AI The third deadbolt slid back with a heavy, metallic clunk that vibrated right through Rory’s palm. She kept her foot braced against the bottom of the door, a habit forged in Cardiff and perfected in East London, and pulled the wood open two inches.
She expected a courier. She expected Eva, having forgotten her keys again. She did not expect slicked-back platinum hair and a charcoal suit that cost more than her annual rent above Silas’s bar.
Lucien Moreau stood on the dim landing, the stairwell’s flickering bulb casting sharp shadows across his cheekbones. His mismatched eyes—one warm amber, the other a pit of solid, demonic black—dropped from her face to the chain still taut across the gap, then back up again.
"Expecting the Inquisition, *chérie *?" His voice was a low, velvet scrape, carrying just enough of Marseille to make her stomach perform a traitorous little flip.
Rory didn’t move her foot. "Eva’s not here. And if you’re looking for information, the shop is closed."
"I know Eva is in Brighton." Lucien shifted his weight, resting both leather-gloved hands on the ivory handle of his cane. The wood was dark, polished, and hiding eighteen inches of Avaros steel that Rory had seen him use twice. "I did not climb three flights of stairs smelling of fenugreek and damp carpet to speak with Eva."
"Leave the curry house out of this," Rory said, though her pulse was hammering an erratic rhythm against the small crescent scar on her left wrist. Six weeks. Six weeks since the warehouse in Rotherhithe, since he had looked at her through the rain and told her that humans were fragile things he couldn't afford to keep in his pockets. Six weeks of silence , and now he was standing on Brick Lane like he owned the postcode. "Go away, Luc."
"I cannot." He reached into his breast pocket, and she tensed, her bright blue eyes narrowing. He paused, showing her the empty palm of his other hand before slowly extracting a folded square of thick, cream-colored parchment. "Your name came up at an auction in Soho two hours ago. Not Rory. Not Aurora. *Malphora *."
The air in the cramped hallway seemed to thin. Rory stared at the parchment, then at the dark, unblinking abyss of his left eye. Slowly, she pushed the door shut just enough to slide the chain off its track, then stepped back, letting the door swing wide.
Lucien stepped over the threshold, bringing the scent of rain, bergamot, and cold night air into the cramped one-bedroom flat. He looked entirely absurd here. The place was a disaster of Eva’s making—every square inch of the floorboards and battered furniture was buried under tottering spires of medieval grimoires, unrolled scrolls weighted down with old mugs, and manic bursts of research notes pinned to the peeling wallpaper.
Ptolemy, Eva’s massive tabby, lifted his head from a pile of Latin translations on the radiator, took one look at the half-demon in the doorway, and let out a low, theatrical hiss before vanishing into the bedroom.
"Everyone is a critic," Lucien murmured, shutting the door behind him. Without being asked , he turned all three deadbolts back into place. His fingers moved with practiced efficiency.
Rory crossed her arms, retreating until the back of her thighs hit the edge of a cluttered dining table. She was still wearing her black jeans and the faded polo shirt from her evening shift delivering for the Golden Empress; she smelled of prawn crackers and traffic fumes, and she hated that she was suddenly , acutely aware of it. She tucked a strand of straight black hair behind her ear and lifted her chin.
"Give it to me," she said, holding out a hand.
Lucien didn't hand over the parchment. Instead, he took three slow steps into the room, navigating the labyrinth of paper with a grace that had nothing to do with his cane. He didn't actually need the thing to walk; Rory knew that better than most. He stopped two feet away from her—close enough that she had to tilt her head back to meet his gaze, close enough that the ambient heat of his body cut through the drafty chill of the flat.
"You are working nights for Yu-Fei again," he said softly . It wasn't a question. His amber eye traced the dark circles under her bright blue ones, lingering on the corner of her mouth. "You look exhausted."
"I'm fine. The paper, Lucien."
"You are reckless." A muscle feathered in his jaw. "You were supposed to stay above Silas’s place after dark. That was the arrangement."
"We don't have an arrangement," Rory snapped, the cool-headed composure she prided herself on cracking straight down the middle. "You made sure of that, remember? A clean break. 'Go back to your ordinary life, Rory. Deliver your takeaway, read your law books, forget what the dark looks like.' Ringing any bells, or do you want me to translate it into French?"
Lucien’s grip tightened on the ivory handle of his cane until the leather of his gloves creaked. "I was trying to keep you breathing."
"You were trying to manage me!" She shoved off the table, closing the remaining distance between them. She was five-foot-six, five inches shorter than him, and wholly human, yet Lucien didn't yield an inch, nor did he look down on her. He never looked down on her, which was half the reason she’d fallen so stupidly hard in the first place. "I left Cardiff because I was sick of a man telling me where I could go and who I was allowed to be. I didn't survive Evan just to let a half-demon in a bespoke suit put me in a glass box for my own good."
