AI The third deadbolt gave with a reluctant scrape, and the door opened on Lucien Moreau.
He stood in the narrow landing above the curry house on Brick Lane with rain sheeting off the awning and dripping from the hem of his charcoal suit. The tailored shoulders were dark with it. His platinum hair, usually slicked back with such precision it looked carved, lay plastered flat to his skull. He held his ivory-handled cane across his body, thumb resting on the polished curve as if he had been leaning on it all the way up the stairs. Behind the wet strands, his eyes caught the yellow light from the flat — one amber, bright and human, the other black and deep enough to swallow the light whole. He looked up at her, and for a moment neither of them spoke.
Rory’s hand stayed on the edge of the door. She had spent the last hour in Eva’s flat with the radiator ticking and Ptolemy asleep on a pile of research notes, telling herself the knock she’d heard earlier had been the building settling. She had expected Eva, home late with tea from the all-night shop, and had already rehearsed the complaint about the cat shedding on the scrolls. She had not rehearsed this.
“You,” she said.
It came out flat, from a place that was not quite anger and not quite relief . Her bright blue eyes narrowed against the landing light. She was still in the thermal top she wore under her Golden Empress delivery jacket, her straight black hair damp at the edges from her own run through the rain, bare feet cold on Eva’s rug. The small crescent scar on her left wrist showed white against her skin where her sleeve had rucked up.
Lucien nodded once, a tight, apologetic movement she would have recognized in any language he chose to use. He spoke four fluently, and he had used all of them on her in the months they had known each other — English when he was lying cleanly, French when he was tired, Italian when he was furious , Arabic once, at length, on a night she had not understood a word and had not needed to.
“I know,” he said. “I should have called. Eva would have told me to—”
“Eva would have shut the door in your face,” Rory said. “So would I, if I had any sense left.”
She started to close it. He did not move to stop her, which was worse than if he had. His cane stayed where it was. Only his head dropped, and she saw, with a jolt she refused to name, that rain was not the only thing wet on him. There was a thin cut across the knuckles of his left hand, and the cuff of his white shirt was spattered dark. The cane tip left a smear on the wet landing boards.
“Lucien.” Her voice changed despite her . Cool-headed, intelligent, quick — that was what people said about her — and none of it helped when her heart was already doing something stupid and loud. “What happened?”
He glanced down the stairwell, toward the clang of pans from the curry house and the neon bleeding up through the floorboards. Someone shouted in Bengali downstairs. A bus hissed past on Brick Lane.
“Someone followed me from Aldgate,” he said. “A man who works for my father. The demon side of my family, as you put it last time. He is not here for me.”
The door, which she had been easing shut, stopped. She could feel him in the gap between them like heat off a stove in winter, close enough that she had to tilt her face up to look at him. Five foot eleven to her five foot six, and still, after three months, the height difference undid her more than anything else. It meant she could see too clearly where the rain clung to his eyelashes.
“Then why are you at Eva’s flat?” she asked.
“Because he is looking for her flat,” Lucien said. “He is looking for the scrolls she’s been translating. He has your delivery routes from Golden Empress. Yu-Fei’s drivers have been watched for a week. He thinks you brought something here.”
Rory’s grip tightened on the door. “Eva has nothing that belongs to Avaros.”
“She has a copy,” he said quietly . “A translation of a boundary rite. It was not meant to be copied. If my father’s people have it, they can open a door without paying the price. They think you are the courier.”
Ptolemy chose that moment to emerge from behind a stack of books, tail high, and weave, unhurried, around Lucien’s ankles before rubbing hard against the side of his shoe. The tabby ignored Rory completely . Lucien looked down at the cat with an expression that almost, almost, softened him.
“He likes you,” Rory said bitterly.
“He likes anyone who smells of rain and trouble,” Lucien said. “Rory, please. I can stand in the landing and tell you everything you need to hear, but the stairwell is open and he will see my light under your door. If you shut it, I will leave. I am asking you not to make me.”
