AI The third deadbolt stuck the way it always did, and Rory had to put her shoulder to Eva's door and shove before it gave with a metallic scrape.
She opened it expecting Eva, arms full of books and excuses for being three hours late, or the man from the curry house downstairs with another parcel delivered to the wrong address. She did not expect Lucien Moreau standing in the rain with one hand braced against the frame and his ivory-handled cane dangling loose in the other, as if he had forgotten he was holding it.
For a second she could not breathe properly.
He looked wrong. Lucien was never wrong. He wore tailored charcoal suits the way other men wore skin, his slicked-back platinum blond hair never dared fall out of place, and he moved through even the filthiest corners of London without collecting so much as dust on his shoes. Now rain had darkened his hair and plastered it to his forehead. His suit jacket hung open, his white shirt was torn at the side and soaked through with blood, and the hand pressed to his ribs was shaking .
His eyes found hers, one amber, one black, and something in his careful expression cracked.
"You are not Eva," he said.
"No." Rory tightened her grip on the door. "Brilliant observation. Did you lose a bet with a razor?"
A ghost of a smile touched his mouth and vanished. "May I come in?"
"No."
"Rory."
"Do not." The word came out sharper than she intended. "Do not stand there after six weeks and say my name in that voice. Where the hell have you been?"
"Busy."
"Busy." She laughed once, without humor . "Right. Of course. Six weeks, Lucien. No call. No message. Eva did a locator spell with your blood from that bar fight and got nothing. Silas thought you were dead. I thought—" She stopped herself before she finished that sentence . She had thought a great many things at three in the morning in her flat above the bar, most of them humiliating in their honesty. "You don't get to bleed on Eva's doorstep and act like this is normal."
"It is not her doorstep I came to." His gaze did not leave her face. Rain ran down his jaw and dripped from his chin. "I came to yours first. Silas said Eva had hidden you here."
"Hidden me?"
"There are people looking for you tonight."
That changed the air between them. Rory glanced past him to the wet stairwell, the narrow landing, the buzzing strip light that made everything look jaundiced. Brick Lane below smelled of rain and frying onions and hot oil from the curry house. She heard traffic hissing past on the main road, nothing closer.
"Looking for me, or following you?" she asked.
"Both, now." He swayed, barely, and caught himself against the frame. His knuckles went white . "Aurora. Please."
He almost never used her full name. The last time had been in her kitchen six weeks ago, with his hand cupping her jaw and his thumb resting against the frantic pulse in her throat, telling her in perfect , reasonable French-accented English why kissing her would be a mistake he was too selfish to make twice. Then his phone had rung. Then he had gone still in that inhuman way of his, said Avaros like a curse, and walked out without his coat. She had waited until dawn with two cups of tea going cold between them.
She stepped back.
"If you die on Eva's rug, she will resurrect you just to bill you for it," she said.
"I shall endeavor to remain inconsiderately alive."
He crossed the threshold and the flat reacted before she could shut the door. The symbols Eva had carved into the lintel flared dull gold. His blood, bright on his fingers, struck the floorboards. Every lock on the door slammed home by itself, all three deadbolts shooting into place in a rapid clatter, and the windows rattled in their frames as the wards sealed tight.
Rory stared at the door. She tried the handle. It did not move.
"Oh, perfect ," she said. "That's just perfect ."
Lucien had gone very still. "Demon blood on a threshold ward. Eva has upgraded since my last visit."
"And what does that mean, exactly?"
"It means the flat believes I have invaded." He looked at the glowing marks with weary resignation. "It will not open for either of us until sunrise, or until Eva releases it."
"You are joking."
"I am many disappointing things tonight. Jocular is not one of them."
Ptolemy chose that moment to emerge from behind a tower of books on the kitchen counter. Eva's tabby cat regarded Lucien with solemn interest, then trotted over the research notes and scrolls covering every surface, jumped down, and wound himself around Lucien's ankles, purring obscenely loud.
"Traitor," Rory told him.
"He has excellent judgment," Lucien said, and then his knees gave out.
She caught him before he hit the floor, which was less heroic than it sounded. He was taller, solid, and wet, and she staggered under his weight until her back hit the bookcase. Books thumped down around them. His cane clattered across the boards. For one stunned moment they were pressed together in the narrow hallway, his forehead dropping to her shoulder, his breath warm and uneven against her neck.
"Don't," she said automatically.
"I am not dying theatrically. I am merely—" He tried to straighten and hissed through his teeth.
"Shut up and lean."
She got him to Eva's sofa, clearing a landslide of notebooks and annotated maps with one sweep of her arm. He sat hard. Blood had spread through his shirt in a dark, spreading flower. Rory knelt in front of him and reached for the buttons before she thought better of it.
"May I?"
"You have seen me shirtless before."
"That was a river spirit and you were showing off."
"I was drowning with panache." His mouth twitched, but his eyes stayed on her hands . "Yes, Rory. Please."
His skin was hot under her fingers, hotter than human. The cut ran along his ribs, long and ugly, made by something serrated. Not a knife. Claws, maybe, or a cursed blade. The edges shimmered faintly black.
"What did this?" she asked.
"A former client disagreed with my retirement from his employ."
"You don't retire. You collect favors and secrets and terrible people owe you their souls."
"Half their souls. I am not greedy."
