AI The third deadbolt had barely clicked before the door swung open and Lucien Moreau was standing in Eva's doorway as if he had every right to be there.
Rory stared at him. The rain had slicked his platinum hair flat to his skull and darkened the shoulders of his charcoal suit, and the ivory handle of his cane was wet in his hand. He was taller than she remembered, or perhaps the cramped landing made him seem that way , and his mismatched eyes, one amber and one black, found hers at once. Behind her, Ptolemy the tabby cat abandoned his post on top of a pile of research notes and shot forward with an offended yowl, winding between Lucien's ankles and then Rory's, as if he could not decide which of them was the greater problem.
"You," Rory said, and her voice came out thinner than she intended. "You have a lot of nerve."
Lucien did not smile. He rarely did at the best of times, and this was not one of them. "Bonjour, Rory."
"Don't you dare bonjour me." She planted herself in the doorway, one hand on the frame, the other tightening over the edge of the door as though she could still close it in his face. "Eva is not here. If you came for her scrolls, you can come back when she is."
"I came for you." He glanced past her, down the narrow stairs that smelled of cardamom and hot oil from the curry house below. His gaze was too quick, too professional. "May I come in?"
"No."
The word landed between them. Ptolemy butted his head against Lucien's shoe, then sneezed at the wet leather, and Rory felt the absurd urge to laugh because her hands were shaking and she refused to let him see it. She tucked a strand of her straight black hair behind her ear with her left hand and felt the familiar crescent scar on her wrist catch against her sleeve. She had grown up with that small, stupid mark from falling off her bike in Cardiff. It had never made her feel anything. Now, with Lucien there, she was suddenly conscious of her own skin.
"Rory," he said, quieter . "There are people on Brick Lane tonight who are not here for curry."
That stopped her. Not because she believed him, but because his tone had changed. The polished fixer voice was gone, and what replaced it was something rawer and more urgent, the voice he had used on the night they first met when Evan's friends had followed her delivery bike through Shoreditch and he had stepped out of a doorway with nothing but that cane and a look that promised violence in four languages. She had been twenty-four and terrified and furious with herself for being terrified . He had walked her home. He had not touched her. That had been the worst part, somehow.
"Last time you decided what I needed to know," she said. "You disappeared. You left a note I couldn't read and you did not answer your phone for three weeks. Do not come here and give me orders now."
"I am not giving an order."
"You are standing in my friend's doorway in the rain telling me people are watching." She leaned closer, aware of the amber of one eye and the absolute black of the other, aware of how close his cane was to her foot, to Ptolemy's tail. "That is an order, Lucien."
He stepped inside anyway.
It was not a push or a shove. He simply moved, with the economical grace that had always made her uneasy, past the point where she could reasonably keep blocking him without laying hands on him, and then he turned and shut the door with a soft click. He did not lock it. He left that to her, which was either courtesy or calculation, and Rory had never been entirely certain which. She reached back and threw all three deadbolts herself, each one loud in the small flat, each one a small assertion. Clunk. Clunk. Clunk.
The flat was cramped even without him in it. Eva's one bedroom above the curry house was a warren of books stacked on the floor, scrolls tied with string leaning against the radiator, printouts weighted down with mugs and stones on every surface. The air was warm from the heating and smelled faintly of old paper and the frying onions rising through the floorboards. Rory had been housesitting for two days, supposedly sorting Eva's notes into some order that made sense to anyone but Eva, and in that time she had learned not to sit anywhere without moving a book first. Now she backed away from Lucien until a tower of histories knocked her calves, and she could do nothing more elegant than stand there with her arms folded.
"You look well," he said.
"I look like I was interrupted."
"Fair."
"You knew Eva would be out tonight."
"I knew she might be." He shifted his weight, and the cane tapped lightly against the floorboards. "She asked me to look at a translation last week. She did not tell me she was leaving. I found out this afternoon."
"And you thought driving across London to ambush me was the sensible option?"
"I thought if I waited until morning, there might not be a morning for either of us." His mouth tightened. It was the first crack she had seen in his composure, and it did something indecent to her chest. "The men from Avaros have been asking about the scrolls Eva borrowed. My father's people. They are not subtle when they want something to be known, and they are very patient when they want something to be taken."