That was too honest, and they both knew it. That was the problem with Lucien. He never begged. He arranged. He fixed. He traded. Three months ago she had asked him, as a last resort, to make Evan stop. Evan, who had learned that a raised voice and a threatened text could keep her checking over her shoulder in Cardiff until Eva had put her on a train to London. Evan, who had found her anyway. Lucien had made it stop in a single afternoon, cleaner than any injunction she could have filed after her pre-law degree had told her the truth about cost and delay. A week later she had learned what he had traded to do it — not money, not a favour she could repay, but another person’s name passed to a collector who did not forgive debts. She had confronted him outside Golden Empress while she was still in her delivery jacket, and he had not defended himself. He had simply listened, with that ruined, patient attention of his, and then said, in French she only half understood, something about protecting what he could while he could. She had told him never to come near her again, and walked away while he stood on a Soho pavement with his cane and his suit and let her.
Now he was bleeding on Eva’s landing.
“Come in,” she said, and hated how steady she sounded. “Before Ptolemy decides to adopt you and I have to explain furniture to Eva.”
He stepped inside and she locked the door behind him — first deadbolt, second, third — each click loud in the small space. The flat smelled of turmeric and cardamom from below, of old paper and Eva’s sandalwood incense, of tea gone cold on a table buried under books. Every surface was covered. Scrolls tied with faded red string leaned against the wall by the single bed. Notes, annotated in Eva’s furious handwriting, spilled from clipboards onto the floor. Ptolemy’s basket sat empty because the cat preferred paper.
Lucien folded himself into the doorway of the kitchenette to give her room, cane vertical now, both hands resting on the ivory handle. The domestic squeeze of the place made him look absurd and dangerous at once, a man built for clubs and back rooms where information changed hands over brandy, damp in a one-bedroom flat above a curry house.
“You traded someone,” she said, because if she did not say it now she would say something worse. “For me. Without asking. You decided the price.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Was he on that list in Avaros? The collector’s list?”
Lucien’s amber eye flickered . The black one did not. “He owed a life-debt. I gave the collector a way to collect that did not involve you. I told myself it was merciful. It was not my debt to spend.”
“At least you know the words.”
“I have had three months to learn them.”
“Why now?” Rory demanded. “Because you are lonely? Because Eva’s research has finally got you a bigger problem?”
He flinched, very slightly . “Because I heard your name in a place that should never have it. Because my father sent his huntsman, and the huntsman does not take no for an answer, and I am tired of finding out what you need from other people’s danger. Because I —” He stopped, and the French came out before he could catch it, low and rough. “Parce que je ne pouvais pas rester loin.”
She understood enough. She had always understood enough. Because he could not stay away.
The cat jumped onto the table, landed squarely on a scroll, and sat on it. Lucien’s mouth twitched. Rory did not. “You can stay on the couch,” she said. “One night. You tell me exactly what this man looks like, what he wants, and how we get him away from Eva’s door. Then you leave, and this stays exactly what it is.”
“What is it?” he asked.
“Complicated,” she said, and the word sounded inadequate and true .
He nodded. “The couch is generous. Eva has taste.”
She fetched the first-aid tin from above Eva’s sink, moving her left hand without thinking until Lucien’s gaze dropped to it. He had seen the scar the first night they had talked properly, after she had delivered a late order to his office and he had poured her water and listened while she told him, too quickly , about Evan. He had lifted her wrist then, gently , with two fingers, and traced the crescent with his thumb and said nothing. She had never told anyone else about the accident.
He reached out now, not for her wrist, but to steady the tin as she set it down . His fingers brushed hers. His hand was cold. The cut on his knuckles was deeper than she had thought, the skin around it already darkening at the edges in a way that made her stomach twist. Half-demons healed, she knew, but not cleanly, not all at once.
“Sit,” she said, and pulled out Eva’s one wobbly chair, and then, after a second, pulled out the second. “Let me see.”
