AI Rory opened the door and found Lucien Moreau bleeding on Eva’s doormat.
For one bright, treacherous second, all she felt was relief. Then she noticed the rain darkening his charcoal suit, the blood at his side, and the careful way he leaned on his ivory-handled cane.
Four months vanished. The anger came back to take their place.
His platinum hair had escaped its usual severe sweep and fallen across his forehead. One amber eye and one black watched her from a face gone too pale. He still managed a small, courteous inclination of his head, as though they had encountered one another at a tedious party.
“Aurora.”
“You can’t be here.”
“That has been a recurring theme of my evening.”
Below him, the stairwell smelled of rain and the curry house’s frying oil. Somewhere down Brick Lane, a siren Dopplered away. Rory’s fingers tightened around the edge of the door.
“Eva’s in York.”
“I know.”
“Of course you do.”
A board creaked on the landing below. Lucien glanced toward the sound. When he looked back, the polish had thinned.
“I lost the men following me near Whitechapel,” he said. “If I am mistaken about that, you should know before you decide whether to close the door.”
There were a dozen things she could have said. She had rehearsed several of them during sleepless nights, usually while washing rice or staring at the ceiling of her flat above Silas’s bar. Most began with How dare you and became less articulate from there.
Instead she caught him by the lapel and pulled him inside.
He stumbled once. She got an arm around his waist, shouldered the door shut, and turned all three deadbolts.
“Chair,” she said.
“It’s good to see you too.”
“Chair, Lucien.”
He went.
Eva’s sitting room offered no clear route anywhere. Rory shifted a tower of books from a kitchen chair, kicked a scroll gently beneath the table with her foot, and pointed. Lucien lowered himself onto the seat while she dragged the curtains closed. Ptolemy, Eva’s tabby, rose from a nest of research notes, stretched with luxurious indifference, and came to inspect the visitor.
He sniffed Lucien’s wet trouser leg. Then he began purring.
“Traitor,” Rory told him .
“At least someone is pleased to see me.”
“He once tried to eat a packet of silica gel. His judgment means nothing.”
She took Lucien’s cane when he offered it and laid it across the table, well away from him. She knew about the narrow blade concealed inside. He had shown her one winter evening, his gloved hand over hers on the ivory handle, standing close enough that she had forgotten the question she meant to ask.
Her own flat was uninhabitable for the week while workmen replastered its ceiling. Eva had lent her this one, along with three pages of instructions about wards, six about Ptolemy, and one underlined warning not to alphabetize anything. Rory had spent the evening at the table after her last delivery for Yu-Fei’s Golden Empress, drinking cold tea and trying to translate a footnote that appeared to be an argument with another footnote.
Now there was blood on Eva’s doormat and Lucien Moreau at her temporary kitchen table.
“How bad?” she asked.
“Not immediately fatal.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“It is the most encouraging one I have.”
She crouched beside him and found the source: a narrow wound beneath his left ribs. The fabric around it was wet and black. When she reached for his jacket, he caught her wrist—not hard, only enough to pause her.
His gaze dropped to the small crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist, then lifted to her face.
“There is a piece of the blade still inside,” he said. “Iron. It needs to come out before you bind it.”
She looked at his hand until he released her.
“First-aid kit?” he asked.
“Bathroom. Try not to die while I’m gone. Eva will make me pay for the chair.”
His laugh turned into a sharp breath.
Rory found Eva’s kit beneath a stack of annotated grimoires and brought it back with clean towels, a bowl of warm water, and the kitchen scissors. Lucien had shrugged out of his jacket and waistcoat. His shirt was open at the throat, cuffs still fastened, immaculate in every way except the blood.
She cut the fabric away from the wound.
“You always did enjoy ordering me about,” he said.
“I enjoyed the rare occasions when you listened.”
The forceps trembled once before she steadied them. Half-demon or not, his skin was cold, and pain had tightened the corners of his mouth. She cleaned the blood until she could see the dark sliver lodged beneath his ribs.
“This will hurt.”
“I had gathered.”
“Don’t be brave. It’s tedious.”
