AI The bottom deadbolt slid back with a dry metallic clack. Rory twisted the middle cylinder, slipped the top brass chain free, and pulled the warped timber door inward. Warm air thick with roasted cumin and frying ghee surged up the stairwell from the curry house below, colliding with the February damp clinging to the man on the landing.
Lucien Moreau stood beneath the caged stairwell bulb. Rainwater darkened the shoulders of his tailored charcoal overcoat and beaded along the slicked-back sweep of his platinum hair. One amber eye and one pitch-black eye locked onto hers.
Rory threw her hip against the oak panel to slam it shut.
The ferrule of his ivory-handled cane wedged into the gap an inch above the threshold. Wood struck cured ash with a dull thud.
"Get the cane out of the jamb, Luc."
"Two Avaros blood-hounds turned onto Commercial Street ninety seconds ago."
"Whitechapel station is four minutes south. Run faster."
Lucien shifted his weight onto the ivory grip. A crease carved between his brows, and when his coat fell open, the white Sea Island cotton beneath his waistcoat showed a dark, plum-colored stain spreading across his right flank.
"Their handler used salt-forged shot. If I step back onto Brick Lane, the scent pulls them up your stairs and straight through Eva's wards."
Ptolemy trotted out from behind Rory's bare ankles, tail hooked high, and rubbed his striped tabby cheek against the wet cuff of Lucien's trousers. Traitorous beast. Rory stared at the widening patch of crimson on Lucien's shirt, then past his shoulder toward the grimy landing window. Sirens wailed up near Shoreditch. Downstairs, kitchen porters shouted orders over the clatter of iron pans.
She stepped back from the sisal mat.
"Inside. Drip on the Anatolian runner and Eva will hex your kidneys."
Lucien crossed the threshold, lifting his cane clear of the cat's paws. His sleeve brushed Rory's forearm as he passed, carrying the chill of wet wool, cedarwood, and the scorched-copper tang of half-demon blood. Rory pushed the door shut, drove all three deadbolts into the frame, and pressed her palm flat against the etched copper sigil nailed above the keyhole until the ward hummed against her calluses.
When she turned around, Lucien filled the narrow living room. Eva's flat left zero margin for broad shoulders in bespoke suiting. Leather-bound grimoires crowded the radiator; unrolled vellum scrolls anchored by chipped mugs buried the dining table, the windowsill, and half the floorboards. Red neon from the curry house sign outside bled through rain-streaked glass, striping Lucien's pale cheekbones in crimson.
He hooked his cane over the back of a spindle chair and reached for the horn buttons of his overcoat with his left hand. His right hung stiff at his side.
"Where is Eva?"
"Cardiff. Visiting her aunt until Thursday."
Lucien's fingers stalled on the second button. His mismatched gaze cut across the cramped room to the yellow Golden Empress delivery bag slumped beside the kitchenette, then rose to Rory's straight, shoulder-length black hair, damp at the ends from her post-shift shower.
"You're staying here."
"Ptolemy starves himself unless someone holds the saucer while he eats. Save the surprise. You broker half the secrets south of the Thames."
"My network tracks syndicate movements, chérie, not cat-sitting schedules."
"Right. Forgot I dropped off your priority list once you cleared out my flat."
She stepped over a crate of Babylonian clay tablets into the galley kitchen and yanked open the cupboard beneath the sink. Glass vials chimed together inside Eva's dented tin tackle box. Rory hauled it onto the scarred laminate counter, popped the rusted latch, and pulled out clear spirit, gauze squares, surgical forceps, and curved silver needles.
Wool rustled in the front room as Lucien shrugged out of the wet overcoat. Air hissed between his teeth when the silk lining snagged on his side.
Rory carried the open tin back in and nudged a stack of Latin lexicons off the low pine coffee table with her shin. Heavy bindings hit the rug with a flat slap. Ptolemy bolted onto the top of the refrigerator, yellow eyes wide.
"Sit before you bleed on the velvet ."
Lucien lowered himself onto the sagging two-seater, stretching one long leg into the tight gap between sofa and table. With his left hand, he unfastened his charcoal waistcoat, tugged the soaked linen shirt free of his trousers, and parted the torn fabric.
Rory dropped to her knees on the rug between the coffee table and his knees. Sixteen inches separated them. Heat radiated off his skin, dry and feverish, overriding the East London damp. Three jagged furrows tore across the lean muscle over his lower ribs, black ash crusting the raw edges where demon-forged salt ate at mortal tissue. Thin grey smoke curled toward the ceiling from the deepest gouge.
"Who pulled the trigger?"
"One of my father's bailiffs. They took exception to a shipping manifest that vanished from Tilbury Docks."
Rory twisted the cap off the spirit bottle with her thumb.
"Stealing paperwork makes people violent. Who knew."
"Bailiffs carry containment chains. Salt-shot is an executioner's load."
She drenched a square of folded gauze until alcohol splashed into the tin lid, then met his gaze head-on. From this close, gold flecks ringed his amber iris, sharp beside the bottomless black of its twin.
"Hold onto something."
"Do your worst, Carter. You owe me one."
She pressed the soaked pad flat against the top furrow.
Lucien's spine locked. His left hand clamped onto the edge of the pine table until the wood creaked under his palm. A guttural French curse tore from his throat, vibrating through the cramped space between them. Black grit sizzled on contact with the spirit, dissolving into dark rivulets that tracked down the taut skin above his hipbone.