He sat. The chair groaned. He laid his hand palm-down on the table, among the notes, and she worked quickly and efficiently, the way she had been taught on delivery shifts when drivers came back with scraped shins and worse. She cleaned the cut, her mouth pressed into a line, her black hair falling forward to curtain them from the rest of the flat. Up close, he smelled of rain and something like ash and expensive cedar . The amber eye watched her hands. The black eye watched the door.
“You’re angry,” he said.
“I’m furious.”
“Good. Angry is better than afraid.”
“I am not afraid of you.” She taped gauze down with more force than necessary. “I am angry that you think anger is the same as trust.”
“It is not,” he said. “I know the difference. I have had to learn that too.”
She finished and capped the antiseptic. Her fingers lingered an instant longer on the tape, smoothing it, and his other hand rose — slowly , giving her every chance to move — and covered hers where it lay on the table. Not holding it down. Just covering it, warm and solid, thumb pressing lightly against the base of her scarred wrist. The touch was so careful it made her eyes sting.
“I did not trade you,” he said, quietly . “Whatever else you believe, I did not. I would have burned that whole debt before I let them put your name on it. That is why he is here. He knows I interfered. My father thinks I have chosen your side.”
Rory looked up. His face was inches from hers across the cluttered table, the rain still beading on his hairline, a fleck of antiseptic brighter than water on his cheek where her hand had passed. The flat was too small for secrets. The curry house pans clanged. Ptolemy purred, loud and oblivious, on the scroll.
“Your side is a dangerous place to stand, Lucien,” she said, and her voice was not steady now . “People who stand there tend to bleed in my friend’s hallway.”
“Then let me stand here one night,” he said. “Let me be useful without deciding your price for you. You tell me what to do. I will do it in English, French, Italian, Arabic — whichever you prefer.”
It startled a laugh out of her, short and wet. He smiled, real and tired and crooked, and the amber eye crinkled and the black eye turned mercifully soft. She felt suddenly , violently aware of how close his mouth was, how her pulse had been ridiculous since the third deadbolt, how the hurt they carried had never been the kind that made attraction go away. If anything, absence had polished it.
She pulled her hand back — not because she wanted to, but because if she did not, she would do something in Eva’s kitchen that Eva would never forgive either of them for, between the books and the scrolls and the cat who now watched them with scandalized yellow eyes.
“Tea,” she said abruptly. “You look like death. Eva’s tea is worse than death, but it is hot.”
She stood, too quickly , knocked her hip against the table. Lucien’s hand shot out to catch her, palm flat against her waist through the thin top, steadying her. The touch seared. He did not let go at once. She did not push him away at once. They stood like that while the radiator ticked, while the steam from the curry house rose through the floorboards and made the windows sweat, while Ptolemy marched across the table and butted his head hard against Lucien’s cane hand until Lucien, with grave courtesy, scratched behind the cat’s torn ear.
“One night,” Rory repeated, because naming the limit was the only way she could keep it. “Couch. No deals. No trades. No French you won’t translate.”
“Agreed,” he said, and his hand fell from her waist only when she stepped back, and even then the warmth of it stayed with her like a brand. “And if he comes to the door?”
“Then we use the three deadbolts,” she said, “and the cane with the blade in it, and we call Eva, and we call Yu-Fei, and you had better be as good at English at three in the morning as you are at midnight.”
“I am,” he said. “I promise I will try to be good at everything else, too.”
She turned to the kettle, her back to him, and locked the door again out of habit — click, click, click — as if the sound could hold something in as well as keep something out. In the window above the sink her reflection stared back at her: black hair, blue eyes, a woman who had fled Cardiff and built a life delivering for Golden Empress and borrowing a friend’s flat and telling herself she was done with complicated men. Behind her reflection, in the cramped, book-filled room, Lucien sat in Eva’s chair with his suit damp, his cane across his knees, his injured hand taped and resting, and did not look away from her.
She did not step away.