AI The door opened on Lucien Moreau standing in the rain on the landing, one hand already raised to knock and an ivory-handled cane planted beside his polished shoe.
For a second Rory did not move. The warm, spiced air from Eva's flat spilled past her into the cold stairwell, and the rain hammering the window at the end of the hall sounded suddenly very loud. Lucien was soaked through at the shoulders of his tailored charcoal suit, his slicked-back platinum hair darkened and loosened at the forehead, and yet he still looked, infuriatingly, as if he had meant to arrive exactly like this. One eye amber, one black, both fixed on her with an expression she had learned not to trust.
"Bonsoir, Aurora," he said.
She stepped back before she could think better of it and put her shoulder against the door, narrowing the gap. "Don't call me that. And don't stand there."
"I wasn't given much choice in timing," he said. "Your friend Eva left instructions."
"Eva's not here."
"No." His gaze flicked past her, into the flat, and then back. "That's why I'm here."
Ptolemy, Eva's tabby, chose that moment to wind around her ankles and yowl for attention, tail high, entirely unconcerned that the man in the doorway was, as far as Rory was concerned , a problem that had walked back in uninvited. She bent without thinking to scratch behind his ears, and when she straightened Lucien was still watching her. He was taller than her by five inches and he had never learned how to make himself look small. The cane, which she knew hid a thin blade inside its shaft, tapped once against the wet concrete. "May I come in?"
"No."
The word came out cool and flat, the way her father's voice had in court when he wanted a witness to know he had already decided the outcome. Rory had fled Cardiff partly to stop sounding like that. She had fled Evan partly to stop feeling like that, as if every conversation were an argument she was about to lose. She was twenty-five and working delivery shifts for Yu-Fei Cheung's Golden Empress and living in a borrowed flat above a curry house, and Lucien Moreau still managed to make her feel fourteen and outmatched in her own skin.
"You can say it out loud if it helps," he said.
"Say what?"
"You're angry."
"I'm a lot of things. Anti-social is first on the list."
A hint of amusement touched his mouth, but it did not reach his eyes. "I would leave," he said, "if Eva had not asked me not to."
Rory's hand tightened on the edge of the door. "Eva wouldn't ask you for anything."
"She asked me to keep you alive until she gets back. She phrased it more politely than that."
From below, the curry house sent up a plume of cardamom and fried onion through the floorboards. Someone shouted an order, a pan clanged, music thumped through the ceiling of the restaurant and into the soles of her bare feet. The flat behind her was cramped and impossibly cluttered, every surface given over to Eva's work: towers of books on the one-bedroom's only table, scrolls tied with faded ribbon lying across the arm of the sofa like sleeping animals, research notes pinned and repinned until the walls looked like a map of someone's obsessions . Ptolemy had claimed the warmest pile of paper as his bed. Rory had been sleeping on the sofa for four nights, guarding it all, because Eva had gone quiet two days ago and had not come back.
"Where is she?" Rory asked.
"I don't know."
"Brilliant. You came all this way to tell me you don't know where she is."
"I came to tell you that someone else is looking for what she found." Lucien shifted his weight, and for the first time she noticed he was not entirely steady. Rain dripped from the hem of his coat onto the landing. "And that if you are still here when they check, you will be easier to find than she is."
That landed, as he must have known it would. Rory had locked the three deadbolts every night since she had taken over the flat, not because she was paranoid in general, but because she had learned in London that locks were a language everyone understood. She liked languages she could understand. Lucien spoke four fluently and used all of them to be unclear when it suited him.
"Who is looking?" she said.
"People who do not like translations of Avaros scrolls being finished."
The word sat between them. Avaros. His father's realm. The thing he had not told her until she had already pulled the information out of a broker in a Southwark pub and thrown it back at him like a glass. Eight weeks ago, she reminded herself. Eight weeks since she had told him, very clearly and without the tremor she had expected, not to come to her flat above Silas's bar again and not to buy her silence with help. He had inclined his head, the Frenchman who never slouched and never apologised first, and said, "I understand, Mademoiselle Carter." He had left her with the feeling that she had won an argument and lost something she had not yet named.
Now he was wet in her doorway, saying Eva's name like a key.
"You're lying," she said, because it was the fastest way to find out what was true.
"No."
"You're using her."
