AI When she opened the door, Lucien Moreau was standing on the landing with rain in his platinum hair and blood soaking through the left side of his charcoal suit.
For a moment Rory could only stare. The hallway light above Eva's flat buzzed and threw one side of his face into shadow, but there was no mistaking him. The slicked-back hair gone damp and loose at the temples. The ivory-handled cane gripped too tightly in his right hand. The eyes she had tried, with very limited success, to stop dreaming about, one amber and one black, both fixed on her as if she were the only solid thing on Brick Lane.
"You are not Eva," he said.
"Brilliant," she said. "Three months of silence and that's your opener?"
Below them the curry house was in full evening swing. The stairwell smelled of cumin, hot oil, and wet brick, and rain hammered the thin window at the turn of the stairs. Someone downstairs laughed. Ptolemy, Eva's tabby, wound once around Rory's ankles and then sat to consider Lucien with profound feline suspicion.
Lucien glanced past her, into the flat. "May I come in?"
"No."
His mouth did something that was not quite a smile . "Rory."
"Do not Rory me in that voice."
"What voice?"
"The reasonable one. The one where you've already decided how this goes and you're just waiting for me to catch up." Her hand was still on the door, shoulder-length black hair damp from the shower, Eva's oversized jumper slipping off one shoulder. She had been making tea. She had been having a quiet night貓-sitting and reading through Eva's appalling research notes, trying very hard not to think about him, and now he was here. Bleeding, apparently. She looked down. The blood had reached his cuff. "What happened?"
"A disagreement."
"With a knife?"
"With several gentlemen who brought a knife to what I had hoped would be a conversation."
"And you came here."
"The wards on this flat are obscene. Eva is paranoid in a way I have always admired." He shifted his weight and his jaw locked for just a second. The cane tapped once against the floorboards. "Also, you shot the last man who tried to follow me through a door."
"That was one time and he was a ghoul."
"Still. Very memorable."
She should close the door. She had rehearsed closing doors on him, in her flat above Silas' bar, in the shower, on deliveries for the Golden Empress with rain soaking her sleeves and noodles going cold in the bag. She had rehearsed a dozen elegant, final sentences. She had decided she was done being the person who waited while Lucien Moreau vanished into London's supernatural underworld and came back with half an explanation and a look that made her forget why she was furious .
He swayed.
Rory caught his arm before she had decided to move. He was cold through the wet wool and heavier than he looked, leaning into her for one unguarded second before he caught himself.
"Inside," she said. "Before you bleed on Eva's landing and she bills you for the exorcism."
She got him over the threshold and shut the door. Three deadbolts. She threw each one with more force than necessary. Top. Middle. Bottom. When she turned, he was standing in the middle of Eva's cramped living room dripping on a stack of books about Mesopotamian burial rites, and Ptolemy had retreated to the arm of the sofa to watch proceedings from a safe height.
"Sit," she said.
"I am not an invalid."
"Sit down, Lucien, or fall down. Your choice, but one of them is less dignified."
He sat. The sofa groaned. Every available surface was covered, books on the coffee table, scrolls tied with kitchen string on the dining chair, research notes pinned and taped and in one case buttered, by the look of the corner, to the wall. He looked absurdly polished among all of it, even wet, even bleeding. Tailored suit. Silver ring. Not a cufflink out of place. Only his breathing gave him away.
Rory fetched Eva's first aid kit from under the sink, towels from the bathroom, a bowl of hot water because that was what people did in films and she needed something to do with her hands. She knelt in front of him and then, because kneeling in front of Lucien Moreau was a position with history attached to it, she stood up again too fast.
"Jacket off."
His amber eye lifted. "If you wanted me undressed, you might have answered my calls."
"I didn't answer your calls because you disappeared after telling me I was a liability." The words came out sharper than she wanted. Too fast. Too honest. "Shirt, too. Unless you'd prefer to die looking expensive."
"That was always my plan, actually."
But he obeyed. The jacket came off stiffly. His shirt was white and ruined on the left side, stuck to his skin. He undid the buttons one-handed with the ease of a man who had done this while injured before, and Rory kept her eyes, with discipline, on the wound. A long slash just under his ribs. Not deep enough to kill him, probably. Deep enough that the edges gaped when he breathed.
Half-demon healing would close it eventually. Eventually was doing a lot of work there.
"This needs cleaning," she said. "And stitches, maybe."
"You can stitch?"
"I can sew. It's the same principle, just with more complaining from the fabric."
She sat beside him because there was nowhere else, their knees almost touching. The flat was too small. Everything in Eva's place forced people close. She dipped a cloth in the water, wrung it out, and pressed it to his side. He went absolutely still.
"Sorry."
"Don't be." His voice was lower now. "You have gentle hands for someone so angry."
"I'm not angry."
"You called me 'the Frenchman' to Eva last time. She reported it. You only do that when you are trying very hard not to use my name."
Rory cleaned the cut in careful strokes. Blood thinned into the water. Up close she could smell rain on him, and cedar soap, and the faint metallic edge that was not entirely human. A scar she had never seen crossed his ribs on the other side, pale and old. She did not ask. She had once traced the shape of his life in questions asked after midnight, and he had let her, and then he had walked out of Silas' back room three months ago saying it was safer if certain parties believed Aurora Carter meant nothing to him.
She had believed him. That was the humiliating part. She had believed the meant nothing bit more readily than the safer bit.
