AI The door opened on the third deadbolt and Lucien Moreau was standing in the rain on Eva's landing, as if the last four months had not happened at all.
Rory stared at him and forgot, briefly, how to breathe in a normal order. He was wet through. Rain slicked his platinum blond hair back from his face and darkened the shoulders of his charcoal suit, and he leaned harder than usual on his ivory-handled cane. Below the flat the curry house was in full evening service, garlic and cumin and hot oil rising up the stairwell, and Lucien smelled incongruously of cold air and iron beneath it.
"Bonsoir, Aurora," he said.
"You have got to be joking."
His mouth tilted, not quite a smile. One amber eye, one black, both fixed on her with an attention that had always felt indecently complete. "I had hoped for a warmer welcome."
"You don't get one. Eva isn't here."
"I know. I came for you."
That did it. Her hand tightened on the edge of the door. She should close it. She had imagined closing it, in fact, with a level of specificity that would have worried her if she had let herself think about it for too long. In the imagined version she was calm and devastating and entirely unmoved, and Lucien walked back down the stairs and out of her life with his tailored tail between his legs.
In the real version, Ptolemy the tabby cat threaded himself around her ankles, took one look at the half-demon on the landing, and butted his broad striped head affectionately against Lucien's wet trouser leg.
"Traitor," Rory said.
Lucien glanced down. "He has always had excellent judgement."
"He eats moths."
"Then we have that in common. May I come in?"
"No."
"Aurora."
"You don't get to say my name like that. Not after —" She stopped. The landing light buzzed. Rain drummed the little grated window at the turn of the stairs, and somewhere below a pan clanged and a man shouted an order in Bengali. Her heart was going too fast, which annoyed her more than his presence did, which was a considerable amount. "Four months, Luc. Four months, and you turn up unannounced at Eva's place like you've popped round to borrow sugar."
"I did knock," he said. "Three times. And then I waited while you argued with yourself on the other side of the door."
"I wasn't arguing with myself. I was hoping you'd get bored and leave."
"I know what hoping sounds like through a door. That was arguing."
She hated that he knew that. She hated more that some stupid, unreconstructed part of her had recognised his knock before her brain caught up. Three short raps, a pause, one more. He knocked the same way he did everything, with precision, as if manners were a form of armour.
"You look terrible," she said.
"Thank you. You look —" His gaze moved over her, quick and too thorough, taking in Eva's borrowed jumper hanging off one shoulder, her bare feet, her straight black hair still damp from a shower. It lingered for half a second and then came back, with effort, to her face. "Well."
"Don't."
"I was not going to say anything indiscreet."
"You were thinking it."
"Thinking is not yet a crime in this country." Then he shifted his weight and she saw it, the thing he had been hiding by standing half in shadow. His left hand was pressed to his side, under his open jacket. When he moved it, his fingers were dark with blood.
All of Eva's books and scrolls and research notes seemed to crowd in at the edges of her vision. The cramped flat behind her was suddenly very small and very warm. "What happened?"
"A disagreement."
"With a knife?"
"With several people in possession of knives. I won, on points." He attempted another smile and it failed him around the edges. "I do not need a hospital. I need somewhere off the street for an hour, and a towel you do not like, and possibly — though it pains me to admit it — to sit down before I make a spectacle of myself on Eva's stairs."
Rory looked at his hand. She looked at the rain running off the hem of his suit. Cool-headed, people called her. Quick thinking. She could think of fourteen reasons to shut the door and every single one of them was sensible.
She stepped back. "If you bleed on Eva's rug I will kill you myself, save everyone the trouble."
"Noted." He crossed the threshold and she locked up behind him, deadbolt after deadbolt after deadbolt, because whatever had put that look in his eyes was still out there in Brick Lane and she was not having it in here. The third bolt slid home with a clunk that sounded far too final.
Inside, the flat did what it always did and reduced the world to books. They were everywhere, stacked on the little table, sliding across the sofa, open face-down on the arm of the chair, annotated in three colours of ink. Scrolls leaned in Eva's umbrella stand. A pot of tea had gone cold beside a half-translated bestiary. Ptolemy, having delivered the intruder, jumped onto a pile of research notes and began to wash his face with an air of complete innocence.
Lucien stood in the middle of it all dripping onto the floorboards. Without his usual immaculate dryness he looked younger somehow, and more tired, and more human than a man with a demon father from Avaros had any right to look.
"Sit," Rory said, and pointed at a kitchen chair she had to clear of dictionaries first.
He lowered himself carefully, cane propped against the table, and let out a breath through his teeth that he had clearly been saving until he was seated. Rory fetched the first-aid kit from Eva's bathroom, a clean hand towel, a bowl of hot water. When she came back he had got his jacket off, folded even now, and was working at the buttons of his shirt with blood-slick fingers.
"Let me," she said, before she could reconsider.
"Aurora —"
"Shut up and sit still."
His shirt was fine cotton and ruined. She pushed it aside and went quiet. The cut ran along his ribs, long rather than deep, still seeping. Something had scored him in a clean, deliberate line. Around it, older bruising bloomed yellow and violet.
"It isn't as bad as it looks," he said.
"You say that to all the girls who patch you up?"
"Only the ones who let me in."
"I haven't decided if I've let you in. This is triage. There's a difference."