She fetched Eva's first-aid kit from the bathroom, along with the little brown bottle of something Eva swore was medicinal and Rory was fairly certain could strip paint. When she cleaned the wound, Lucien's hand shot out and caught her left wrist.
He did not squeeze. His fingers simply closed around it, anchoring himself, his thumb finding the small crescent-shaped scar there. He had traced that scar once before, absently, while pretending not to watch her over the rim of a wineglass, and she still remembered the exact pressure of it.
"You are hurting me less than you think," she said.
"You always lie beautifully when you are frightened."
"I'm not frightened. I'm annoyed that you showed up looking like an expensive corpse."
His thumb moved once over the scar. "You are frightened for me. There is a difference."
She pulled free and threaded the needle, because looking at his face was suddenly a bad tactical decision. "Hold still."
He held still. He watched her instead, while she stitched, and the silence filled with rain on the windows and Ptolemy purring on the arm of the sofa and the curry house radio murmuring through the floor. Every surface in Eva's flat bore witness to some obsession: books stacked spine-out and spine-in, scrolls tied with red string, sticky notes in three languages. It was a ridiculous place to be trapped with the man who had kissed her like a promise and left like a warning.
"You should have called," she said at last, quiet.
"Yes."
That startled her more than an excuse would have. She glanced up. The amber eye was soft with pain. The black one gave nothing away, as usual.
"That's it? Yes?"
"I wanted to." He swallowed. "My father summoned me."
Rory went still, needle poised.
"You never talk about Avaros."
"I never talk about many things until they become weapons in another man's hand." His jaw tightened. "He learned about you. I do not know how. A woman with no magic who keeps surviving magic tends to attract attention. He offered me a bargain. Your name removed from certain ledgers, your ex Evan found and delivered to people who would make his continued existence very unpleasant, in exchange for my return."
Her stomach turned over. "Evan?"
"I did not accept." Lucien's voice roughened. "But I could not come back until I was certain he had not set a tail on my affections. I could not call, because everything I said would have been listened to. I stayed away because staying away was the only honest protection I could offer, and I hated every day of it with a purity that surprised even me."
She tied off the stitch too tightly and he inhaled sharply .
"Sorry."
"Do not be. I suspect I have earned worse."
"You have." She sat back on her heels. Her black hair had come loose from its tie and fell around her face, damp at the ends from his wet shirt. Her hands were bloody. His blood, demon-hot, smeared across her knuckles. "You could have left a note. One word. Alive. That would have been a start."
"I left three."
"What?"
"With Silas. With Eva. With the woman at the Golden Empress who pretends not to carry a cleaver under the counter. Each was told not to give it to you unless I was truly dead." His smile was thin and self-lacerating. "I believed I was being noble. Eva called me a melodramatic French bastard and threw a book at my head."
"That sounds like Eva."
"It was a heavy book."
Despite herself, despite everything, Rory felt the laugh rise and break. Lucien's eyes warmed at the sound as if she had done something far more intimate than laugh in a blood-spattered flat at midnight.
"You are a melodramatic French bastard," she said.
"Oui. But I am your melodramatic French bastard, if you will still permit the insult."
The room went quiet . The wards hummed in the walls. Sunrise was hours away. The sofa was narrow, the flat was sealed, and there was nowhere sensible for her to put the feeling that rose up in her chest, bright and furious and relieved all at once. She had rehearsed so many speeches for this moment. She had been cutting and cool-headed in every one. She had not, in any of them, been kneeling between his knees with his blood on her hands, close enough to see the rain still caught in his eyelashes.
"You kissed me," she said.
"Yes."
"Then you told me it was a mistake."
"I told you I was a mistake." His hand lifted slowly , giving her time to move. She didn't. His fingers brushed a strand of hair back from her cheek and tucked it behind her ear with a care that undid her. "I have made treaties with warlocks and lied to archdemons before breakfast. You are the only person in London I am afraid of lying to, and that terrifies me more than my father does."
"Good," she whispered. "Be terrified. Stay anyway."
His breath caught. For a moment neither of them moved. Then Ptolemy, with the impeccable timing of his species, leaped onto Lucien's wounded side in pursuit of the dangling thread from her stitch kit.
Lucien swore in French, Rory lunged to catch the cat, and they collided. Her hands landed on his chest. His arm came around her waist to steady her, solid and sure, and suddenly there was no distance left worth pretending about. She could feel his heart hammering under her palm, too fast for all his practiced calm.
"Ptolemy," she said weakly, "is trying to kill you."
"He is an assassin of romance. Eva has trained him well." Lucien did not let go. His forehead rested against hers. "We are trapped until sunrise."
"I noticed."
"I can sleep on the floor. I can recite tax law in four languages. I can be extremely honorable and extremely miserable in the chair by the window, if that is what you ask."
Rory slid her hand up, just enough that her fingers curled into the wet lapel of his ruined suit. She thought of Evan, of Cardiff, of every door she had ever locked behind her. She thought of Lucien's coat still hanging in her flat because she had never quite managed to give it back.
"Don't be honorable," she said. "Just don't disappear again."
Something in his face finally, fully broke open. "Never without a note."
"Never without telling me."
"Never without telling you." He said it like a vow. His arm tightened around her, careful of nothing but holding on. Outside, London rain washed Brick Lane clean, and behind Eva's three deadbolts the wards burned gold, keeping the whole dangerous world at bay until morning.