AI The third deadbolt stuck, as it always did, and Rory swore at it under her breath before wrenching it back. Whoever was knocking had stopped knocking. That was worse. Knocking was polite, but silence meant someone was standing there, waiting.
She opened the door on the chain first.
Amber eye. Black eye. A sliver of platinum hair that had come loose from its usual perfect slick and hung across his forehead.
"Rory," Lucien said.
Not Aurora, the way he said it when he wanted to annoy her, or when he wanted to be gentle and didn't know how to manage it any other way. Just Rory, quiet and tired, and it landed harder than she'd have liked.
"How did you find this place?"
"I'm a man who finds things." He tried a smile . It didn't hold. "Eva's name is on the lease. Eva's name is on a great many things, if one knows where to look."
"That's not comforting ."
"It wasn't meant to be."
Below them, the curry house was in the thick of the dinner rush. The smell of cardamom and frying onions rolled up the stairwell, and someone laughed too loudly on the street. It was so ordinary that the sight of Lucien Moreau on the landing, with his charcoal jacket torn at the shoulder, seemed like a glitch in the world.
He was leaning on the cane. He never leaned on the cane. He carried it the way other men carried umbrellas, as a formality, an accessory. Now the ivory handle was pressed under his palm and his knuckles had gone pale.
Rory looked at the dark stain spreading beneath his ribs, and the anger she'd been carrying for three weeks shifted, unwillingly, to make room for something else.
"Damn it," she said, and shut the door to slide the chain free.
He came in slowly . The flat was too small for him, or he was too much for it. Books climbed the walls in leaning towers, and scrolls poked out of a ceramic umbrella stand. Eva's research notes papered every flat surface, the corkboard, the fridge, the back of the bedroom door. Lucien's gaze skimmed the clutter with an assessing flicker that she recognized. He was cataloguing it, pricing it.
"Don't," she said.
"Don't what?"
"Read anything."
"I wouldn't dream of it." He paused. "Eva's handwriting is appalling, in any case."
She locked the deadbolts behind him, all three, and the small metallic thunks seemed to settle something in the air. When she turned, Ptolemy had emerged from beneath the desk and was regarding the newcomer with narrow, judgmental eyes.
"That's the cat," Rory said.
"So I gathered." Lucien inclined his head gravely. "Monsieur."
Ptolemy sniffed the hem of his trousers, sneezed, and stalked to the radiator in a huff.
"Sit," Rory told him. "Not there, that's Eva's research. The kitchen chair."
"Your hospitality is overwhelming."
"Keep talking and I'll show you what else is overwhelming."
But he sat, and she saw what it cost him. It was a brief tightening at the corner of his mouth, a breath held a beat too long. When he shrugged the jacket off she pressed her lips together and said nothing at all, because the white shirt beneath it was soaked dark down the left side.
"Who did this?"
"Something that didn't care for my questions."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the one I have at the moment." He fumbled a button with fingers that weren't working properly. "I'd rather not have brought it to your door, if that helps. I went to three other places first. I'm aware it doesn't help."
She stared at him. Three weeks ago, in his office with its smoked-glass windows and its bottle of something amber and expensive, he had told her to stay out of it. He'd said it smoothly and reasonably, in the voice of a man arranging furniture, as though she were a piece he might move to a safer room. And she had heard Evan in it, the old quiet certainty that she was a thing to be managed. She'd said things she hadn't entirely meant. He had said one thing he had, and it had been cold and precise, and she'd walked out into the London rain with her hands shaking.
Now she went to the bathroom, got the first-aid kit Eva kept stocked because of her own occupational stupidity, and came back to kneel on the worn floorboards in front of him.
"Shirt off," she said.
"Ah. The romance I always imagined."
"Lucien."
He stopped joking.
The wound was ugly, a raking gash that ran from below his ribs toward his hip, its edges strange and faintly dark, like ink bleeding into paper. She'd seen things in the past months she'd never have believed, but she still had to take a breath before she pressed the gauze to it. He hissed through his teeth. The skin beneath her fingers was hot, hotter than a human's should be.
"Sorry."
"Don't be. It's your right to hurt me. I earned it."
She looked up. He wasn't smiling now. Up close his eyes were almost unbearable, the amber one bright as a lit window, the black one deep enough to lose a thought in. He was watching her, and there was no armor in it, none of the tailored, faintly amused distance he wore like his suits.
"I didn't come here for that," she said, low .
"I know."
"You don't get to say something like that and make me the villain of it."
"I'm not trying to." He drew a careful breath. "I was wrong, Rory. What I said. How I said it. I have been trying for three weeks to work out a way to tell you that which didn't sound like a man trying to be forgiven, and I have failed, and then I was bleeding on a stranger's pavement, and your name was the only one I could think of."
Her hands had stopped moving. She made them start again, wound the bandage around his ribs, and tried to ignore the warmth of his skin, the flex of muscle under her palms, the way he held himself absolutely still as though any movement might break the moment.
"You could have called," she said.
"You'd have hung up."
"Probably."
"There. You see? I know you." A ghost of the old dryness returned. "It's my curse."
She tied off the bandage and sat back on her heels. Neither of them moved. Her wrist, the pale crescent of the old scar, was resting on his knee where she'd braced herself, and she noticed it at the same moment he did. His thumb came down, light as breath, and traced the curve of it. He'd done that once before, on a rooftop above Soho, the night the city had glittered like spilled glass and they'd stood a hair's breadth from something neither of them could take back.
"You never told me how you got this," he murmured.
"You never asked."
"I'm asking."
Her throat had gone tight. "I fell off a garden wall when I was seven. There was a rusted nail in the mortar. My dad carried me the whole way to the hospital and cried more than I did." She swallowed. "It's not a good story."
"It's a very good story." His thumb moved again. "It's yours."
She should have pulled away. The old Rory, the one who had fled Cardiff with two bags and a bruise she'd learned to cover, would have. She had built a whole life around not letting anyone hold her by the wrist.
But he wasn't holding her. That was the thing. His hand rested there open, and all she'd have to do was leave, and he would let her.
"I was angry," she said quietly. "Not just because of what you said. Because you were right about one thing, and I hated that you were."
"Which thing?"
"That I'd get hurt." She met his eyes. "But it was mine to decide. Not yours."
"Yes." No hesitation, no argument. "It was."
The word sat between them. From below came the muffled clatter of the kitchen, a shout in Bengali, the hiss of a wok. On the radiator, Ptolemy began to wash one paw with great and pointed disinterest.
"Stay tonight," Rory said. It came out rougher than she'd intended. "On the sofa. Because you're bleeding, and because whatever did that to you is still out there, and because I'm not finished being angry with you."
Something moved across Lucien's face, and it took her a moment to recognize it as relief, unguarded and startlingly young. "That seems a fair set of terms."
"They're not terms."
"No?" The corner of his mouth lifted. "What are they, then?"
She stood, brushed off her knees, and reached for the blanket on the back of the sofa so he couldn't see her face. "A start," she said.
Behind her, very softly , he laughed, and the sound loosened something in her chest that had been clenched for three weeks. When she turned back he was watching her with those mismatched eyes, and neither of them looked away.