"You told Cavendish I was a liability," she said quietly. "In front of his whole table. You said I was a human girl with a clever mouth who'd got in over her head and the best thing anyone could do was send me back to Cardiff. You remember that? Because I do. Word for word, actually. I've got an excellent memory when I'm being publicly humiliated by someone I've slept with."
"I remember."
"Great. Then you remember why opening the door to you bleeding isn't exactly top of my list of fun Tuesday activities."
He caught her wrist as she reached for the bowl. Not hard. His fingers were cold and then, under hers, warming. Her pulse jumped against his thumb. He let go at once, as if he had felt it too and understood what it cost her.
"Your scar," he said.
She looked down. The little crescent on her left wrist, white against her skin. He had kissed it once, in the dark, and asked how she got it, and she had told him about falling off her bike aged nine and trying not to cry in front of her father, and it had felt absurdly like giving him something real.
"Don't," she said.
"Aurora." Not Rory. Aurora, said properly, the French rounding the end of it. "If I had told Cavendish you were important, he would have taken you that night. Not eventually. That night. He collects leverage the way other men collect debt, and he had just learned my father in Avaros is doing the same. I needed both of them to look elsewhere."
"So you lied."
"Yes."
"You could have told me afterwards."
"Yes."
"You didn't. You vanished. For three months, Lucien. I thought-" She stopped. The cloth was still in her hand. She put it down because her fingers were not steady and she refused to let this flat, this man, and a bowl of pink water be the scene of her losing the plot entirely. "I thought maybe you'd meant it after all. The convenient version. Human. Clever mouth. In over her head."
Something passed over his face then, quick and unpractised. "I meant none of it."
"You are extremely good at lying. That's your job."
"It is." He leaned his head back against the sofa and looked at her sideways, both eyes dark in the lamplight now, the amber one catching last. "Which is why I am not going to insult you with a perfect speech. I handled it badly. I thought distance would protect you and, if I am honest, I thought it would protect me from having to watch you decide I was not worth the risk. That is not a defence. It's just what happened."
The room seemed to narrow around the admission. Ptolemy sneezed on the arm of the sofa. Downstairs, a pan clanged.
Rory picked up the needle from Eva's kit. Eva, because she was Eva, had sterile suturing supplies between a takeaway menu and a Latin glossary.
"Hold still," she said.
"You are going to sew me up angry."
"I'm going to sew you up competently. The anger is free."
The first stitch made him inhale through his teeth. She worked quickly , professionally, as if his skin were not warm under her fingertips and his breath did not touch her hair every time he exhaled. He watched her face, not the needle. She could feel it. By the fourth stitch her shoulder was against his chest and neither of them had moved away.
"There," she said at last, and cut the thread. "Try not to get stabbed again before Thursday. Eva will want her sofa back unstained."
"Stay angry a little longer," he said quietly. "It's easier."
"Easier than what?"
"Than you looking at me like that."
"I am looking at you like you have six stitches I just put in and you're about to ruin them by being dramatic."
"No." His hand came up, slow enough that she could have leaned away. He tucked a strand of wet-again hair, shower-damp and sticking to her cheek, behind her ear. His knuckles brushed her jaw. "Like that."
She did not lean away. That was also a decision, though her body seemed to have made it without consulting the part of her still listing grievances. His hand stayed, cupping nothing, just resting at the side of her face with a care that undid her more than any apology had.
"I missed you," he said. "That is the unsophisticated truth. I missed you in Marseille French and bad English and two other languages, none of which made it sound more dignified. I missed arguing with you. I missed you stealing my coffee and pretending you hadn't. I missed-"
A sound hit the front door. Not a knock. A scrape, low down, as if something had tested the bottom bolt and thought better of it.
Lucien was on his feet before the second scrape came, cane in hand, and there was a thin bright sound as the blade inside it slid free by an inch. The stitches pulled. He did not seem to notice. He had put himself, without any discussion whatsoever, between Rory and the door.
"Oh, for God's sake," she said, standing too, heart slamming. "Sit down. You're injured and Eva has three deadbolts and enough wards on that door to flatten a minor saint. Whatever it is, it isn't getting in."
For a moment they stayed like that. His back to her chest almost, close enough that she could have put her forehead between his shoulder blades. Rain on the window. Ptolemy alert and round-eyed on the bookshelf.
The scrape did not come again. Footsteps went down the stairs instead, slow, departing.
Lucien slid the blade home. His shoulders dropped a fraction. "You see? Liability," he said, but so dryly that she surprised them both by laughing, breathless and annoyed about it.
"You are staying on that sofa tonight," she said. "Because you'll bleed on the stairs and someone will have to carry you, and it isn't going to be me. Tomorrow morning you will explain everything, and I mean everything, with tea that you make, and if I hear one fixer euphemism I will take those stitches out with Eva's nail scissors. Are we clear?"
"Crystal."
"And this," she gestured between them, at his hand which had somehow found hers again, or hers his, at the space that wasn't there, "does not mean you're forgiven."
"No," he said. He turned her hand over in his, thumb brushing once, deliberately , over the crescent scar on her wrist, and she let him. "It means there's a sofa, and a locked door, and until morning. I can work with that."
She should have gone to make the tea. She stood there instead, in Eva's book-crammed flat above the curry house, with his blood drying on her fingers and his hand warm around hers, and let the moment be exactly as unfinished as it was.