AI The third deadbolt stuck, the way it always did, and Rory had to put her shoulder into the door before it gave. She'd expected Mrs. Ahmed from the curry house downstairs, maybe, come to complain about Ptolemy yowling on the fire escape again. She had a speech ready.
The speech died.
Lucien Moreau stood on the landing with rain in his hair. It had pulled the platinum loose from its usual severe line, and a few strands clung to his forehead like he'd been caught out in something. His charcoal suit was dark at the shoulders. He leaned on the ivory-handled cane harder than a man leans on an affectation.
"Rory," he said.
Six weeks. Six weeks without a word, and he said her name like he'd left the room a minute ago to fetch the wine.
"No," she said, and started to close the door.
The cane's tip slid into the gap. He didn't push. He simply left it there, as if to say, *your choice.* She hated that he knew exactly how to do that.
"I would not have come," he said quietly , "if there were anywhere else."
"There's loads of places else. London's enormous. Try a hotel."
"Hotels have cameras." He shifted his weight, and something passed over his face, a flinch he smoothed away almost before it happened. Almost. "And Eva has wards."
Rory looked at him properly then. The way his left arm hung too close to his body. The way he'd buttoned his jacket, which he never did, because he said it ruined the line. The dark patch at his side that wasn't rain.
"Jesus, Luc."
"It is not as bad as it looks."
"You don't know how it looks. You can't see yourself." She opened the door . "Get in before you bleed on Mrs. Ahmed's stairs."
He came in carefully, ducking the low lintel out of habit. The flat swallowed him the way it swallowed everyone: books stacked in leaning towers along the skirting boards, scrolls rubber-banded and shoved into wine racks, Eva's research notes pinned three deep on a corkboard that had long since stopped being a corkboard and become a kind of paper sediment. Lucien, in his ruined suit, looked like a painting someone had hung in a skip.
Ptolemy, the traitor, trotted straight over and wound himself around the cane.
"Bonsoir, mon vieux," Lucien murmured, and the tabby chirped at him as if they'd been corresponding.
Rory threw the deadbolts, one, two, and the stubborn third, and then turned and pointed at the sofa. "Sit. Jacket off."
"I had imagined," he said, lowering himself onto the cushions with a care that told her everything, "that if you ever said those words to me, the circumstances would be different."
"Don't." She was already in the bathroom, yanking open the cabinet under the sink where Eva kept a first aid kit that could have outfitted a field hospital. "You don't get to be charming. You've forfeited charming."
When she came back he'd managed the jacket. The shirt beneath was white, or had been. There was a long diagonal slice across his ribs, the fabric stuck to it, the edges of the wound faintly black in a way that had nothing to do with bruising.
She knelt on the rug in front of him and did not let herself think about the last time she'd been this close. The rooftop in Clerkenwell. The city orange and humming below them. His hand on the back of her neck, and the way he'd said her name then, like it was a word in one of his four languages that didn't translate.
And the morning after: a folded note on the bar downstairs, left with Silas. *Pardonne-moi.* That was all. She'd had to look it up, and then she'd been furious that she'd had to look it up, because he'd known she would.
"Shirt," she said.
He unbuttoned it with one hand. She peeled the fabric away from the wound as gently as she could, and he made no sound at all, which was worse than if he'd sworn.
"What did this?"
"A disagreement."
"With a blender?"
The corner of his mouth moved. "With a gentleman who believed I had sold him out."
"Had you?"
A pause. The amber eye and the black one both settled on her, and she made herself hold his gaze. She'd learned, over the months she'd known him, that he respected people who didn't look away. She'd learned, too, that it was the only way to tell when he was lying , because the black eye went very still.
"Yes," he said. "To protect someone else."
Rory tore open an antiseptic wipe with her teeth. "Lucky someone."
"She did not think so. She thought I had simply left."
Her hands stopped.
Ptolemy jumped onto the arm of the sofa and settled there, tail flicking, watching them like a referee.
"Don't," Rory said again, but it came out smaller this time.
"You asked me, that night, who I was working for." His voice was low, even, the accent softening the edges of the words the way it did when he was tired. "I did not answer. You remember."
She remembered. She remembered the way he'd kissed her instead, and how she'd let him, and how she'd told herself afterward that it was because she was cool-headed enough to know when not to push. That was a lie. She'd let him because she wanted to.
"The man who hired me wanted to know about you," Lucien said. "Who you were. Where you slept. What you had seen at the Vauxhall warehouse. He was prepared to pay a great deal. When I refused, he made it clear that he would find someone who wouldn't." He exhaled. "So I gave him something else instead. Someone else. And then I needed to be very far away from you, so that when he came looking for me, you would not be standing beside me."
The wipe had gone cold in her fingers. She pressed it to the wound anyway, and this time he did hiss, just slightly , through his teeth.
"You could have told me," she said.
"You would have come with me."
"You don't know that."
"Rory." He said it so gently that she had to look down. "I know that."
She hated that he was right. She cleaned the cut in silence , working inward from the edges, and the black at its margins came away on the gauze like ink, leaving the skin beneath raw and red and ordinary. Human, almost. She thought of his mother in Marseille, whom he'd mentioned exactly once. She thought of whatever his father was, in whatever place Avaros actually was, and how Lucien never mentioned him at all.
"Six weeks," she said. "I thought—" She stopped. Started again, because she'd spent two years learning not to swallow things, and she wasn't going to start again for him. "I've had a man walk out on me before, Luc. Well. I walked out on him. But I know what it looks like when someone decides you're not worth the bother of an explanation. And you let me think that. You let me think I was that again."
For a moment he didn't say anything. Rain ticked against the window. Downstairs, someone in the curry house kitchen laughed, and the smell of cumin and frying onion drifted up through the floorboards the way it always did.
Then he reached out with his good hand and turned her left wrist over, very lightly , so the little crescent scar caught the lamplight. He'd done it on the rooftop too. He'd asked her about it, and she'd told him about the garden wall in Cardiff and the broken milk bottle, and he'd listened as though it were the most important story anyone had ever told him.
"You have never," he said, "been not worth the bother. Not once. Not to me."
His thumb rested on the scar. She could feel her pulse against it and knew he could too.
"That's a very good line," she said unsteadily.
"It is not a line."
The black eye was perfectly still. But it wasn't the stillness she'd learned to watch for. It was something steadier than that, something that looked, if she was being honest, a little frightened.
Rory took a breath. She reached for the butterfly strips, because her hands needed something to do, and she closed the wound one careful strip at a time while he sat there with his shirt open and his head tipped back against Eva's sofa and his fingers still loosely circling her wrist, as though he couldn't quite bring himself to let go .
"The man who did this," she said. "Is he going to come looking?"
"Eventually."
"Then you're sleeping on the sofa. And tomorrow you're going to tell me everything. His name. Who you gave him. All of it."
"And if I refuse?"
She pressed the last strip down, a little harder than strictly necessary. He winced. She smiled.
"Then I'll let Ptolemy sleep on your face."
He laughed, a real one, and then groaned because laughing hurt, and Rory sat back on her heels and looked at him: bedraggled and bloodied and ridiculous in the lamplight, the most impeccable man she'd ever met reduced to a wet cat on a dead-end street in East London.
He'd come here. Of all the places in the city, he'd come to the one with her in it.
"I'm still angry with you," she told him.
"Bien sûr." His thumb moved once over the scar, a slow arc. "I would be disappointed if you were not."
She didn't pull her hand away. Not yet.