AI The third deadbolt gave with a hard click, and Rory opened the door just wide enough to prove to herself that she had imagined the knock.
She had not.
Lucien Moreau stood in the narrow hall outside Eva's flat, rain beading on the shoulders of his charcoal suit, his slicked-back platinum hair darkened at the temples where the weather had caught him. He leaned on his ivory-handled cane a fraction more than usual, and his heterochromatic eyes lifted to hers, amber and black, both fixed with an unnerving steadiness that she had spent three months trying not to remember.
“Bonsoir, Aurora,” he said.
“Do not Aurora me at midnight,” she said. “And do not bonsoir me either.”
“It is eleven forty.”
“Then you are early for being unwelcome.”
His mouth shaped something that might have been a smile if he had allowed it to finish. He did not. That was Lucien all over, every expression edited before it reached his face.
Ptolemy, Eva's tabby, pushed his broad striped head against Rory's ankle and then, traitor that he was, slipped out into the hall and wound himself luxuriously around Lucien's trouser leg. Lucien glanced down. The smile escaped properly this time, small and reluctant.
“At least someone in this building retains some manners.”
“Ptolemy licks his own arse and eats moths. Do not take it as a compliment.”
She should have shut the door. She had imagined this moment often enough in the flat above Silas' bar, usually while tired and angry and determined to be magnificent about it. In the imagined versions she was always wearing something better than Eva's oversized university jumper and a pair of socks that did not match, her straight black hair was not scraped back still damp from the shower, and she said something final and devastating before closing the door with great dignity. In reality she stood there with her hand on the bolt and her heart behaving so loudly she was half convinced he could hear it.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“To come in.”
“No.”
“Aurora.”
“Rory.”
Something tightened almost imperceptibly around his eyes. He had only ever called her Aurora when he was serious, or when he was trying not to be.
“I need to come in,” he said, quieter now . “Please.”
That should not have worked. Please from Lucien was not a habit. It was a concession, wrung from him. Still, she did not move.
“You made it very clear the last time we spoke that continued contact would be, I believe the exact phrase was, strategically unwise.”
“It was.”
“And that whatever personal entanglement we had developed was subordinate to your arrangements.”
His jaw tightened. “I said it badly.”
“You said it in four languages, Lucien. It got worse in French.”
“I was attempting to be thorough.”
“You were attempting to make sure I would not ask you to stay.”
Silence filled the hallway. Downstairs the curry house was closing, and the rich, spiced air from the kitchen vents drifted up the stairwell, mixing with wet brick and rain off Brick Lane. Someone laughed out on the street, drunk and happy and oblivious.
Lucien shifted his weight . It was a small movement, but his knuckles whitened on the head of his cane, and Rory looked down before she meant to. The left side of his shirt showed through his open coat, pale fabric ruined by a spreading red stain just above his hip.
All the air left her at once.
“For God's sake,” she said, and hauled the door wide. “Get in.”
“It is not as bad as it looks,” he said as he crossed the threshold, which immediately undermined itself when he caught the doorframe with one hand to steady himself.
“Yes, men bleeding on my best friend's doorstep always give such reliable medical assessments. Sit down before you fall down. You will not bleed heroically all over Eva's rug. She will kill you, and then she will kill me for letting you.”
She shut the door and threw all three deadbolts in sharp succession. The familiar sounds helped. Bolt, bolt, bolt. The flat sealed itself around them, cramped and warm and cluttered beyond reason. Every surface wore Eva's research. Books leaned in dangerous towers beside the kettle, scrolls were secured with hair ties and takeaway chopsticks, printed articles and handwritten notes covered the little kitchen table, the arm of the sofa, most of the windowsill. The air tasted faintly of old paper, tea, and turmeric from downstairs.
Lucien lowered himself onto the sofa, displacing a stack of folklore journals and Ptolemy, who leapt up again at once and settled against his thigh as if he had been saving the spot for three months. Rory went to the bathroom for Eva's first aid kit, mostly to have ten seconds where she did not have to look at him.
When she came back he had shrugged out of his coat with careful, economical movements. The shirt beneath was worse up close.
“Kneel down if you are going to glower at me,” he said. “You will get a crick in your neck.”
“I am not glowering.”
“You are doing something with your eyebrows that could intimidate lesser men.”
“Hold still.”
She knelt in front of him and opened the kit on the coffee table, shoving aside three mugs and a annotated copy of a bestiary. Her hands, to her private fury, were not quite steady. She unbuttoned the lower part of his shirt herself because he was too slow, and because if she waited she would think too long about touching him at all.
The cut ran along his side, shallow but long, from hip toward ribs. Whatever had made it had been sharp and not entirely of human make. The edges of the wound smoked faintly where his half-demon blood met the air, a dark, reluctant shimmer. Rory pressed clean gauze to it, harder than mercy strictly required.
Lucien inhaled through his teeth. “Your bedside manner has evolved.”
“So has your ability to get stabbed. What did this?”
“A mutual acquaintance in Whitechapel who felt our negotiation had stalled.”
“Did you win the negotiation?”
“I am here, and he will be walking with a limp for a considerable number of years. Let us call it a diplomatic triumph.”
“His weapon?”
“Silvered. Blessed, I think, in water no priest would admit to owning. It is closing slowly .”
“That explains the sulking wound. You need Eva.”
“Eva is in Oxford until Thursday, and her wards are still on this flat. It was the safest address I could reach without being followed.” His eyes met hers . “And I knew the address.”
