped, knew it from birthday cards and shopping lists and years of research notes stacked floor to ceiling in a flat above a curry house on Brick Lane.
The paper trembled in my grip. "Lucien. Why is Eva's name on this list?"
He didn't answer. His head had turned toward the door, and his face had gone very still, and that was when I noticed the thudding through the floorboards had stopped. Silas's bar, on a Friday, at midnight, had gone silent as a grave .
"Aurora." He rose from the chair, cane in hand, black threads already retreating up his arm as the wound wept clean. "When I say run, you take the fire escape and you go to Brick Lane. Do not argue with me tonight."
The stairwell door downstairs opened. Two sets of footsteps . Unhurried. Coming up.