AI The first deadbolt stuck, as it always did, and Rory had to put her shoulder to Eva's door to work it free.
"You have got to be—" she started, and then stopped .
Lucien Moreau stood in the narrow hall outside Eva's flat, soaked through to the skin.
Rain had slicked his platinum blond hair flat against his head and darkened his charcoal suit to black. Water ran off the ivory handle of his cane and pooled around shoes that had cost more than Rory made in a month delivering for the Golden Empress. He was leaning, actually leaning, against the doorframe, one hand pressed hard to his side. His other hand was raised , caught mid-knock, as if he hadn't expected her to answer quite so quickly .
For a moment neither of them spoke. The smell of curry and hot oil drifted up from the restaurant below, mixing with wet wool and London rain. Somewhere behind her, Ptolemy made a thin, inquiring noise from the top of a stack of books.
"You look terrible," Rory said.
His mouth curved, though it didn't reach his eyes — one amber, one black, both fixed on her with an intensity that made her fingers tighten on the edge of the door. "Good evening to you as well, Aurora."
"Don't." Three months and still the sound of her full name in his accent did something stupid and traitorous behind her ribs. "What are you doing here?"
"At present? Bleeding on Eva's landing."
She looked down. The hand at his side was dark. Not rain-dark. When he shifted his weight , she saw it properly, a wet bloom spreading beneath his fingers, through his shirt where his jacket fell open.
The cool-headed thing, the sensible thing, would have been to ask questions through the door. Who did this? Who followed you? Why here, why me, after everything? Rory had built a reasonably functional life out of sensible things since she had walked out of his office in Soho and told him not to call her again.
She stepped back and held the door wide.
"Get inside before you ruin the carpet. Eva will kill you herself."
"I shall add her to the list." He came in slow, favoring his left side, his cane tapping once against the threshold. He did not quite hide the sharp intake of breath when he had to lift his feet over the tangle of shoes and umbrellas Eva kept by the door. Five foot eleven of tailored elegance reduced to this — pale, wet, hurting — made something in Rory's chest ache in a way she had spent weeks trying to train it out of.
She shut the door at his back. Three deadbolts, top to bottom, each one thrown with more force than necessary. Click. Click. Click.
"Still thorough," Lucien observed.
"Still alive," she said. "No thanks to the company some of us keep."
"Rory."
"Don't do that either."
"Do what?"
"Say my name like it's an apology. If you wanted to apologize, you had three months and, I assume, a functioning phone. You're a fixer, Lucien. You can find anyone in London. You found Eva's flat at—" She glanced at the kitchen clock, half-buried under research notes and an open scroll weighted down with a mug. "—one in the morning. So don't stand there dripping and expect me to believe this is a social call."
Ptolemy chose that moment to wind between Lucien's ankles, tail high, traitorously pleased. Lucien looked down at the tabby as if personally betrayed.
"He remembers you," Rory said.
"He remembers that I fed him salmon while Eva was in Edinburgh."
"You bribed her cat."
"I cultivate useful alliances." He tried to straighten and failed, his jaw tightening. The cane clattered against a tower of paperbacks and sent two sliding to the floor. Rory caught him without thinking, both hands fisted in the wet front of his jacket, and suddenly they were far too close in Eva's cramped hallway, hemmed in by bookshelves and coats.
He was cold from the rain and hot underneath it, feverish through his shirt. She could feel his heart hammering under her knuckles.
"Right," she said, quieter . "Kitchen. Sit down before you fall down and I have to explain a half-demon corpse to Eva."
"Half-demon unconscious, I hope."
"Don't tempt me."
She got him into the one clear chair by shoving a pile of Eva's notes onto the counter — something about Avarosian binding circles, rendered in Eva's frantic handwriting, which Rory very deliberately did not read too closely — and Lucien sank down with a grace that fooled neither of them. Ptolemy immediately jumped into the vacated space on the table and began washing a paw, watching them both with round, judgmental eyes.
Rory filled the kettle. Got the first aid kit from under the sink, the big one Eva kept stocked for exactly the sort of nonsense Rory had promised herself she was finished with. Towels. The bottle of whisky Eva pretended was for cooking.
"Shirt," she said.
Lucien raised an eyebrow . "You could at least offer me dinner first."
"You are bleeding on my best friend's chair."
"It is not your flat."
"It is not yours either, and yet here we are." She set the kit down harder than she meant to. "Shirt, Lucien. Or jacket, at least. Let me see."
Something in her voice must have cut through the performance. He stopped trying to smile. With stiff, careful movements, he shrugged out of the jacket and worked at his buttons one-handed until impatience won and Rory stepped in, pushing his fingers aside.
His hands were shaking . Hers, annoyingly, were not much steadier up close.
The wound was low on his ribs, longer than it was deep, a clean slice that had missed anything vital by what she guessed was more luck than judgment. It was still seeping . There was another graze along his forearm, and bruising blooming dark at his jaw, as if someone had hit him with something heavier than a fist.
"What did this?" she asked.
"A very committed gentleman with a blessed knife."
"Just one gentleman?"
"There were three originally." He watched her face as she pressed a folded towel to his side. His expression gave nothing away, but his hand came up, hovering, and then settled lightly on the edge of the table instead of on her. That restraint was new. That restraint hurt worse than the alternative. "The others reconsidered their commitment."