“Then I shall endeavor to be cowardly and charming.”
“Just be still.”
He was. His hand closed around the edge of the table while she worked, knuckles whitening, but he made no sound beyond one soft curse in French. The sliver came free with a tiny, obscene click against the forceps.
Rory dropped it into the bowl. For an instant, the water clouded red.
Lucien exhaled.
She pressed a clean towel to the wound. “Hold that.”
He covered the towel with his hand. Their fingers brushed. Neither of them moved quickly enough to pretend it hadn’t mattered.
“The last time I had my hands on you,” she said, “you were bleeding then too.”
“Yes.”
“And afterward, you kissed me.”
His mismatched eyes lifted to hers. “I remember.”
The memory opened with humiliating ease: a safe house in Bermondsey, antiseptic stinging her nose, Lucien’s mouth warm and urgent against hers. She had slid her hands into his hair. He had made a low sound she still heard at inconvenient moments. Then he had stepped away so abruptly she had thought someone was coming through the door.
No one had been.
“You told me I’d mistaken adrenaline for intimacy,” she said.
“A wretched sentence.”
“It was very tidy. You must have been pleased with it.”
“No.”
“And then you disappeared.”
He looked down at the blood-soaked towel beneath his hand. Rory busied herself with gauze and tape because looking at him had begun to feel dangerous again.
“My father incurred a debt,” he said at last. “According to the laws of Avaros, I inherited it without the inconvenience of being consulted. His creditors came to London to discuss repayment. They were thorough people. They researched my finances, my clients, my habits.”
“Your weaknesses.”
“Yes.”
She tore the tape harder than necessary.
“I had to leave London,” he continued. “Marseille first, then elsewhere. I believed that if you hated me, you would not ask questions or try to find me. You would be safe, and I would have time to settle it.”
Rory smoothed the bandage over his ribs. Her hands were steady now. That seemed important.
“So you decided what I could know,” she said. “What I could feel . What I would do.”
“Yes.”
The single word stopped her.
She had expected elegance. Lucien could make an evasion sound like a confidence and a lie sound like a favor. Instead he sat bare to the waist beneath Eva’s yellow kitchen light, his ruined shirt around his shoulders, offering her no shelter from the truth.
“Did it work?” she asked.
“The debt is settled. No one is watching your home or following your deliveries.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
His jaw tightened. “No. It did not work.”
Rory stepped back and began putting things into the kit that did not need putting away.
“Do you know what the worst part was?” she asked. “Not the leaving. Not even the silence . It was that sentence. You made me wonder whether I’d invented the whole thing because I wanted it so much.”
“Aurora—”
“I’ve had someone do that to me before. Make me doubt every sensible thing I knew about myself, then tell me it was for my own good.” She had told him enough about Evan for the comparison to land. She watched it land. “I won’t live through that again. Not even for you.”
Lucien’s face changed. Only slightly, but she had once prided herself on reading him.
“You shouldn’t,” he said. “I am sorry. Not for wanting to protect you. For deciding that cruelty was an acceptable way to do it. For making you question what was real because I lacked the courage to be honest.”
The anger did not leave her. It simply stopped knowing where to go.
She pushed a strand of black hair behind her ear. “Why come back now?”
“I returned to London this evening. I intended to telephone you in the morning.”
“After four months, you were going to telephone?”
“I considered standing outside Silas’s with flowers and looking ridiculous.”
Despite herself, she glanced at him. “You don’t look ridiculous.”
“I was prepared to make an effort.”
A laugh escaped her, small and unwilling. Lucien’s mouth softened, but he did not mistake it for forgiveness.
“There were four places I could have gone tonight,” he said. “All of them safer than involving you. I chose the one where you might be.”
“Because you were bleeding?”
“Because when I thought of being turned away from your door, it frightened me more than the men behind me.” He paused. “That was selfish. You are allowed to be angry about it.”
“I don’t need your permission.”
“No.”
“Stop agreeing with me.”
“I can argue badly, if it would help.”
This time she nearly smiled and hated him for noticing.
