AI The door opened as far as the chain allowed, and Rory found Lucien Moreau on the other side with rain in his platinum hair and blood on his cuff.
For a moment, neither of them spoke.
The landing smelled of cumin and damp wool. Downstairs, someone shouted an order through the curry house kitchen. Lucien stood beneath the failing bulb in a charcoal suit that probably cost more than Rory earned in three months, his ivory-handled cane planted neatly beside his shoe. Even soaked and bleeding, he looked as though he had arrived to correct someone’s table manners.
“No,” she said.
His amber eye flicked to the chain. The black one remained on her face.
“Good evening to you, too.”
“It was.”
She started to close the door. His hand came up, then stopped short of the wood.
That hesitation caught her harder than it should have. Once, he would have put his palm flat against the door and smiled until she let him in. Tonight he simply stood there, rain dripping from his sleeve.
“Eva’s not here,” Rory said.
“I know.”
“Then you’ve wasted a journey.”
“I came to see you.”
Six weeks ago, those words would have warmed her all the way through. Now she felt the old warmth and resented it.
“Funny. The last time you wanted something from me, you sent a car.”
His mouth tightened.
Behind her, Ptolemy threaded between her ankles and pushed his striped forehead against the gap. Rory caught him with her foot before he could escape onto the landing.
“Don’t,” she told the cat .
Lucien glanced down. “Still an excellent judge of character.”
“He wants to bite you.”
“Then an improved one.”
She would not laugh. She had spent six weeks learning not to look for him in restaurant windows, not to hear his voice in every man who ordered coffee with a French accent. He could stand in the rain until his tailoring dissolved.
Then blood slid over his knuckles and dropped onto the landing.
Rory looked at it.
“Whose?”
“Mine.”
“How much?”
“Less than it appears.”
“Not what I asked.”
A tiny movement disturbed his expression. Pain, quickly put away.
She shut the door in his face.
On the other side, he made no sound.
Rory slid back the chain, opened the door wide, and stepped aside.
“Five minutes. You’re getting blood on Eva’s floor.”
“I’ll replace it.”
“You’ll clean it.”
He inclined his head and came in.
She locked all three deadbolts behind him. Each bolt scraped home with the reassuring solidity Eva insisted was the minimum acceptable defence against burglary, debt collectors, and anything with more teeth than it ought to possess.
When Rory turned, Lucien was surveying the flat without seeming to. Books crowded the windowsill. Scrolls protruded from a chipped umbrella stand. Eva’s research notes covered the dining table beneath two mugs, a magnifying glass, and Ptolemy’s abandoned feather toy. The radiator ticked under a drying rack of black socks.
“Eva’s in Oxford,” Rory said. “I’m feeding the cat.”
“I haven’t asked.”
“You were looking.”
“I was wondering whether that chair could bear my weight .”
She cleared three books from it. “Try not to bleed on the dissertation.”
He sat with care. Too much care.
Rory fetched the first-aid box from above the fridge, where Eva kept it next to the emergency candles and a jar labelled NOT OREGANO. When she came back, Lucien had set his cane within reach and was working at his jacket buttons one-handed.
“Let me.”
He went still.
She hated that, too: the way two ordinary words changed the air between them.
“Your sleeve,” she added.
“Of course.”
The jacket came off reluctantly . Beneath it, his white shirt was dark with rain across the shoulders and red along his left forearm.
Rory drew the scissors from the box.
“That shirt is—”
“If you say expensive, I’ll start at the collar.”
He offered her his arm.
She cut the sleeve open. A long wound ran from just below his elbow towards his wrist, clean at one end and ragged at the other. Black grit clung to the edges.
Her stomach tightened. She had seen what Lucien’s world could leave behind.
“What did this?”
“A knife.”
“I worked that much out.”
“A knife carried by a man who objected to a change in our arrangement.”
“And was I part of the arrangement?”
He looked at her.
There it was. Not an answer, but enough of one .
Rory set the scissors down with deliberate precision.
“You have three seconds to explain why you’re in Eva’s flat.”
“A broker has been selling information about people who came into contact with a shipment from Avaros. Your name was in his ledger.”
The flat seemed to grow smaller around her.
“The delivery at Limehouse?”