"Yes," he admitted, and the honesty of it almost undid her, which was probably his intention and probably not. "I'm using the fact that you care about her to get you to listen for one minute. The rest is true anyway."
She studied him the way she had studied case files at Cardiff University when she had still been pretending Pre-Law was a future she wanted. Not his face. His hands. His cane. The way his amber eye kept flicking, just once, toward the stairwell behind her. When she followed the look she saw it: a reflection in the wet window at the end of the landing, a shape that had not moved in the time since the door opened. A man in a dark jacket, too still, watching the flat.
Rory's thoughts, quick and out of the box in a way that had once made Lucien laugh with genuine surprise, arrived all at once. If they had followed him, they would follow him inside. If she let him stand out here arguing, they would get a cleaner look at both of them. If she closed the door in his face, the watching man would know she was inside Eva's flat and alone.
She stepped aside.
"In," she said. "Fast."
Lucien did not hesitate. He crossed the threshold and she shut the door behind him, turning the three deadbolts in rapid succession. Click. Click. Click. The sound was disproportionately loud in the narrow hall. Ptolemy, affronted by the sudden lack of a draught and the presence of a stranger, sat down hard on Lucien's foot and fixed him with a stare.
"He likes you," Rory said.
"He is calculating whether I am edible."
"He's not. He's a snob."
Lucien looked down at the tabby, and something in his face softened in a way she had seen only twice before, both times when he thought she was not looking . "Eva feeds him too well for snobbery."
The flat was too small for two people who did not want to be close. The hall was barely wide enough for the door to open, and Rory had to press herself against the bookshelf that Eva had wedged beside the coat hooks to let Lucien pass. Scrolls leaned against her shoulder. A notebook slid and she caught it against her chest, her left sleeve riding up. The small crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist, from falling off a garden wall in Cardiff when she was eight and trying to impress Eva, showed pale against her skin.
Lucien noticed. He always noticed things like that, and then pretended he had not, which was somehow worse.
"Your hand," he said quietly .
She pulled the sleeve down. "My hand is fine."
"Rory."
"Don't do that thing where you say my name like it's a negotiation."
"I am not negotiating." He set his cane carefully against the wall, the ivory handle catching the light. "I am asking if you are hurt."
"I'm not hurt. I'm crowded." She moved past him into the main room, which was the same room as the bedroom in Eva's flat if you considered the bed shoved against the far wall, and the kitchen a recess by the window that was mostly taken up by drying herbs and a chipped kettle. Stacks of notes covered the bed. She had cleared a space on the sofa and not slept in the bed because it felt too much like pretending Eva was coming back tonight. "Talk. You have five minutes before I remember why I hate you."
Lucien stood near the door, as if he understood that if he came further in she might have to ask him to stay. Rain ran off him in dark spots on the rug. "Eva was translating a funerary rite," he said. "From Avaros. She believed it contained a list of names. Hosts. People in London who carry a debt to my father's court and can be called in."
Rory went still. "And?"
"And Evan's name was on the preliminary list she sent me."
The room seemed to tilt. Evan. The name was a physical thing in her body. It lived in the back of her neck and the hollow of her stomach . She had left him in Cardiff, packed a bag while he was at work, driven to London at Eva's insistence because Eva had known what Rory had not admitted for a year. She had not seen him since. She had checked over her shoulder on every delivery route for Yu-Fei Cheung, learned the back alleys of Brick Lane, learned which buses to take home to the flat above Silas's bar so no one could follow her simply. And Eva, her childhood friend, had been sending Lucien lists?
"You're lying again," she said, but her voice had lost its courtroom flatness . "You would say anything to get—"
"I would not use him."
Lucien said it in French first, then English, as if the first version was the true one and the second was for her benefit. "Je ne mentirais pas sur lui. I have no interest in hurting you there, Aurora. God knows I have done enough damage elsewhere."
That was the problem. He was good at damage. He was a fixer. He fixed things by moving information from one person to another and calling the blood loss acceptable. When they had met, a delivery for Golden Empress had gone wrong because the takeaway bag she was carrying had not contained food but a sealed vial a client had paid Yu-Fei to move without questions. Lucien had stepped in, smoothed it over with the client, saved her job, and in return had asked her to tell him what Eva was researching . She had, because she had liked the way he listened, because he had looked at her with both his strange eyes and seen a person and not a problem. Then she had learned he knew about Eva's scrolls before she did, that he had known about her for months through his network, that he had let her walk into a working relationship with him as if it were chance. She had told him she did not do transactions disguised as attraction.
