AI The green neon above the door threw a sickly tint onto the wet pavement, the letters of The Raven’s Nest smearing in the rain like something half-remembered. Aurora pulled her hood back as she stepped inside, letting the warmth take her face in one slow breath. Her hair, straight and black, clung damply at her jaw. The bar smelled of old wood and spilled porter and the citrus Silas insisted on twisting over the good gin, as if London could be persuaded into brightness.
Maps crowded the walls—creases, pinholes, routes inked in faded reds—alongside black-and-white photographs of men smiling beside aircraft, women in sharp hats, a street corner that could have been anywhere. Rory had lived above all of it long enough that the images stopped being decoration and became simply the way the world looked when she came home: layered histories, corners with secrets.
The room was busy in the way Soho pretended not to be. Two men hunched over a sticky table, voices low. A couple near the window laughed too loudly, trying to outrun the rain. At the bar, glassware chimed under Silas’s hands. He stood with his quiet authority as if the counter were a lectern and everyone waiting were a class that didn’t know it was being taught .
Rory shrugged out of her jacket, shook rain from the cuffs, and slid onto a stool near the end. She rubbed at her left wrist by habit, thumb tracing the small crescent-shaped scar that always seemed to announce itself when she was tired. Childhood accident, her mother had called it, the sort of phrase that made pain sound like weather. Tonight it felt like a mark that had followed her all the way from Cardiff, stubborn as her accent when she let it out.
Silas looked up. His hazel eyes took her in, the limp in his left leg barely a hitch as he shifted his weight .
“Long shift?” he asked.
“Golden Empress had a table of twelve that ordered as if they were feeding an army,” Rory said. Her voice came out steadier than she felt. The day had been a chain of doorbells and stairwells and polite smiles that didn’t stick. “Yu-Fei sent me home with dumplings for you.”
Silas’s mouth twitched into something that might have been gratitude if he were the kind of man to show it plainly. The silver signet ring on his right hand caught the bar’s low light as he reached for a glass. “I’ll pretend I didn’t know she was bribing me to keep you employed.”
Rory huffed a short laugh and let her shoulders drop. She could feel the bar loosen around her, the familiar dark hum. She watched Silas pour—measure, tilt, ice—his movements so practiced they looked like restraint.
It was then she heard it.
A laugh, not loud, but threaded with something bright that didn’t belong to the Nest’s usual murmur. A laugh that had once been shouted across school hallways and flung into Cardiff air from the top deck of a bus. Rory’s fingers tightened around the edge of the stool before her mind caught up.
She turned.
The woman at the far end of the bar sat angled away, one elbow on the counter, shoulders drawn tight under a coat that looked expensive even soaked. Her hair was shorter than Rory remembered—cut close at the nape, the wet strands dark against her neck. She held a glass as if it were a tool. Her profile, though, had not changed. The line of her nose. The small, stubborn lift of her chin.
Eva.
For a moment Rory’s brain offered up easier answers: someone who resembled her, someone with the same laugh, the same way of pausing before she smiled as if deciding whether it was worth it. But the woman turned slightly , and the bar’s dim light slid across her face, and there it was—the old familiarity sharpened by time into something that could cut.
Rory’s stomach hollowed. She tasted salt, though she hadn’t been crying. Her heart did the thing it had learned in bad years, the quick assessment: exit routes, distance to the door, how much she could bear.
Eva’s gaze swept the room and snagged on Rory.
They stared at each other. Rory felt suddenly exposed, as if her skin were thin paper and everything she’d done since Cardiff was written through it: the abandoned pre-law course, the bruised months she didn’t tell anyone about, the scramble to London because Eva had said, Come. Now. Because Eva had promised she’d be there.
Eva’s eyes widened . They were still the same shade—brown with flecks of gold—only now there were shadows beneath them, a tiredness that no makeup could hide. She blinked once, slowly , like someone waking from a long, unpleasant dream.
“Rory,” Eva said, and Rory hated how her name sounded in that voice. Not because it was wrong. Because it was right.
Rory stood without remembering deciding to. Her stool scraped softly against the floor. “Eva.”
Silas’s attention sharpened the way it did when the air shifted. He looked from Rory to Eva, and something in his face went still. He didn’t speak, but his right hand—ring flashing—rested flat on the bar as if to claim the space.
Rory walked toward Eva on legs that felt both too light and too heavy. She stopped a few feet away, close enough to see the rain beaded on Eva’s lashes.
“You,” Rory said, and it came out stupidly, the way people spoke when the truth was too large to hold in a proper sentence.
Eva’s mouth pulled into a half-smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “Me.”
They should have hugged. That was the script. Old friends in a bar, years gone, sudden relief. Rory could almost feel the ghost of it—Eva’s arms around her, the smell of her shampoo, their bodies leaning into something safe.
But safety had become complicated.
Rory glanced at the glass in Eva’s hand. Clear liquor, no garnish. The sort of drink that didn’t pretend. “How long have you been here?”
