AI The deadbolt clicked. Then another. Then the third, each one a small explosion in the hallway's silence .
Rory's hand froze on the delivery bag slung across her chest. The Golden Empress logo—a phoenix rising from a takeaway container—suddenly felt stupid against her ribs. She'd climbed three flights of stairs above Silas' bar, lungs burning, rehearsing what she'd say to Eva about the late dumplings. Not this. Not him.
The door opened six inches. Lucien Moreau filled the gap like he'd been poured into it, charcoal suit immaculate, platinum hair catching the hallway's single bulb. His amber eye found hers first, then dropped to the black one, then back up with something she couldn't name.
"You're bleeding," he said.
Rory looked down. Her left wrist, the crescent scar pale against a fresh line of red. She must have caught it on the stair railing. She hadn't felt it.
"Kitchen," she said. "First aid."
He stepped aside. The flat smelled of old paper and something sharper—ozone, maybe, or the particular static that followed him everywhere. She'd learned not to ask.
Eva's flat swallowed them whole. Books teetered in stacks against every wall, scrolls unfurled across the threadbare sofa, research notes pinned to the windows with masking tape gone yellow at the edges. Ptolemy the tabby watched from the kitchen counter, tail twitching, indifferent as a judge.
Rory set her bag on the small table near the door. The cut on her wrist had stopped bleeding but throbbed with each heartbeat.
Lucien moved to the kitchen sink, turned on the tap, wet a cloth. He didn't look at her while he worked. "You came to Brick Lane unannounced."
"It's London. People wander."
"People don't wander three miles past their usual routes with a bag of cold prawn crackers and a split wrist."
She watched his reflection in the window above the sink, the way his shoulders held themselves, the ivory cane leaning against the counter like a third presence. Two years since Marseille. Two years since she'd walked out of his apartment with her suitcase and a lie about her mother being ill. Two years of delivery routes that avoided the City, of pretending she hadn't memorized the way his mouth looked when he was about to say something he shouldn't.
"I needed to talk to Eva," she said.
"Eva's in Prague. Researching something for her thesis." He turned, cloth dripping, and she saw his face properly for the first time in two years. The scar above his left eyebrow , faint now, white against tanned skin. The way he held his jaw, slightly , like he was bracing for impact. "She left Tuesday."
The words landed flat. Rory felt them in her teeth.
"Then I'll wait."
"You'll do no such thing." He crossed the small kitchen, close enough that she smelled bergamot and something darker, something that had no name in any of the four languages he spoke. "You'll sit. You'll let me look at your wrist. You'll tell me why you're really here, and I'll decide if I believe you."
"I don't need you to—"
"You need me to." The amber eye caught the light. "You always did. That's why you came here instead of calling. That's why you're standing in my doorway at half past ten on a Tuesday with a bag of someone else's dinner."
Rory's fingers found the scar on her wrist, pressing until it hurt. "I left because you were killing me, Luc."
"And you think I don't know that?" He was closer now, close enough that she could see the flecks of gold in the amber eye, the way his pupils dilated and contracted like something underwater. "You think I don't lie awake wondering which version of the truth you took with you? The one where I was a monster? The one where you were a victim? The one where we were both just—" He stopped. His hand lifted, hovered near her cheek, didn't touch. "You never asked what I was running from."
"I asked. In Marseille. You said it was business."
"It was." He dropped his hand . "It still is. But business and survival aren't the same thing, Rory. And neither of us survived that night very well."
She thought of the apartment above the Vieux-Port, the rain against the shutters, the way he'd looked at her when she said she was leaving —not angry, not pleading, just emptied out, like someone had reached inside and taken the shape of him. She'd thought it was relief she saw. She'd been wrong.
"I have to go," she said. "My shift—"
"Your shift ended three hours ago." He reached past her, took the delivery bag from the table, set it on the counter. The prawn crackers crunched. "You're not working tonight. You haven't worked a Tuesday night in four months. You take Tuesdays off to 'study.' You don't study. You sit in your flat above Silas' bar and you wait for me to come to you, and when I don't, you find reasons to be near me, and when that fails, you—" He stopped. Shook his head. "I don't know what you do, Rory. I don't know what you want from me. But I know you're standing in my kitchen bleeding on my floor, and I know that two years ago you walked out of my life without a word, and I know that I have never—" Another stop. His jaw worked. "I have never stopped thinking about the way you said my name when you left. Like you were trying to memorize it."
The kitchen clock ticked. Somewhere downstairs, Silas' bar played music, bass thumping through the floorboards.
Rory felt the tears before she could stop them, hot and stupid and immediate. She hated him for seeing. "You don't get to be angry. You don't get to stand there in your perfect suits and tell me what I feel. You left me in that apartment with nothing. No explanation, no—"
"I left you a note."
