AI The third deadbolt stuck, the way it always did, and Rory had to lean her shoulder into the door and wrench the bolt sideways before it gave. She'd assumed it was the curry house again. Somebody from downstairs came up every other night to complain that Eva's radiator was leaking through their ceiling, and Rory had rehearsed an apology on the way across the flat.
She opened the door and forgot it.
Lucien Moreau stood on the landing with rain in his hair.
It had slicked the platinum darker, pulled a strand loose so it fell across his forehead, which was wrong. Everything about him was usually so deliberate. The charcoal suit was soaked through at the shoulders. The ivory handle of his cane gleamed under the bare bulb, and his gloved hand rested on it with a tension she recognised, as if he'd been leaning on it harder than he wanted anyone to see .
Seven weeks. She'd stopped counting at five, which meant she hadn't stopped counting at all.
"Rory," he said.
His voice hadn't changed. Low, the vowels softened at the edges by Marseille. She'd spent an embarrassing number of nights trying to forget exactly how it sounded, and now it was on Eva's landing, and it was worse than she remembered.
"Eva's not here," she said.
"I know."
"Then you've come to the wrong flat."
"I know that as well." He looked past her into the room, at the lamplight, the stacked books, the scrolls weighted open with mugs. Then back at her. The amber eye caught the light. The black one never did. "I was told you were feeding the cat."
"Told by whom?"
A faint, tired curve of his mouth. "It's my job to be told things."
She kept her hand on the door. She was aware of her own body in a way she hated: the old Cardiff University hoodie, bare feet on the cold boards, hair scraped back with one of Eva's pencils. The smell of cumin and frying onions drifted up the stairwell from the kitchen below. A normal Tuesday night, and he'd walked into it as if he had the right.
"You should have rung," she said.
"You would not have answered."
That was true, and it stung that he knew it. "You don't get to disappear for two months and then turn up on a doorstep dripping like something out of a Brontë novel, Lucien."
"Seven weeks," he said quietly .
She stared at him. He held her gaze for a moment, then looked away, down the stairs, and his jaw tightened.
So he'd been counting too.
Something moved against her ankle. Ptolemy, the traitor, had come to see who was at the door. The tabby slid past her legs onto the landing and wound himself around Lucien's wet trouser leg, purring loudly enough to hear over the rain on the skylight.
Lucien looked down at the cat. The cat looked up at Lucien.
"Don't," Rory said. "He'll ruin your suit."
"The suit is already ruined." But he bent anyway, slowly , and that was when she saw it: the hitch in his breath, the way his free hand went to his side under the jacket and pressed there before he could stop himself.
The anger went out of her so fast it frightened her.
"You're hurt."
"It's nothing."
"Lucien."
"A disagreement with a client. It has been resolved ." He straightened, carefully . "I did not come here to bleed on Eva's floor. I came to tell you something, and then I will go."
"You'll come inside and let me look at it, and then you can tell me whatever you like." She stepped back and held the door wider. When he didn't move, she added, more sharply than she meant to, "I'm not going to stand here arguing with you on a landing while you drip blood. Get in."
For a second she thought he'd refuse. Then something in his face gave way. He came in, ducking a little under the low frame out of habit, and Ptolemy trotted in after him, tail high.
Rory threw all three deadbolts. When she turned, he was standing in the middle of the room as if he didn't know where to put himself. There was nowhere obvious. Every chair held a stack of research notes. Eva's sofa had been colonised by an open atlas of the Thames and two volumes on medieval warding.
"Sit," she said, and swept the atlas onto the floor.
He sat. She went for the first-aid kit under the sink. Eva kept it well stocked, for reasons Rory had learned not to ask about. When she came back he'd taken off his gloves and was working at the buttons of his waistcoat with fingers that weren't quite steady.
She knelt in front of him and brushed his hands aside. "Let me."
He went still.
She undid the buttons one by one. She was very careful not to look at his face. The shirt beneath was white, or had been. On the left, just above his hip, a dark stain had spread through the cotton, the edges gone rusty.
"Nothing," she said flatly.
"A small nothing."
"Take the shirt off."
A pause. "Rory."
"I have seen a man's chest before. I'll try not to faint."