"The cane?"
"The cane helped them reconsider."
She did not ask if they were alive. Three months ago she might have. Three months ago she had stood in his office with rain on her coat just like this, and listened to him explain, in that calm, reasonable voice he used for catastrophes, that he had known for two weeks that Evan had been hired to watch her — her Evan, her ex, the man whose name still made her go cold and careful — and had chosen not to tell her because the information was more useful to him moving than still. Because he could protect her better if she didn't know.
Because, he had said, you would have run, Aurora, and running would have got you killed.
He had not been wrong. That was the worst of it. He had not been entirely wrong, and he had lied to her anyway, and she had not been able to figure out how to forgive either part of that.
"You can't stay," she said to the towel, to his ribs, to anywhere but his face. "Once this stops, you have to go. Eva's wards will hide the blood for a while, but—"
"They will not need to hide it long. Whoever sent them was fishing. They wanted to know where I would run." His voice dropped. "I should not have come here."
"Then why did you?"
Silence. The kettle clicked off. Ptolemy sneezed.
Rory poured hot water over a clean cloth and wrung it out, trying to give her hands something useful to do. "You have safe houses. You have—what did you call them, assets? People who owe you favors in four languages. You have a demon father with an entire realm. Avaros, Lucien. You could have gone anywhere."
"I did go somewhere else first," he said. "Kensington. Very expensive, very empty, very safe. I sat in the dark for twenty minutes and understood, with perfect clarity, that if I was going to die tonight, I was not going to do it there."
"You're not dying."
"No," he agreed, too quickly , and then, after a beat, more honestly: "Probably not."
She cleaned the cut in silence . He bore it the way he bore everything, quietly, except for the one sharp breath when she got to the deepest part, and his fingers finally, finally closed around her wrist to still her hand.
His thumb rested, feather-light, over the small crescent-shaped scar on the inside of her left wrist.
He had asked about that scar once, months before everything fell apart, over takeaway noodles eaten straight from the carton in this same kitchen because Eva's table had been covered in books then, too. She had told him the stupid childhood story — a bicycle, a garden wall in Cardiff, her father's horrified face — and he had listened as if it mattered. Nobody listened to her small stories as if they mattered. Not like that.
"Rory," he said now, so low she felt it more than heard it. "Look at me."
She did. She wished immediately that she hadn't. Wet hair, ruined suit, blood on his skin, those mismatched eyes utterly unguarded for once — Lucien without the fixer, without the broker, without the man who always knew the price of everything. Just the man who had once made her tea exactly right without being asked and translated French poetry badly on purpose to make her laugh in bed at two in the morning.
"You should have told me," she said. The old hurt came up clean and sudden, and her eyes stung with it. "About Evan. About being watched. You looked at me every day for two weeks and you chose for me. You don't get to do that. Not to me. Not after him."
"I know."
"You don't get to decide I'm safer ignorant. You don't get to love someone in pieces and keep the ugly parts in a locked drawer."
"I know." His hand was still on her wrist. He did not tighten it. He did not let go, either. "I have played that evening back more times than I have slept since. I told myself I was protecting you. It was true, and it was also convenient. If you knew, you might have left London. You might have left me. So I made sure you could not choose at all. That is—" He searched for the word, this man who spoke four languages fluently, and landed on the plainest one. "Cowardly. It was cowardly, and I am sorry. Not for keeping you alive. For taking your choice to keep yourself alive. I am sorry for that, specifically, and I should have said it in daylight, sober, unbleeding, and without imposing myself on Eva's kitchen."
Rory laughed, a wet, startled sound. "That would have been nice."
"It would have been considerably better planned." A ghost of the old dryness, and then it faded. "I didn't come to ask you to forgive me. I want to be very clear, because apparently clarity is a skill I am learning late. I came because when someone put a knife in me, you were not my safest option. You were simply the only one I wanted."
The cloth in her free hand dripped onto the lino. The flat was very small. There was no room in it for this, on top of the books and the scrolls and three months of her carefully rebuilt resolve .
"You absolute bastard," she said, without any heat at all.
"Yes," Lucien said. "Fair."
"Eva will be back at six. If she finds you here, she'll have questions neither of us wants to answer, and she'll feed you and be furious in that order."
"Then I will go before six."
"You'll go when that stops bleeding and not a minute sooner. And you're sleeping on the sofa, which is mostly books, and you'll like it."
Something changed in his face then, slow and careful, as if he didn't quite trust it . "Rory—"
"Don't make it a thing." She eased her wrist free, gently , and reached for the bandages, mostly so she wouldn't reach for him instead. "We still have everything left unsaid, Lucien. All of it. This doesn't fix it."
"No," he said. "But it is a beginning, if you will allow it to be one."
Outside, the rain kept coming down on Brick Lane, drumming on the curry house sign, turning the street to wet gold under the lamps. Rory taped the last edge of the bandage down flat over his ribs, her palm lingering a second longer than medicine required against the warm, living skin of his side, feeling his breath go uneven under her hand. He covered her fingers with his own, just resting there, asking nothing.
"Stay alive until morning," she said. "Then we'll talk."
"Until morning," he said, like a vow he intended, this time, to let her hold him to.