"You left me a—" She laughed, broken . "A note? Luc, you left me a fucking note on your coffee table while I was in the shower, and when I came out you were gone, and your phone was off, and I waited three days before I realized you weren't coming back, and I had to call your office and they said you'd resigned, and I had to—" Her voice cracked. "I had to find out from a stranger that you'd been transferred to London, and I couldn't follow, because I was supposed to be in Cardiff, because I was supposed to be studying to be a lawyer, because you were supposed to be—" She couldn't finish. She pressed her bleeding wrist against her mouth and tasted copper and salt.
Lucien moved. She felt him before she saw him, his hand covering hers, pulling it away from her face, his thumb pressing into the cut on her wrist with a gentleness that made her gasp.
"That's enough," he said, and his voice was ruined, ragged at the edges . "Rory, that's enough. Look at me."
She couldn't. She looked at his hand instead, the long fingers, the faint scar across his knuckles, the way his thumb moved in small circles against her pulse point.
"I came here tonight because I couldn't—" She swallowed. "I couldn't do it anymore. The pretending. The routes I take that pass your office. The way I check the windows of every flat I deliver to, hoping—" She finally looked up. His face was wet. She hadn't seen him cry in two years, not once, not even when his father died, not even when she'd left. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I should have called. I should have come to London sooner. I should have—"
"Don't." His thumb stopped moving. "Don't apologize for surviving. Don't apologize for choosing yourself. I get it, Rory. I do. But you don't get to disappear and then reappear like this, like nothing happened, like I didn't spend two years wondering if you were dead, if I'd driven you to—" He broke off. Closed his eyes. When he opened them, the black one was black, the amber one bright and furious and aching. "I loved you. I love you. I don't know how to stop, and I don't know how to be the person you need, and I don't know if you even want me here, but I am here, and I have been here, and you are standing in my kitchen and I can't breathe and I don't know what to do with any of this."
The delivery bag crumpled on the counter. Ptolemy yowled from the sofa, sudden and sharp.
Rory stepped into him. She didn't plan it, didn't think, just moved until her forehead rested against his collarbone and her arms went around his waist and she was shaking and he was shaking and his hands found her hair, her face, the small of her back, holding her like she might dissolve.
"I don't know how to do this," she whispered. "I don't know how to be with you. I don't know how to not be with you."
"I know." His mouth was against her temple, his breath hot. "We'll figure it out. We'll figure it out together, or we'll fail trying, but we'll—" He pulled back, just enough, his hands framing her face, his thumbs brushing her cheekbones. "I need you to look at me. Really look at me. And tell me what you want. Not what you think I want to hear. Not what you're afraid of. What you want."
She looked. She saw the exhaustion in the lines around his eyes, the hope and the terror warring in the set of his mouth, the way he held himself still for her, offering everything and asking for nothing.
"I want you to stay," she said. "I want you to tell me about Prague, and about your work, and about why you never called. I want you to let me touch you without flinching. I want—" Her voice dropped. "I want to learn how to be yours again. If you'll let me."
His eyes closed. She felt the hitch in his breath, the way his fingers tightened in her hair.
"Yes," he said. "Yes, yes, yes. Stay. Stay and I'll tell you everything. I'll tell you about the things I couldn't say, the reasons I ran, the ways I failed you. I'll let you touch me. I'll let you—" He kissed her forehead, her eyelids, the corner of her mouth, each touch a question and an answer. "I'll let you try. God, Rory, I'll let you try."
She rose on her toes. The kitchen tilted. His hand slid to the back of her neck, guiding, and his mouth found hers with a hunger that had two years of silence behind it, and she tasted salt and bergamot and something that might have been forgiveness or might have been the beginning of it.
Ptolemy yowled again, louder, outraged.
They broke apart laughing, breathless, foreheads pressed together.
"Your cat hates me," Lucien said.
"Your cat hates everyone. It's part of the charm ."
He smiled, small and private and devastating. "Come here. Let me look at your wrist properly. And then—" He glanced at the delivery bag, the clock, the life they'd left in pieces two years ago. "Then we'll order proper food. Not prawn crackers. And we'll talk until morning, or until we run out of things to say, whichever comes first."
"And if we run out?"
"Then we'll start over. We're very good at starting over, you and I."
Rory let him take her hand, let him lead her to the sofa where Ptolemy hissed and fled, let him clean and bandage her wrist with the same gentleness he'd shown her face. The flat around them hummed with books and secrets and the particular electricity of a beginning.
Outside, Brick Lane roared with traffic and strangers and the ordinary miracle of a city that never slept. Inside, two people who had lost each other found their way back, one small, bleeding, stubborn step at a time.