Rory's mind, annoyingly, did the work even while her heart was still doing its furious arithmetic. Eva's research. The scrolls she had been translating, half in Welsh, half in something older and stranger. Lucien's demon father in Avaros. The way he had gone entirely still when she had asked him, months ago, whether he ever trusted her with the truth or only with the parts of it that were convenient. She had kissed him later that same night, after he had walked her home for the third time and she had decided she was tired of being careful, and he had kissed her back like a man saying goodbye. The next morning his flat had been empty and his number had gone to voicemail.
"Why?" she asked. "Why now? Why not when you left?"
He looked at the pile of notes between them as if he might find an answer there. "Because then I was trying to protect you by leaving."
"Try again."
"I was trying to protect you," he repeated, and something in his French accent thickened the words. "And I did it badly. I thought if I stayed, they would use you to reach me. They would have. They would still..." He stopped. He chose his next word with visible care. "Pardonne-moi, Rory. I was a coward dressed in a good suit."
She laughed, once, sharp. "A coward who speaks four languages. The multilingual variety."
"Five, if you count lies." He did not smile. "I did not lie about wanting—" He broke off. For a fixer who could negotiate with demons and barristers in the same evening, he was remarkably bad at this. "I did not lie about that. I left because I wanted it too much to be safe for you. That is not an excuse. I know it. I am not asking you to forgive me tonight."
"Good. Because I won't." She said it and meant it, mostly. Her throat hurt. "Eva is my friend. She got me out of Cardiff when Evan..." She could not finish the sentence without her jaw locking. Evan had not just been unkind. He had monitored her, isolated her, learned exactly which silences would make her apologise. She had fled to London because Eva had known her since they were children and had known, without being told , that Rory did not need rescuing so much as she needed a door she could lock and a reason to believe a man might let her keep the key. "If those men are watching this place, you will not bring that here. You will not use Eva's flat as a trap and me as bait."
"I would never—"
"You came here unannounced." Her blue eyes, Eva always said, were terrible at hiding what she thought, and now they were not hiding anything. "Forgive me if I do not grade your intentions on a curve."
He inclined his head. "You are right to be angry."
"I am not asking to be right. I am asking why you are really here."
"Because Eva left a message on my machine in Welsh." He glanced at her, and there was something almost like respect in it. "She said, quote, if anything happens, do not be an idiot about it. She trusts you. She trusts you to think faster than anyone in this city when you are frightened. She said you would know the back routes."
Footsteps sounded on the stairs outside. Rory heard them before Lucien did, a slow heavy tread passing the first floor landing and continuing up. Ptolemy's ears flattened. Lucien went utterly still, his hand tightening on the cane, and in that instant Rory understood that whatever he had come to say, the danger was not theoretical.
He did not speak. He moved. One hand, light and startlingly warm through her jumper, settled at the small of her back and guided her sideways into the narrow space between the door and the wall, behind the curtain of coats Eva kept there. Her shoulder brushed his chest. She could smell rain and something clean and expensive on his skin, and under that, the faint iron tang that had always clung to him after a night in the underworld. Her heart did not behave. She pressed her palm flat against the wall to keep from reacting to the heat of him, and felt him breathe, once, against her hair.
The footsteps stopped.
Rory closed her eyes. She could hear the curry house kitchen below, the clatter of pans, a man shouting for more naan. She could hear her own pulse in her ears. On the other side of the door, someone coughed. Two knocks, deliberate and spaced. Not a delivery. Not a neighbour. A pattern.
Lucien's thumb brushed, without apparent intention, the place where her left wrist rested against the wall. He paused there, over the crescent scar, as if his fingers had found it by accident and could not in conscience pretend they had not. When he spoke, his mouth was close to her ear and his voice was low enough that only she could hear it.
"Do not answer," he murmured. "Let them think Eva is out."
She swallowed. Her quick thinking, the thing Eva praised and her father had never understood, kicked in through the panic. She lifted her head an inch and, in her best bored London voice, called, "Just a minute, love, I'm just out of the bath," and then, louder, she banged something deliberately in the kitchen, a pan lid against the counter. Ptolemy, startled, yowled at exactly the right moment. Rory banged the pan again.