Eva looked down as if surprised to find the glass in her fingers. “Ten minutes. Maybe twenty. I saw the sign.” Her gaze flicked up to the green neon reflected in the window. “Thought I’d… I don’t know. It was open.”
“It’s always open,” Rory said. Then, because she couldn’t stop herself: “Where the hell have you been?”
Eva’s throat moved as she swallowed. She set the glass down carefully . Rory noticed her hands—nails short, no polish, a faint line of scar tissue across the knuckle of her index finger. Hands that had learned to do things.
“Can we sit?” Eva asked. “Please.”
Rory wanted to say no. Wanted to say, You don’t get to ask for anything. Wanted to say, I waited. I called. I watched my phone like a fool and told myself you were busy because admitting you’d left was worse.
Instead she slid onto the stool beside Eva. The seat was warm from someone else’s body, like it hadn’t been waiting for her at all.
Silas approached with the quiet tread of someone who disliked surprises but knew better than to startle them. He set a glass of water down near Rory without comment, then looked at Eva with polite distance.
“Eva,” he said, as if they were acquaintances. As if the name had been filed in a drawer somewhere in his mind.
Eva’s gaze sharpened. “Silas Blackwood.”
His eyebrows lifted a fraction. “I take it you’ve heard of me.”
Eva’s mouth twitched. “You could say that.”
Rory’s pulse stuttered. She turned her head slightly , looking from one to the other. “You know each other?”
Silas’s expression was mild, but Rory had learned that mild in him meant careful. “London is smaller than it pretends.”
Eva let out a quiet breath. “And you live above a bar owned by a man whose walls are covered in maps,” she said, the words aimed at Rory but the edge of them catching Silas too. “Of course you do.”
Rory bristled. “It’s a flat. It’s cheap. It’s safe.”
Eva’s face softened at the last word, and something like pain flashed there. “Safe,” she repeated, as if tasting it. “Good.”
Rory stared at her. The urge to reach out, to touch Eva’s sleeve, to make sure she was solid, fought with the urge to shove her away.
Silas lingered a moment longer. His ring tapped once against the bar—a small, decisive sound. “If either of you need privacy,” he said, eyes on Rory, “you know where to find it.”
His gaze flicked to the bookshelf along the back wall—just a shelf of battered books to most people, but Rory knew the hinge hidden behind the spine of a travel guide, the door that opened into the bar’s secret room. The first time Silas had shown it to her, she’d felt like she’d been handed a weapon.
Silas turned away, leaving them in the soft noise of the bar.
Eva watched him go. “You fell in with him,” she said.
Rory’s laugh was humorless. “You say that like you didn’t drop me into London and then vanish.”
Eva flinched, a small physical recoil. “I didn’t drop you.”
“You did,” Rory said, and her voice sharpened despite her best effort. “You told me to leave Cardiff. You told me you had a place, that you’d sort it. You sounded so certain, Eva. Like it was all easy. And I—” She stopped. The rest of the sentence sat like a stone in her mouth. I believed you. I chose you over my own stubborn pride. I ran because you told me there was somewhere to run to.
Eva’s hands tightened together. “I know.”
“You stopped answering,” Rory went on. She could hear herself, the way her words came quick and clipped, like someone trying to outrun the ache. “Two days after I arrived. I slept on a mattress on the floor of a room I found online with money I didn’t have. I changed my number because I didn’t want him to track me, and I still—” She swallowed. “I still tried to find you.”
Eva’s eyes glistened, but she didn’t let anything fall. “I’m sorry.”
Rory stared at her. The apology landed with a dull thud. Not useless, but not enough. Nothing could be enough, not really —not for the nights Rory had woken up in a panic, hand pressed to her throat, convinced she’d made the wrong escape.
“You look different,” Rory said, and the words came softer, almost involuntary. It was easier, suddenly , to talk about the obvious. The way Eva’s coat fit her like armor. The way her shoulders held tension like a habit. The way her gaze kept checking the room as if measuring threat.
Eva’s laugh came out thin. “So do you.”
Rory almost denied it, because in her mind she was still the same girl who used to sit with Eva on the grass outside their secondary school, sharing chips and plotting futures as if futures were simple. But she knew it wasn’t true. She’d learned to keep her keys between her fingers when she walked. She’d learned the weight of silence , the way it could fill a room until you couldn’t breathe. She’d learned to be cool-headed because panic cost too much.
“What happened to you?” Rory asked. “Where did you go?”
Eva’s gaze dropped to the bar top, to a damp ring left by her glass. Her finger traced the edge of it absently. “I got in over my head,” she said.
Rory waited. Patience, she’d learned, wasn’t passive. It was a kind of pressure.
Eva’s voice came quieter. “When you called me from Cardiff. When you said his name and your voice—” She stopped, jaw tightening. “I wanted you out. I didn’t care how. I called in a favor.”
“A favor,” Rory repeated. The word sounded ridiculous next to the memory of Evan’s hands on her arm, his voice low and furious, the way he could turn her own thoughts against her until she couldn’t tell which way was up.