Ptolemy jumped onto the table and sat on a scroll. Rory moved the cat before he could bleed on it, though the cat was clean and the scroll was already stained with tea. Her hands needed something to do.
“What did you miss?” she asked.
Lucien went still.
“If you’re going to be honest,” she said, “you may as well be specific.”
He considered the question with more care than he had given his wound.
“I missed hearing you argue with people on the radio. I missed the way you find the one impossible route through a problem and then behave as though everyone else was being deliberately obtuse. I missed seeing your name on my telephone.” His voice lowered. “I missed being known by someone who did not wish to purchase the information.”
Rory looked at the bandage because his eyes had become too much.
“You could have stayed,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Or written.”
“Yes.”
“Or trusted me enough to let me choose.”
“Yes.” His hand rested open on the table between them. “I cannot offer you a version of the past in which I behaved well. I can only tell you that I want to come back into your life without managing any part of it. If you refuse, I will respect that. If you ask me to begin slowly , I will begin slowly . If you ask me to leave when you’ve finished making sure I don’t die on Eva’s chair, I will do that too.”
“And what do you want?”
“You.” He said it without decoration. “Not merely tonight. Not because I am injured and you are kinder than you pretend. I want to take you somewhere neither of us has been hired to attend. I want to call you and not calculate what the call is worth. I want to learn whether we are any good at being ordinary.”
The flat seemed very quiet. Even the curry house below had gone still.
Rory thought of all the sensible answers. She had built a life that did not require Lucien Moreau: deliveries, friends, research she barely understood but was beginning to love, a bed she slept in alone without feeling that something had been taken from her. Wanting him did not have to mean handing him the keys.
It could mean opening one door at a time.
She stepped between his knees.
His breath caught, but he did not touch her.
“May I?” he asked.
“That depends. Are you asking because you mean it, or because I’m holding forceps?”
“A certain amount of self-preservation is not unattractive.”
“Lucien.”
“Yes.” His gaze stayed on hers. “I am asking because I want to kiss you. And because the choice is yours.”
She set the forceps on the table.
Then she kissed him.
He was careful at first, so careful that the restraint hurt more than hunger would have. Rory curled her fingers into what remained of his shirt. His hand came to her waist, warm through her thin sweater, and the kiss deepened by degrees—familiarity returning, then changing into something neither of them could dismiss as adrenaline.
When she drew back, he followed half an inch and stopped himself.
“This doesn’t fix anything,” she said.
“No.”
“It doesn’t mean you can vanish and bleed on my doormat whenever you miss me.”
“A reasonable boundary.”
“And you’re sleeping on the sofa.”
He glanced toward the sofa, which was currently occupied by six books and a stuffed file labeled DO NOT FILE.
“Naturally.”
“Breakfast,” she said. “The whole story. No elegant omissions. Then I decide what happens next.”
“What if breakfast goes badly?”
“Then Yu-Fei always needs someone to wash dishes.”
His laugh was quieter this time, and real.
She helped him to the sofa, moved the books, and found a blanket beneath Ptolemy’s basket. The cat immediately claimed Lucien’s legs. Rory switched off the lamp and stood for a moment in the dim room, listening to rain whisper against the windows.
“Rory,” Lucien said.
It was the first time that night he had used the name her friends used.
“What?”
“Thank you for opening the door.”
“Next time, call.”
“Next time,” he said, “I will.”
She went to bed alone and left the three deadbolts turned. Sleep took its time. When she finally woke, gray morning had silvered the curtains, and for one sharp instant she was certain he would be gone.
Then she heard a cup set gently on the kitchen table.
Lucien was still there, shaved as well as a man could manage with Eva’s pink razor, wearing one of Rory’s Cardiff University sweatshirts over his bandaged side. It was too small and absurdly undignified. Ptolemy sat at his feet, demanding tribute. Two cups of coffee steamed beside a paper bag of pastries.
He saw her looking at the sweatshirt.
“You said ordinary,” he told her.
Rory folded her arms to hide her smile. “I said breakfast.”
He pulled out her chair.
She sat, wrapped both hands around her coffee, and asked him the hardest question she had.
Lucien answered it.