“Yes.”
She remembered the heavy takeaway bag, the customer who had paid in cash without opening the door more than an inch. She remembered the strange smell beneath the ginger and garlic. Hot metal. Rotten fruit.
Lucien had told her afterwards that the package tucked beneath the containers hadn’t come from the Golden Empress.
He had told her many things afterwards.
“Yu-Fei didn’t know what was in it.”
“I know.”
“And neither did I.”
“I know that, too.”
Rory took a breath. “Did you tell the broker that?”
“Quite emphatically.”
She looked down at his arm again.
“Is he coming here?”
“No. He no longer has the ledger, and the people who bought the information have been given reason to forget it.”
“Given reason.”
“I am trying not to make this evening worse.”
“Then try answering me.”
Lucien lowered his gaze to the ruined cuff. “I bought back three names. I destroyed the original ledger. One of his men tried to take offence with a blade.”
“Three names?”
“Yours. Eva’s. Silas’s.”
The anger didn’t leave her, but it lost its clean edges.
Outside, a bus hissed through standing water. Ptolemy jumped onto the table and settled on a stack of notes as though none of this concerned him.
Rory put on gloves.
“This will sting.”
“It already does.”
“Good.”
She washed the wound. Lucien’s fingers tightened once on his knee, and she pretended not to notice. Up close, he smelled of rain and the faint cedar soap she had once borrowed from his bathroom. The memory arrived complete and unwelcome: standing barefoot on his tiled floor, laughing because he had produced a toothbrush still in its packaging as if hospitality were a skill he had practised in private.
She reached for the tweezers.
“You could have rung.”
“You blocked my number.”
“You could have used another one. You manage elaborate conspiracies before breakfast.”
“I thought you deserved the choice of shutting the door.”
Rory picked a sliver of black metal out of his arm.
“That’s a new principle for you.”
“Yes.”
He said it without defence. She would have preferred an argument. An argument would have given her somewhere to put the hurt.
Six weeks earlier, Lucien had arranged a car, a ticket to Cardiff, and a room at a hotel near her parents’ house. He had presented all three as though solving a logistical problem .
There was danger in London. He had been right about that.
There was safety elsewhere. Perhaps he had been right about that, too.
But Rory had stood in his immaculate office and listened to him explain where she would go, who would collect her, what she would tell her mother. By the time he offered money, her hands were shaking .
She had already left one man who thought love gave him the right to organise her life.
“You told me I was sensible enough to understand,” she said.
Lucien’s gaze lifted.
“I remember.”
“That was the worst bit.”
“I know.”
“No. You don’t get to know because you’ve had six weeks to come up with the right answer.”
He accepted that with a small nod.
She cleaned the last of the grit away. The cut beneath it looked ordinary now, which was almost more unsettling.
“I thought if I explained the danger clearly enough, you would agree,” he said. “When you didn’t, I decided fear was making you unreasonable.”
Rory’s hands paused.
“I was afraid,” he continued. “You were not the one being unreasonable.”
The radiator clicked. Downstairs, a door slammed.
She pressed gauze over the wound.
“You don’t get to send me away because you’re frightened.”
“No.”
“You don’t get to decide I’m safer without asking what I’m willing to lose.”
“No.”
“And if you ever speak to Yu-Fei about taking me off deliveries behind my back again, I’ll put your cane through your windscreen.”
For the first time that evening, his mouth almost curved.
“I no longer have that car.”
“Then I’ll wait until you buy another.”
“I believe you.”
She taped the dressing in place, smoothing the edges with her thumb. Only then did she realise how gently she was holding his wrist.
She let go.
“That needs someone better qualified than me.”
“I’ll have it seen to.”
“Tonight.”
“Tonight.”
Rory stripped off the gloves. Her left wrist caught the light, the pale crescent scar showing above her sleeve. Lucien looked at it, and she remembered his mouth touching that exact place.
She folded her arms.
“You can’t turn up bleeding and expect this to be easier.”
“I didn’t expect it to be easy.”
“What did you expect?”
He leaned back, tiredness finally showing in the set of his shoulders.
“I hoped you would let me apologise.”
“You could have posted a letter.”
“I wrote four.”
That surprised her into silence .