After a heartbeat that felt like a year, the footsteps resumed and moved away. The landing creaked. A door slammed somewhere below. Silence returned, thick and ringing.
Lucien had not moved his hand. It was still at her back, still warm, and Rory realised she had not moved away from it. She turned her head, slowly , until she was face to face with him in the coat-filled dark. His amber eye caught the thin light from under the door. The black one was unreadable . He was close enough that she could see the faint scar at his jaw, close enough that if she had wanted to, and God help her, part of her still did, she could have closed the distance between them and settled three months of hurt in a single reckless kiss.
Instead she stepped sideways, out of the coats and out of his reach, and felt the absence of his hand like a draught.
"You have the worst timing," she said, because if she said anything true her voice would break.
"I know."
"You come back, you warn me about Avaros, and then you hide me behind Eva's winter coats like a child."
"I would hide you behind anything," he said simply. "That has always been the problem."
She looked at him, properly looked at him, for the first time since the door opened. He was tired. There were shadows under his eyes that good tailoring could not fix. He was thirty-two and he had been running from his father's world since he was old enough to afford a train ticket out of Marseille, and perhaps, she thought, he had also been running from her. She did not forgive him for it. But she recognised it, because she had spent months running from herself in the opposite direction, telling herself she had wanted an adventure and not a man who had looked at her as if she were the only true thing in London.
"There is a service door behind the curry house," she said, and she was proud of how steady she sounded. "I know it from the delivery routes. The kitchen staff leave at eleven. Yu-Fei's drivers use the alley behind Brick Lane to cut through to Whitechapel when the main road is blocked. If we need to move the scrolls tonight, we do not take them down the front stairs. We put them in a Golden Empress bag, I put on my delivery jacket over Eva's coat, and we walk out like I am doing a late drop. No one looks twice at a delivery girl."
Lucien studied her. "You would do that?"
"I would do that for Eva." She lifted her chin. "And because if those men are watching the flat, they need to see something boring. They need to see me leave and nothing happen. You can stay here and watch the door. Or you can come with me and learn how to be useful without deciding everything for everyone."
He considered it, and she watched him consider it, and she understood that he was not weighing the plan. He was weighing how much it cost her to offer it. Cool-headed, intelligent, quick out-of-the-box thinking, Eva called her. Rory called it surviving. She could survive this too, she told herself. She could survive Lucien in Eva's tiny kitchen, Lucien learning to let her lead.
"When you left," she said quietly, before she lost her nerve, "did you ever intend to come back?"
He did not look away. "Every day. I told myself it was for your safety. Some days, I believed myself."
Her eyes stung. She blinked hard at the wall of books. "That is the most honest thing you have said to me."
"Then let me be honest now." He took a step closer, but he did not touch her this time, and she appreciated it more than she could say. "I am still in love with you. I have been, in the intervals between other people's disasters, for a year. I do not expect you to return it. I expect you to do your job and get Eva's work out of here alive, and I will do mine and keep you alive while you do it. If that is all we can manage tonight, it will have to be enough."
Rory's breath caught. She had rehearsed a hundred angry speeches on the long shifts delivering noodles through the rain, and none of them had prepared her for the plain, unadorned fact of him saying it in a room that smelled of paper and onions, with a cat glaring at them both from the top of a pile of scrolls.
"Stay until eleven," she said, because eleven was soon and soon was bearable and she needed it to be bearable. "We move the scrolls. You tell me everything about Avaros that I need to know to stay safe. Not the edited version. All of it."
"All of it," he agreed.
"And you do not leave without a word. Not again."
"Not again."
Ptolemy chose that moment to launch himself from the books, land directly on Lucien's polished shoe, and begin chewing pointedly on a shoelace. Lucien looked down at the cat, then at Rory, and something in his face eased, infinitesimally, into the ghost of a smile. Rory felt her own mouth betray her in return, and she pressed her lips together to hide it.
She turned to the kitchen, to the pan she had banged, and put the kettle on with hands that only shook a little. Behind her, she heard Lucien set his cane carefully against the wall, close enough that she knew where it was, close enough that she knew he would not reach for it without her seeing. The rain kept falling on Brick Lane. The flat was too small, too warm, too full of Eva's life and Lucien's impossible presence. And for the first time since the third deadbolt had clicked, Rory did not want to be anywhere else.