The mention of Evan made the black eye seem to swallow the light in the room. The temperature dropped five degrees in a heartbeat. "Do not compare me to that worm," Lucien whispered, the cultivated smoothness vanishing into something guttural and ancient . "I would tear my own throat out before I ever laid a hand on you in anger."
"No, you just disappear," she shot back, though her voice wobbled treacherously on the last word . She hated that it hurt. She hated that for forty-two days, every time the bell above Silas’s bar rang, her heart had leaped into her throat hoping it was him. "You decide what’s best for both of us, and you vanish. You didn't even let me say—"
"Say what?" Lucien stepped in, crowding her back against the edge of the table. Scrolls went cascading to the floor with a dry rustle, neither of them looking down. He set the cane against the table's edge, letting it lean there, and stripped off his right glove with his teeth. He tossed the leather aside and raised his bare hand, hovering a breath away from her cheek, waiting. Giving her the choice.
Rory looked at his fingers, then up into his mismatched eyes. She didn't pull back.
When his palm finally touched her skin, the warmth of him was a shock—a demon’s blood ran hot, a constant fever just beneath the surface. His thumb brushed over her cheekbone, his touch impossibly gentle for a man who brokered secrets and violence for a living.
"If I had stayed that night in Rotherhithe," Lucien murmured, his forehead dropping to rest against hers, his breath warm against her lips, "I would not have left at all. And the people who want leverage on me—the things from my father's realm that crawl through Soho looking for a weakness—they would have looked at you, *ma lune *, and they would have known within five seconds that I would burn London to the ground if you so much as bled."
Rory’s breath hitched. Her hands came up, almost of their own accord, her fingers tangling in the fine wool of his lapels. Her left wrist brushed against his chest, the small crescent scar pressing right over the heavy, rapid thud of his heart. "So they found out anyway," she whispered. "The parchment."
"An old broker from the docks," Lucien said, his eyes fluttering shut as she leaned into his palm . "He thought the alias Malphora belonged to a rival fixer. He was trying to sell your description to a blood-mage from Bristol. I bought the contract."
Rory’s mind, always quick to connect the dots, went cold. "You bought it. With what, Luc? Information brokers don't take cash for that kind of thing."
He didn't answer. Instead, his other hand came up, still gloved in soft black leather, and cupped the back of her neck, his fingers sliding into her dark hair.
"Lucien," she pressed, pulling back an inch to search his face. "What did it cost you?"
"Nothing I was not willing to pay," he said simply.
And before she could demand the logic of it, before she could pick apart the legalities of whatever demonic bargain he had struck in a Soho basement to keep her name out of the wrong mouths, he tilted her chin up and kissed her.
It wasn't the careful, hesitant thing they had danced around two months ago. It was the culmination of six weeks of starved silence . Lucien kissed her like a man drowning, his mouth hot and demanding against hers, tasting of dark roast coffee and rain. A low sound vibrated in his chest, a half-demon's purr of pure, possessive relief as Rory’s hands slid from his lapels up to his shoulders, knocking his impeccably slicked-back hair out of place.
She opened for him with a gasp, pulling him closer by the collar of his coat. He boosted her effortlessly, setting her on the edge of the cluttered table right on top of Eva’s sixteenth-century maps, stepping between her knees so there was no space left between them at all. His bare hand slid down from her jaw to her waist, his thumb rucking up the hem of her work shirt to press against the bare, warm skin above her jeans.
Rory arched into the touch, her head spinning. All her carefully constructed defenses, all the pragmatic rules she had written for herself since moving to London, went up in smoke. When they finally broke apart for air, Lucien didn't go far. He buried his face in the curve of her neck, right where her pulse was hammering , his breathing ragged.
"Tell me to leave," he muttered against her skin, his voice muffled and raw. "Tell me to walk out the door, Aurora, and I will stand on the street in the rain until the sun comes up to make sure nothing touches you. Just do not ask me to stay away anymore. I am not strong enough for it."
Rory stared up at the cracked plaster of Eva’s ceiling, her chest heaving, the heat of his body seeping through her thin shirt. Her fingers stroked through the cool silk of his platinum hair, feeling the tension coiled in the muscles of his neck. It was a terrible idea. He was half-Avaros demon, she was a barrister's daughter who delivered sweet-and-sour pork in a battered Nissan Micra, and the underworld was apparently bidding on her aliases.
It was a logistical nightmare.
"The couch is buried under thirty pounds of Sumerian translations," Rory said, her voice husky as she tugged his head back so she could look into those strange, devastating eyes. "And Ptolemy will probably try to scratch your face off if we wake him up."
A slow, wicked smile—the one that usually meant someone in London was about to lose a great deal of money—spread across Lucien’s mouth. The amber eye practically glowed in the dim light of the flat.
"I speak four languages, *chérie *," Lucien murmured, his bare hand sliding up her ribs as he leaned in to capture her mouth again. "I am sure the cat and I can come to an understanding."