“Where are they?”
“In my desk.”
“Useful.”
“They were mostly explanations. I kept mistaking them for apologies.”
She looked away before he could see too much in her face.
On Eva’s kitchen counter, a carton of milk stood beside an unwashed spoon. Someone had drawn a furious little face in the condensation on the window. Rory fixed on those things until the pressure behind her ribs eased.
“Did you mean it?” she asked.
“Which part?”
“The part where you said what happened between us was an error of judgement.”
Lucien did not move.
She had hoped, at the time, that he would take it back. Even after the car, even after the ticket. She had waited in that office for him to say he was angry , or scared, or lying.
He hadn’t.
“No,” he said now.
Rory swallowed.
“Then why say it?”
“Because you asked whether I wanted you to leave, and I knew I would fail if I told you the truth.”
“Fail at what?”
“Letting you go.”
She let out a breath that hurt.
“That wasn’t noble, Luc.”
“No. It was cruel.”
He rose, slowly enough that she could see the effort it cost him.
“I’m sorry I made you doubt what you meant to me. I’m sorry I tried to take the decision from you.” He reached for his jacket. “The information is dealt with. I came to tell you that, and to say those things. You don’t owe me anything for either.”
Rory watched him gather the wet wool over his good arm.
She had wanted this moment often enough: Lucien apologising, Lucien leaving, her dignity intact. In every imagined version, she had felt better.
Now he stood a few feet away, and she could see the rain still caught at his hairline.
“Don’t put that on,” she said.
He stopped.
“It’ll soak the dressing.”
“I can carry it.”
“And you’ll get cold.”
His expression changed, carefully , as though he didn’t trust it to change too much.
Rory went to the drying rack and took down Eva’s largest cardigan. Dark green, shapeless, with a hole at one cuff.
“She’ll charge you if you ruin it.”
“I would expect nothing less.”
She held it out. He set his jacket down and took it.
The cardigan looked absurd over his waistcoat. Rory pressed her lips together.
“Not a word,” he said.
“I haven’t said anything.”
“Your restraint is deafening.”
A laugh escaped her. Small, but real.
Lucien looked at her as if she had handed him something fragile.
She wished he wouldn’t. She wished he would keep doing it.
“You can stay until your appointment,” she said. “I’ll make tea.”
“Thank you.”
“And you’ll tell me what was in that shipment. All of it. No deciding which parts I can cope with.”
“Yes.”
She nodded and turned towards the kitchen.
“Rory.”
Her name in his voice still stopped her.
He stood beside the chair, his uninjured hand loose at his side.
“May I come closer?”
The question left her exposed in a way his old confidence never had.
She could say no. He had made room for it.
“Yes.”
He crossed the small space between them and stopped within reach.
Rory studied his face: the pale lashes, the tired mouth, the amber eye she could read more easily than the black. She had missed him. It was inconvenient, humiliating, true.
“This doesn’t fix it,” she said.
“I know.”
She touched his waistcoat, just above the lowest button.
“I’m still angry.”
“I know that, too.”
“Stop knowing things.”
His breath shifted with a quiet laugh.
She pulled him the last inch towards her.
The kiss was tentative at first. His mouth touched hers and waited. Rory closed her fingers in the fine wool and kissed him again, less carefully .
He lifted his good hand to her cheek. Warm fingers, no pressure. She leaned into them before she could think better of it.
When they parted, he rested his forehead against hers.
Neither of them spoke for several breaths.
Then Ptolemy knocked something heavy off the table.
Rory shut her eyes. “That had better not be the magnifying glass.”
Lucien glanced past her. “A book.”
“Which book?”
“One that appears to resent the floor.”
She laughed against his shoulder, then stepped back. He let her.
That mattered.
She filled the kettle while he retrieved the book and cleared two mugs from the table. He asked where to put Eva’s notes rather than shifting them himself, and Rory told him to leave them alone unless he fancied being cursed over breakfast.
By the time the water boiled, he had sat down again. The cane rested against his chair. His ruined jacket lay folded beside him.
Rory brought the tea over and took the seat opposite.
“All right,” she said. “Start with Limehouse.”
Lucien wrapped his good hand around the mug.
And this time, he told her.