That got a breath of a laugh out of him, and then he winced at what it cost him. He shrugged the jacket and waistcoat off and pulled the shirt free. She kept her eyes on the wound. It was a clean slice, shallow but long, as if a blade had been meant to go in and had been turned at the last moment.
She soaked a pad in antiseptic. "This'll sting."
"I would expect nothing less from you."
She pressed it to the cut harder than strictly necessary. He hissed something in French she was fairly sure wasn't polite.
For a while there was only the rain and the ceiling fan ticking over and the sound of her tearing open gauze. His skin was warm under her fingertips, warmer than a human's. She'd noticed that before, the night on Silas' roof, when he'd caught her wrist to stop her from leaning too far over the edge to look at the lights on the river. His thumb had rested on the little crescent scar there. He'd asked how she got it, and she'd told him about the fence at her grandmother's house in Penarth, and he'd listened as if it were the most important thing anyone had ever said to him.
Then she'd leaned in, and he'd let her get close enough to feel his breath before he turned his face away.
*I am not something you should want,* he'd said. *Trust me in this, if in nothing else.*
In the morning he'd been gone . No note. His number rang out. Silas had shrugged and said that was Lucien for you, and Rory had carried on delivering dumplings for Yu-Fei and pretending her chest didn't ache every time a black car slowed on the street outside.
"You could have said goodbye," she said to the gauze.
He was quiet so long she thought he wouldn't answer.
"If I had said goodbye," he said at last, "I would not have left."
Her hands stopped.
"There was a man," he went on, in the same careful voice. "He had been asking questions about you. Who you were, where you lived, who you had been before London. I know how to deal with men who ask questions. But I could not do it from beside you, because anyone watching me would have been watching you." He exhaled. "So I made myself uninteresting to you. It was the only protection I could think of that would work quickly ."
She sat back on her heels and finally looked at him.
He looked exhausted. There were shadows under his eyes she'd never seen before, and a small cut at his hairline, already closing. He was looking at her the way he'd looked at her on the roof, before he'd turned away. Openly, as if he'd run out of the energy it took to hide it.
"Uninteresting," she repeated.
"It did not work," he admitted. "I was still interested."
"You thought I'd stop caring because you stopped answering your phone."
"I thought you might hate me. That would have been enough."
"I did hate you," Rory said. "For about a week."
"And then?"
She taped the gauze down and smoothed the edge with her thumb, and her thumb stayed there longer than it needed to. She could feel his pulse under it, fast.
"Then I got angry that I couldn't," she said. "Which is worse."
Ptolemy leapt onto the sofa arm and settled with his paws tucked under him, watching them both with the smugness of a creature who'd known all along.
"Is he gone?" she asked. "The man asking questions."
"He will not be asking anyone anything again."
She didn't ask what that meant. She thought she knew, and she thought she'd sort out how she felt about it later. Right now, she found she mostly felt relief, sharp and unexpected, that the thing had been done and he had come back from doing it.
"That's what you came to tell me," she said.
"Part of it."
"And the rest?"
He reached out, slowly , the way you'd approach something that might bolt, and took her left hand. Turned it over. His thumb found the crescent scar on her wrist as if he'd kept a map of it.
"I was wrong," Lucien said, "on the roof. Not about what I am. About what you are allowed to want. That was never mine to decide ." His throat moved. "I have no right to ask for anything. I only wanted you to know that I did not leave because I did not want you. I left because I did."
Rory looked at their hands. She thought about Evan, and how she'd promised herself, coming to London on Eva's sofa with two bags and a split lip, that she would never again let a man decide what was good for her. She thought about how differently this one had done it. Badly, stupidly, and entirely in her defence.
"You're an idiot," she said.
"Yes."
"If you ever do that again, I'll stab you with your own cane."
"I would deserve it."
"You'd *get * it." She stood, still holding his hand, and he tipped his head back to look up at her, lamplight catching the damp gold of his hair. "You're staying tonight. You're not walking back out into that rain with a hole in your side. Eva will kill me if you die on her landing."
"And tomorrow?"
She didn't know. That was the honest answer, and she let him see it on her face. But she didn't let go of his hand, and after a moment he laced his fingers through hers, and held on as though he'd been waiting seven weeks to do it.
"Tomorrow," Rory said, "you can tell me the rest."