AI Ptolemy heard them on the stairs before the knock came, ears flattening, tail dropping into a low question mark, and so Rory had a full ten seconds to decide she wasn't going to answer. She set her mug down on a stack of Eva's scrolls — coasters were a superstition in this flat — and crossed the room through the tributaries of paper. Cumin and ghee came up through the floorboards from the curry house below, and under it the colder smell of the stairwell as she slid the top deadbolt, then the middle one, then opened the door the two inches the chain allowed.
A slice of him. The bulb behind buzzed and laid a yellow stripe down the platinum of his hair. Charcoal suit, no tie, collar open at the throat, the ivory handle of his cane pale as a knuckle in the gloom .
"Bonsoir, Rory."
She said nothing.
"I'd have rung ahead," Lucien said, "but you've a habit of not answering numbers you don't recognise."
"You're not supposed to know where this flat is."
"No," he agreed. "I'm not."
The chain pulled taut between them, a thin brass fact. He didn't look at it. He looked at her the way he did, with that terrible even patience, and the trouble with his eyes was that only one of them was human. The amber one she could read. The black one swallowed everything and gave nothing back, and it was the black one that made her want to shut the door and the amber one that made it impossible.
"Eva's not home," Rory said.
"I know. I waited until she'd gone."
"Where?"
"Neptune's, on Kingsland Road. She'll be there another two hours at least. She's arguing with a man about the taxonomy of river spirits." A pause. "She's winning."
Rory put her forehead against the doorframe, briefly, and hated herself for the half-second of fondness. "You're a piece of work."
"Oui."
"Say what you came to say through the gap."
"Through the gap," he repeated, and something in his voice shifted, the French flattening out of it. "Very well. I came to tell you that I was wrong."
She hadn't expected that, and it showed, and she hated that too. Behind her, Ptolemy abandoned all principle and threaded himself out through the gap, tail high, and began an elaborate figure-eight around Lucien's ankles. Lucien, to his credit, did not look down.
"That's it?" she said. "Four months and that's it?"
"That's the beginning of it. It's raining and I've been standing under your window for twenty minutes trying to find a version of the rest that doesn't sound like a man selling you something." He tilted his head . "May I come in? Or would you rather I did this in the stairwell for the neighbours."
She should have said the stairwell. She knew she should have said the stairwell, but the cold was coming through the gap and up the sleeves of her jumper, and the truth was that she had spent four months rehearsing a speech for exactly this door and the speech had gone out of her head entirely at the sight of his collar being open.
She closed the door, slid the chain, and opened it again.
He came in the way he did everything, economically, without apology, and the room shrank around him — Eva's flat was not built for a man who stood five-eleven in a made-to-measure suit, and certainly not for one carrying a cane that Rory happened to know concealed nine inches of very good steel. He set it against the arm of the sofa rather than the floor, which was the closest thing to a courtesy she'd get.
"Sit down, then," she said, and went to put the kettle on because her hands needed something to do.
"I'd rather stand."
"Suit yourself."
The pipes groaned. Rain muttered against the window. He stood in the middle of the room with his hands loose at his sides, and she could feel him taking the place in with the part of him she'd once found charming — the fixer's glance, the catalogue, the noting of the new books on the sill and the fact that her coat was on the back of the chair and not in the hall.
"You look well," he said.
"Don't."
"Very well, then. You look like you've not slept properly in a fortnight and you've been eating at the restaurant instead of cooking."
She turned around. "You don't get to do that. You don't get to stand in Eva's front room and read me like a ledger."
"No," he said quietly . "You're right."
And because he agreed with her, she had nowhere to put the anger she'd been carrying, and it turned over in her chest and became something worse.
"You sold me," she said.
"I did."
"Say it properly."
"I took money from a man to tell him where you slept. I told myself it was a courtesy to a client and that the information would go no further, and I was careful, and I was paid, and I was wrong." His jaw worked once . "I sold you, and I knew it while I was doing it, and I did it because I had a rule about clients I'd kept for eleven years, and I have since broken that rule in a way that cost me a great deal of money and one very old friendship, which I tell you not so you'll be grateful, but so you'll know the debt is paid on my side and you owe me nothing."
The kettle clicked off. Steam crawled up the cupboard. Rory's left wrist itched the way it always did when she was about to do something reckless — the small crescent scar there, old and white, suddenly the most noticeable thing about her.
"Who was he?"
"His name was Anselm Vane, and he's not anyone's problem anymore. That's what took me four months." He said it without heat . "I'd have come sooner, but I wanted to come with that."
"That's not — " Her voice caught, and she pushed it back down, hard. "That's not the part that kept me up."
Lucien's hands stilled.
"You had a hundred chances to tell me," she said. "You came to the restaurant in October. You sat at the back table and you ate Yu-Fei's terrible dumplings and you told me a story about a violin in Vienna and I laughed, Lucien, I actually laughed, and you knew that night that my address was in someone's pocket, and you let me walk home alone."
He didn't flinch. That was the thing about him. The black eye took it and gave nothing back, and the amber one — the amber one had gone strange and bright, and that, God help her, was worse.
"You're right," he said again. "That's the part that matters. I have an explanation and it isn't a good one, and I'm not going to insult you with it."
"Try."
He looked at her for a long moment. Then he set the cane properly aside, came around the sofa, and stopped a bare pace away. Close enough that she could smell him — cedar and cold iron and the rain in his hair. Close enough that his shadow fell over her and the flat got very quiet.
"I was afraid," he said, "that if I told you, you'd leave, and I'd have had to watch you do it."
Rory's breath went out of her slowly .
"That's not fair," she said.
"No."
"You don't get to be frightened. You're the one who — "
"I know what I am." His hand came up, hesitant in a way she'd never once seen from him, and stopped in the air between them, asking. "I have made a life out of knowing things and selling them, and I found one thing I couldn't put a price on, and I handled it the way a man handles something he's afraid to break, which is to say badly, and to say nothing, and to take the money."
"I don't want your confession."
"I know."
"I wanted you to choose me." Her voice was barely a voice. "That's all. You had forty-three words to say and any four of them would have done it, and you chose the ledger."
His fingertips touched the inside of her wrist, light as a moth, and found the crescent scar there by feel, the way he'd found it before.
"I chose the ledger," he said. "And then I spent four months setting fire to it." His thumb moved once across the scar. "Rory. I'm not here to be forgiven tonight. I'm here because you're owed the telling, and because I'd rather stand in a cramped room in the rain and hear you tell me to go than spend another winter not knowing the sound of your voice."
Ptolemy, traitor that he was, jumped up onto the sofa and settled, purring, against Lucien's hip.
Rory looked down at the hand on her wrist. Then she reached up, careful, deliberate, and closed her fingers in the open collar of his shirt.
"You're soaking wet," she said.
"I am."
"You'll ruin the sofa."
"Without question."
She pulled, and he came.