There it was. Not just safety. Her. Eva's wards, Eva's flat, but Rory answering the door. Rory on her knees in front of him with his blood under her fingernails, close enough to see the rain still caught in his lashes, close enough to remember exactly how warm his skin was under her palm when she adjusted the gauze.
Three months ago he had stood in the rain outside Silas' bar and told her that his father in Avaros had taken an interest in the mortal fixer who kept refusing his summons, and that interest had begun to extend to the people the fixer was seen with. To her. She had asked if he was leaving . He had said he was simplifying variables . She had called him a coward in terms Eva would have applauded. He had said, with that terrible tailored calm, that cowardice had kept him alive for thirty-two years and romance was unlikely to improve the strategy. Then he had walked away, cane tapping over wet pavement, and Rory had watched until he turned the corner because looking away first had felt like losing .
Now his blood was seeping through gauze onto her fingers.
“You could have rung,” she said.
“You would have told me not to come.”
“Yes, and then I would have met you downstairs anyway and you know it. That is not the point. You do not get to choose silence for three months and then choose my doorstep when you are bleeding. That is not fair, Lucien.”
“No,” he said. “It is not.”
The agreement took her aback more than an argument would have. She taped the dressing down with short, efficient strips, trying to ignore the way his body tensed and relaxed under her hands, the lean hard line of him beneath expensive cloth. She had missed him with her hands. That was the mortifying truth lurking underneath all the nobler versions. She had missed his voice, and the dry private humor that appeared only when he was tired, and the way he made tea as if performing a legal contract, and the way he listened, really listened, when she worked a problem aloud, his different-colored eyes never leaving her face .
“I went to Marseille,” he said suddenly .
Rory kept her eyes on the dressing. “Business or pleasure?”
“My mother. She had kept letters from my father from before I was born. Contracts, essentially, written as love letters. I needed to know what he believed he owned.”
“And?”
“He believes lineage is a debt. Mine was coming due. I found clauses. I found weaknesses. I paid several very unpleasant people to witness several even less pleasant renegotiations.” He paused. “I have been, for the last six weeks, legally uninteresting to Avaros. Or as close to it as someone like me can be.”
She did look up then. “Six weeks.”
“Yes.”
“You have been free, or free-ish, for six weeks, and the first contact I get is you bleeding on Eva's stairs.”
His hand lifted, hesitant in a way she had never seen from him, and settled carefully over hers where it still rested against his side. His fingers were cool from the rain. “I rehearsed better versions. Telephone calls. A letter. I wrote three. They were all terrible. One sounded like a ransom demand. One sounded like a legal brief. The third simply said that I had been a fool and that I missed you, and that one I judged too dangerous to send.”
“Too dangerous,” she repeated softly .
“It was true without any decoration. I have very little practice with that.” He swallowed. “I told myself if you were settled, if you were happier, I would turn that fact into a reason to stay away forever. Then tonight happened, and all my strategy reduced itself to the fact that I wanted to hear your voice before I possibly lost consciousness. That seemed clarifying.”
Ptolemy purred obtrusively between them. Downstairs a shutter rattled closed. Rain struck the window over the sink in a sudden gust and then softened.
Rory turned her hand over under his, and his fingers closed around it at once as if she had given permission for something he had been holding back with both hands. He noticed, as he always noticed, the small crescent scar on her left wrist, and his thumb brushed across it, feather light. The touch did more damage to her defenses than any speech could have.
“You left,” she said, and hated the unevenness in her voice. “You decided for both of us.”
“I know.”
“You do not get to do that again. Not if whatever this is starts again. If you are frightened, you say so. If your demon father develops a hobby involving me, you tell me and we fight about the plan together like adults. I grew up with lawyers, Lucien. I can handle an appalling family obligation.”
That drew a startled breath of laughter from him, which he immediately regretted when it pulled at the cut. “You are magnificent when you are furious.”
“I am furious approximately thirty percent of the time at present. The rest is not fit to describe to a wounded man.”
“I am grateful for all percentages.”
He was still holding her hand. She was still kneeling between his knees in Eva's ridiculous jumper with first aid supplies scattered over books about river hags, and none of it felt ridiculous in the least. It felt perilously close to the exact place she had been trying not to arrive at since the door opened.
Rory rose, but only enough to sit on the edge of the coffee table facing him, their knees nearly touching, because she wanted to be level when she kissed him if she was going to be fool enough to do it. She gave herself one last chance to be sensible and found that sensible had quietly left the building some time around the third deadbolt.
“This does not fix everything tonight,” she said.
“I would be disappointed in your judgment if it did.”
“You are sleeping on this sofa, and in the morning you are going to explain the Whitechapel situation fully and without your fixer evasions. Then we are going to argue properly.”
“I look forward to it with a terror usually reserved for my father's court.”
“Good.”
She leaned in then, and he met her halfway with a care that broke her heart a little. The kiss was not rushed. It tasted of rain and relief and all the conversations they had refused to have; his free hand rose to her jaw, his thumb resting just below her ear, and for a moment the flat, the blood, Avaros, Marseille, and three months of silence contracted to the simple, astonishing fact of his mouth against hers. When she drew back, his eyes stayed closed an instant longer than necessary, as if he were committing something to a memory he did not trust luck to preserve.
“Stay alive until morning,” she told him, against his forehead.
“I shall make every effort.”
“Effort is the bare minimum, Moreau.”
His hand tightened gently around hers. Outside, the rain went on washing Brick Lane clean, and inside Eva's warded little flat, with the cat purring and the deadbolts thrown and Lucien asleep at last under Eva's spare blanket, Rory sat beside him far longer than any sensible woman would have, listening to him breathe and deciding, for once, not to rehearse the part where she let him go.