She cleaned the wound and he did not flinch, though his hand found the edge of the chair and stayed there, knuckles pale. His skin was hot. This close she could see the rain still caught in his lashes, the faint pulse in his throat, the exact and maddening difference between his eyes. She had once traced the line of his jaw in the dark above Silas's bar and thought, with the kind of foolish clarity that comes at two in the morning, that she had never wanted to be looked at the way he looked at her. She pressed the dressing down harder than she needed to.
"Careful," he murmured.
"You deserve worse."
"I know."
That was the problem. He said it simply, without self-pity, and the argument she had been warming up for four months lost its footing. She taped the dressing down and did not move her hands away as quickly as she should have. His ribs rose under her palm.
"Why here?" she asked. "Why me? You have half of London owing you favours, Luc. You have safe houses and fixers and God knows who else. You could have gone anywhere."
"Eva's wards are the best in East London." He glanced at the door, at the small sigils Eva had inked inside the frame where a casual eye would never find them. "And the people who came for me tonight knew my safe houses. They knew my usual routes. One of them knew about the blade in my cane, which is information I am very careful with."
"So you led them to me instead. Lovely. Thank you."
"I led them nowhere. I lost them in Whitechapel, doubled back twice, and came up through the kitchens downstairs where your curry house friends were kind enough to pretend a bleeding Frenchman was a health inspector." A pause. "But yes. I also came because it was you. Both things are true. They usually are."
Rory sat back on her heels. Her left wrist ached, the way it sometimes did when she was tired or angry, the small crescent-shaped scar pale against her skin. Lucien's gaze dropped to it, and his expression changed in a way she felt in her stomach .
"Do you remember," he said quietly, "the last night at your flat, you told me that if I walked out without telling you why, I should not imagine I could walk back in and pick up the sentence where I left it."
"I remember. I was there."
"I have imagined it anyway. In four languages. It goes badly in all of them."
"Good."
"I left because Silas had word that Evan had hired men to watch your building." The name landed between them like a dropped glass. Rory went very still. She had not said Evan's name aloud in weeks. She had not needed to. He lived in the list of reasons she checked locks and took the long way home. "I made an arrangement," Lucien went on. "Information, and money, and a debt I did not want, in exchange for them calling off the watch and burning what they had on you. The terms required me to be elsewhere. Visible elsewhere. If I had told you, you would have tried to stop me, or worse, to help, and you are brave and brilliant and entirely too willing to bleed for other people, Aurora."
"You made that decision for me."
"Yes."
"You let me think —" Her voice, traitorously, thinned. She stood up too fast and put the little kitchen between them, bowl and bloody water, dictionaries and cold tea. "You let me think you'd taken their money. Eva found the payment, Luc. I saw your name on a transfer to the same people who were following me. What was I supposed to think ?"
"That I had betrayed you. It was, I concede, the intended impression. For them as much as for you. If they believed I had sold you, they would stop watching to see who you ran to." His amber eye burned; the black one gave nothing back at all. "It worked. And then it kept working, and every week I did not come back made coming back a longer conversation, and I am —" He stopped and laughed once, without humour. "I fix things for other people for a living. I appear to be very poor at it for myself."
Ptolemy, sensing a silence he could fill, jumped down and demanded dinner at a volume out of all proportion to his size. Neither of them moved.
Outside, the rain thickened against the window over the curry house sign. A siren passed on Brick Lane and faded east. Rory's hands were shaking , so she pressed them flat on the worktop among Eva's notes until they stopped.
"You should have trusted me," she said.
"Yes."
"You don't get off that easily just by agreeing with everything."
"No. But I have had four months of disagreeing with myself at considerable length. I am out of practice at losing an argument gracefully to anyone else." He rose then, slowly , holding the chair back, his ruined shirt open, the dressing stark white against his side. He did not come closer. That, more than anything, nearly undid her. Lucien had always known exactly how much space to leave her, and when. "Tell me to go and I will go. The wards will hold them off the street, and I will be — my own problem again. Say it and I am gone, Aurora. I will not come back a third time."
There it was. The clean exit. The sensible thing. She could say it and watch him button his bloody shirt and take his cane and go down the stairs into the wet London night, and she would lock the three deadbolts and feed the cat and in the morning she could start, again, the long competent work of not thinking about him.
She opened her mouth.
At that moment, something hit the window.
Not rain. A single, deliberate tap, and then another, and a shape moved across the glass where no fire escape ran and no pigeon had any business being at that height in a storm. Ptolemy flattened his ears. Every sigil Eva had drawn inside the door frame lit, faintly, like embers breathed on.
Lucien was already moving . He had the cane in his hand, and whatever pain he was in had vanished behind something older and colder and not entirely human. He looked at the window, then at Rory, and all the apology was gone out of his face.
"They found the building," he said. "Not the flat. Not yet."
"How long?" she asked.
"Until they work through Eva's wards? An hour. Perhaps two, if your friend was showing off when she set them, which she usually is." He held out his free hand, palm up, an offer rather than a grab. "It seems, whether either of us likes it, that we are spending the evening together."
Rory looked at his hand. She looked at the glowing door, at the dressing on his ribs, at the rain-streaked window where something tapped a third time, patient as a creditor.
She put her hand in his. His fingers closed around hers, warm and sure, and neither of them let go a moment too soon.
"Then you'd better tell me everything," she said. "From the beginning this time. And Luc —"
"Oui?"
"If you bleed on Eva's rug, I meant it."
For the first time that night, he smiled properly, and it reached both his mismatched eyes. "I would not dare."