Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQHJ5D8E79H8S7YAY0HFCY

The rain had been a constant, miserable companion all evening, a fine, drizzling mist that soaked through Rory’s delivery jacket and left her feeling chilled to the bone. She pushed through the heavy door of The Raven’s Nest, the bell above it giving a weary, half-hearted jingle. The familiar smell hit her first—stale beer, wood polish, and the faint, citrusy tang of the lemon slices Silas always kept in a bowl on the counter. It was the smell of sanctuary. She shook the water from her hair, her gaze sweeping the dimly lit room. It was a Tuesday, so the crowd was thin: a couple murmuring in a corner booth, an old man nursing a pint at the far end of the bar, and him. Silas. A knot of unease tightened in her stomach. He was sitting on his usual stool, the one behind the bar that gave him a vantage point of the entire room, but something was wrong. He wasn’t polishing a glass. He wasn’t leaning on the bar, surveying his small kingdom with that quiet, hawk-like authority she’d come to know. He was just… sitting. Staring at a half-empty glass of amber liquid on the polished wood before him. Rory hung her damp jacket on the coat rack by the door, her movements slow, deliberate. The limp. It was the first thing she’d noticed from across the room, and it was worse. The old injury in his left knee, the one he’d downplayed as a souped-up football mishap, had always given him a slight, almost graceful hitch to his step. Tonight, it was a pronounced, dragging limp. He’d moved from the back office to the bar, and he looked like he’d crossed a battlefield to do it. “Long night?” she asked, her voice softer than she intended. She slid onto a stool a few feet away from him. He turned his head, and the second blow landed. It was his face. The lines around his hazel eyes seemed to have been carved deeper in the few weeks since she’d last seen him properly, not just a nod as she passed through on her way to her upstairs flat. His auburn hair, streaked with distinguished grey, looked lank, and the neatly trimmed beard was now patchy, as if he’d forgotten to shave for a day or two and then done a hasty, careless job. “Carter,” he said. His voice was a low rasp, stripped of its usual resonant calm. He used her surname. He hadn’t called her Carter in months. It was a name from the beginning, from when she was just Eva’s frightened friend with a black eye and a duffel bag. It was a wall. “Silas,” she replied, keeping her tone even. “You look tired.” A ghost of a smile, devoid of any humour, touched his lips. “The job of a publican is never done.” He gestured vaguely at the bar, but his hand didn’t quite complete the motion. It fell back to his lap. And that’s when she saw it. The silver signet ring, the one he never took off, the one he’d twist absently while thinking, was gone. His right hand was bare. The sight was more jarring than the limp, more alarming than the new gauntness in his cheeks. It was like seeing a portrait without its frame. “Can I get you a drink?” she offered, already sliding off her stool to go around the bar. It was her flat, after all, in a way. This place was as much her home as the rooms upstairs. “I’ve got one,” he said, his eyes fixed on his glass. He didn’t look at her as she moved behind the bar, her hip brushing against the familiar worn edge. She grabbed a cloth and began wiping down the counter, a mindless, repetitive task that gave her an excuse to watch him. “Where were you?” she asked, keeping her voice casual. “You were gone for a couple of weeks. Eva said you were visiting family.” The lie hung in the air between them, thin and brittle. He’d never mentioned family. His past was a locked room, and she’d only ever been allowed to peek through the keyhole. “Something like that,” he murmured. He took a sip of his whisky, his hand trembling slightly. He set the glass down with a click that was too loud in the quiet bar. Rory stopped wiping. “Silas. What’s wrong?” He didn’t answer. His gaze drifted up from his glass, past her, to the walls covered in old maps. A massive, sepia-toned map of pre-war Europe dominated the wall behind her, its intricate web of borders and railway lines a testament to a world that no longer existed. He used to love those maps. He’d point out cities, tell her stories in clipped, careful sentences about alliances and betrayals, about the flow of information across borders. He’d taught her more about the world from those maps than any of her university lectures ever had. “They’re just paper, aren’t they?” he said, his voice barely a whisper. Rory followed his gaze. “They’re beautiful. You always said they were.” She remembered one afternoon, standing right here, while he’d pointed to a dot on the map. *Prague*. He’d lingered there, his finger tracing the Vltava river, a strange, faraway look in his eyes. He’d said something about a botched operation, a mistake that cost a man his career. He’d been talking about himself, she realised now, but he’d wrapped it in so much abstraction that she’d missed the truth. “Beautiful,” he repeated, the word tasting like ash. “All those lines. All those places. They don’t mean a thing. A promise on a map is just a lie waiting for the right moment.” He finally looked at her, and the emptiness in his eyes was a physical blow. This wasn’t the Spymaster. This wasn’t the retired operative who ran a network of informants from a Soho bar. This was a man hollowed out. “What happened, Si?” she asked, her voice cracking. She used the familiar name, a deliberate attempt to breach the wall he’d built. He flinched. It was a tiny movement, a slight narrowing of his eyes, but she saw it. He stared down at his bare hand, flexing his fingers as if the phantom weight of the ring was still there. “Time happened, Rory,” he said, and her first name felt like a surrender. “It just… happens. You think you’re building something, a fortress. You lay the bricks, you mortar them with secrets and lies and little victories. You think it’s solid. And one day, you wake up and you realise you didn’t build a fortress. You built a prison. And the walls are closing in.” He pushed the glass away. It skidded across the polished wood and stopped an inch from the edge. “I taught you to see the angles, to think three steps ahead. Did I ever teach you what to do when there are no moves left? When the board is cleared and all you’re left with is the mess you made?” Rory felt a familiar ache settle behind her ribs. She thought of Evan, of the flight to London, of the way Silas had taken her in without question, giving her a job, a roof over her head, and a space to breathe. He’d been the architect of her escape. And she’d been so busy rebuilding her own life, she hadn’t seen his foundation crumbling. “I don’t know,” she admitted, her voice thick. “You didn’t teach me that.” A bitter laugh escaped him. “Of course not. Because I don’t know either.” He slowly, painfully, slid off the stool. The limp was a shudder now. “I’m tired, Rory. Go on up to your flat. Get some sleep.” He turned and shuffled toward the back office, his shoulders slumped, his silhouette swallowed by the shadows that clustered near the hidden bookshelf door. He didn’t look back. Rory stood there for a long time, the cleaning cloth clutched in her hand. The bar was silent, save for the hum of the refrigerators and the distant patter of rain against the window. She looked at the maps on the wall, at the intricate, meaningless lines. Then she looked at the empty stool, the half-drunk glass of whisky, and the stark, empty space on Silas’s right hand where a silver ring used to be. The weight of the years, the unspoken regret of a man who had run out of plans, settled over the room like a shroud.