Rory kept her grip steady. She swapped the blackened pad for clean gauze, angled the silver forceps into the cut, and extracted a jagged grain of dark salt from torn muscle. It dropped into the tin lid with a sharp ping.
"Seven weeks, Luc."
"Six weeks and four days."
"You kept count."
"I keep immaculate books."
Rory locked the forceps around a second crystal , fixing her bright blue eyes on his ribs rather than the tight line of his mouth.
"Funny. From where I stood, the math looked simple enough. You knocked on my door above Silas' bar at midnight. You drank my Irish whiskey. You spent four hours in my sheets, waited until my breathing slowed, and walked out with the Vane dossier I spent a fortnight building."
"Vane ran an Avaros clearinghouse. Walk into Clerkenwell with that folder, and his buyers skin you behind St John's Gate before tossing what's left into the Fleet."
"That wasn't your decision!"
She plucked a deep shard free. Lucien's breath caught hard in his chest, ribs expanding against the heel of her resting hand. Smooth skin burned beneath her knuckles, stretched tight over muscle that jumped at the sting of silver.
"You're twenty-five, Rory. You ride a bicycle with a bent mudguard through Soho traffic delivering prawn dumplings, and you read your father's old tort law volumes when rain keeps you awake. Vane's enforcers don't serve writs."
"I survived Evan without a fixer playing bodyguard. I survived half a year in this city before you ever stepped into Silas' taproom."
She dropped the stained forceps into the tackle box and picked up a curved suture needle, drawing fine silver wire through its eye. Her fingers stayed level, though blood thrummed beneath her jaw.
"If you wanted the Vane file off the street, you had options. Buy me out. Threaten me. Rake my lock open on a Tuesday afternoon while I was hauling hot-and-sour soup up Shaftesbury Avenue."
"I had a key to your flat."
Rory went motionless, silver wire pinched between thumb and forefinger. Her gaze snapped up to his face.
Lucien leaned back against the faded cushions, shirt hanging open around bare shoulders, silver stubble catching the crimson neon spilling across the room.
"Took a wax impression the Tuesday prior. Cut the brass in Soho."
"What?"
"Silas put thirty-year-old Chubb locks on the upstairs doors, Rory. Worn pins. Any half-competent cutpurse in Whitechapel could walk through it in twelve seconds."
Anger drained the chill from her hands, replaced by a hot, dizzying rush that crowded her lungs.
"If you had brass for my door, why did you knock at midnight?"
Lucien leaned forward off the velvet cushions. His left hand left the pine table and closed around her left wrist, fingers spanning the pale, crescent-shaped scar below the heel of her palm. His thumb settled directly over her pulse , skin rough and furnace-hot.
"Because the dossier was sitting beside your kettle in plain sight, and I walked straight past it."
Air snagged behind Rory's teeth. She pulled back half an inch; his grip anchored her hand inches from his bare sternum.
"You lifted it before dawn."
"At five in the morning. After waking up with your hair across my collarbone and spotting two of Vane's lookouts parked across from Silas' cellar doors."
His thumb brushed once across the raised white curve of her childhood scar—the exact spot his mouth had pressed against in the dark forty-six nights ago.
"Walk out empty-handed, and they go upstairs to see what kept me. Walk out carrying Vane's ledger under my arm, and the hounds follow my Bentley all the way to Dover."
"You left the door on the latch and vanished to Marseille. Zero word. Not a burner text, not a message through Silas, nothing. I sat on that linoleum floor staring at an empty counter, convinced every touch was sleight of hand to keep my eyes off the kitchen."
"Letting you hate me kept Vane's knives away from your throat."
"Letting me hate you made me want to put one through yours."
Lucien closed the remaining gap between sofa and floor until the scent of rain, raw spirit, and warm skin drowned out the cardamom rising through the floorboards. A fresh bead of dark crimson welled along his lower rib and trailed toward his belt, ignored by both of them.
"You have three inches of sharpened silver in your right hand, chérie. Stitch my side or open an artery, because kneeling between my knees in a washed-out cotton shirt is testing whatever restraint I brought up those stairs."
Rory stared at the faint scar bisecting his lower lip, her pulse knocking hard against the pad of his thumb. Rain rattled the sash window above the street. Down in the Brick Lane alley, an iron bin lid clanged shut.
"Let go of my wrist, Luc."
He turned her hand over instead, pressing her open palm flat against the bare skin above his heart so its fast, heavy cadence struck straight against her skin.
"Tell me you believed it was sleight of hand."
"Everything is leverage in your line of work."
"Look me in the eye and tell me I faked four hours in your bed."
Her fingers flexed involuntary fractions against the heat of his chest, nails grazing solid muscle while the unthreaded tail of silver wire slipped from her other hand onto the rug. Bright blue met amber and black in the red-striped gloom .
"You treated me like a mark."
"I stole to keep you breathing. Call me a thief, Rory, call me Avaros filth, throw Eva's library at my head—don't insult both of us by pretending you didn't feel my hands shaking when you took my coat off."
His right arm moved despite the torn muscle in his flank, long fingers sliding beneath the damp fall of her black hair to cup the nape of her neck, thumb tilting her chin up toward his mouth.