He had not argued. That was what had hurt most. He had simply accepted the terms and vanished.
"Why would Eva send you anything?" she asked now.
"Because she is cleverer than both of us. Because she knew you would not listen to me and she would listen to anyone who could get to you in time." He took a folded paper from the inside pocket of his suit and held it out, but did not step closer to give it to her. "She left this at a drop in Shoreditch. In case she was followed. She thought I would find it after she disappeared."
Rory crossed the room and took it. Her fingers brushed his. His hand was cold from the rain. The paper was Eva's handwriting, hurried, on the back of a takeaway menu. Rory, it said. If you are reading this, he is not the enemy on this one. Find the rite. Lock the door. Do not work alone. Love you. Ptolemy will tell you if he is lying. He has not been fed , so he will lie.
Despite everything, a laugh broke out of her, sharp and startled. Lucien watched her read it, and the look on his face was so nakedly relieved that she had to look away at the towers of books before she did something embarrassing like forgive him.
"She's an idiot," Rory said.
"She cares about you."
"She knows I can't translate dead demonic funerary rites."
"Neither can I, fully. But I can read enough to keep you from making a fatal mistake in translation." He paused, and the old precision returned to him. "I can also answer questions you will have about Avaros that Eva would not survive asking in the wrong room."
Rory set the note down on top of a scroll. "So you want to stay here and research with me."
"I want you not to be alone when they come to check whether she finished it. The man outside is not the only one. There will be more tonight. The flat has three deadbolts and a cat. It does not have a second exit."
"I have a delivery bag and a bicycle," she said. "I have options."
"You have a bicycle with a flat tyre that Eva keeps meaning to fix."
She stared at him. "You've been watching the flat."
"I have been watching Eva's flat from a café across the road for two days. I have seen you take out Golden Empress bags that are empty because you are not on shift. You have been guarding her books. You have not slept. That is why I came now, in the rain, without waiting for a better moment. Time is not—"
"Don't. Don't be concerned about me. You don't get to do that after—"
"I know," he said, quickly . "I know what I do not get to do. I am asking for what I may do. Stay. Help you read this. Help you find Eva. Leave in the morning if you still want me gone."
It was, she realised, the first time he had ever asked her for anything without framing it as a deal. The rain intensified against the window. From below came the smell of something being deep-fried and the cheerful ding of the curry house till. Ptolemy jumped up onto the sofa, circled twice, and sat directly on the notes she had been sorting, as if the argument had gone on long enough.
Rory looked at the three deadbolts she had just locked, at the impossible clutter of Eva's life, at Lucien standing too straight in his wet suit with his demon father's world knocking politely at the door.
"You can stay until morning," she said. "You sleep on the floor. You do not touch the scrolls without telling me what you see when you look at them. And when we find Eva, you tell her she owes me a new kettle, because hers has been whistling for a week."
Lucien's shoulders lowered by a fraction. It was the closest she had seen him to sitting down. "The floor is acceptable."
"The floor is covered in books," she said.
"Then I will sleep on the books."
She moved to the window and pulled the curtain half across it, careful not to give the street a view in. In the glass, she could see their reflections warped and overlapping: her black hair loose around her shoulders, his platinum hair coming unpinned, the two of them crowded together in a room that had no business holding this much history.
Behind her, she heard the soft tap of his cane being laid down, the rustle of his suit jacket as he finally took it off and draped it over a chair, revealing a shirt that was dry underneath. He was human enough to be cold. He was demon enough to be dangerous. She had known both of those things when she let him in, and she had let him in anyway.
"Rory," he said, when she turned back. He was holding out his hand, not touching her, palm open. "I am sorry I made you a transaction. I would like—"
"Stop," she said, but not unkindly. She could not hear an apology she was not ready to accept and still stand in the same room as him. "Not yet. We have a rite to translate, apparently. Show me where the names start."
He stepped forward, close enough that she could smell rain and the faint, expensive soap he used, something clean and a little bitter. His amber eye and his black eye were both on the scroll she had uncovered on the table, but his hand remained where it was, offered and not taken.
She looked at it for a long moment. Then she set her own hand, scar and all, lightly against his wrist, not his palm. A point of contact. Not a promise. A place to start.
"Here," she said. "Eva always starts at the margin."