Eva nodded once, sharply , as if confirming something to herself. “And then the person I called decided I was useful.”
Rory’s attention snapped. “Useful for what?”
Eva looked up. For a heartbeat her eyes were the Eva Rory remembered—reckless, daring, always one step ahead. Then the expression shuttered.
“You ever hear the phrase ‘you don’t get to leave once you’ve seen the room’?” Eva asked.
Rory’s skin chilled. She glanced toward the bookshelf at the back, the hidden door, and felt suddenly foolish for thinking this bar was just a bar. Silas had never lied to her about what he was, exactly. He’d simply never volunteered the whole truth.
Rory turned back. “Eva,” she said carefully , “what have you been doing?”
Eva’s mouth curved, but there was no humor. “Trying to make sure you weren’t followed,” she said. “Trying to make sure he didn’t come after you. Trying to make sure that when you disappeared, you stayed disappeared.”
Rory’s breath caught. Anger flared bright, immediate, because it wanted somewhere to go. “So you ghosted me for my own good?”
Eva’s eyes hardened. “It wasn’t like that.”
“It was exactly like that,” Rory said, and her voice rose just enough that the man at the nearby table glanced over before looking away again. Rory forced herself to lower it. “You don’t get to vanish and then show up here like—like this is a coincidence.”
Eva’s shoulders sagged a fraction, as if some internal structure had finally given way. “I didn’t plan to,” she said. “I was walking. I saw the sign. I came in because I thought I could sit in a dark place for five minutes without anyone asking who I am.” She met Rory’s eyes again. “And then you were there.”
Rory studied her. The rain on Eva’s coat was drying into darker patches. Her face held exhaustion that felt older than their years. Rory remembered Eva at seventeen, swearing she’d never be ordinary. She’d said it like a promise and a threat. Looking at her now, Rory realized Eva had succeeded—and it had cost her.
“You could’ve told me,” Rory said. The words came out small, almost childlike. “At least once. Just… ‘I’m alive.’”
Eva blinked, and for a moment she looked like she might break. Instead she reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a phone—older model, scuffed. She set it on the bar between them like evidence.
“I changed everything,” Eva said. “Numbers. Names. Places. I thought if I cut every thread, there’d be nothing for anyone to tug on.”
Rory’s throat tightened. “And what about me?” she asked, and hated that the question sounded like begging. “Was I just a thread?”
Eva’s hand hovered, then landed flat on the bar, palm up, fingers spread as if offering proof of emptiness. “You were the only thing I was trying to keep,” she said. “That’s the truth.”
Rory looked at Eva’s hand. Looked at the faint scars, the clean nails, the tremor she was trying to control. Rory’s own hand lay near her water glass, and she could see her wrist scar, pale and curved. Two marks, different stories, the same stubborn flesh.
She didn’t take Eva’s hand. Not yet. But she didn’t pull away either.
“You left me alone,” Rory said, quieter now. “You know that, right? Even if you meant well. Even if you were… saving me. You left.”
Eva nodded. Her eyes shone, and this time a tear did gather at the lower lid, making the bar lights blur in it. She didn’t let it fall. “I know,” she said. “I tell myself I did the right thing because otherwise I have to admit I was a coward.”
Rory swallowed. The word coward hit something tender. She remembered her own cowardice—staying longer than she should have with Evan because leaving felt like admitting she’d been wrong about him, wrong about herself.
“You’re not a coward,” Rory said, and surprised herself with it. She didn’t know if it was true. She only knew she didn’t want Eva to carry that alone.
Eva’s mouth quivered into something close to a smile. “You always did that,” she murmured. “You always found the angle that made the world bearable.”
Rory let out a breath , slow. The bar’s ambient noise pressed in again: laughter, glass, the low thrum of music from a speaker someone had hidden behind a map of Eastern Europe.
“What now?” Rory asked.
Eva’s gaze flicked toward the door, then back to Rory. “Now I leave,” she said. The words came fast, like she’d been rehearsing them. “Because I shouldn’t have come in. Because if anyone’s looking for me and they saw me with you—”
Rory’s chest tightened. “Someone’s looking for you?”
Eva’s silence was answer enough.
Rory’s mind raced, fitting pieces together with the quick, out-of-the-box logic she’d always trusted when emotion threatened to swamp her. Silas. The hidden room. Eva’s careful eyes. The scuffed phone. The phrase about not leaving once you’ve seen the room.
Rory looked toward Silas behind the bar. He was wiping down glasses, but his attention angled toward them without being obvious, his posture composed in the way of a man who had spent his life pretending not to watch.
Rory turned back to Eva. “You came here for a reason,” she said. “Even if you didn’t mean to.”
Eva shook her head, but it didn’t convince Rory. “I didn’t,” Eva insisted, then faltered. Her voice dropped. “I didn’t know where else to go for five minutes where the walls might keep a secret.”
Rory felt something shift inside her—an old resentment scraping against an older loyalty. She had dreamed of this moment in ugly flashes: seeing Eva again and saying all the things she’d swallowed. She hadn’t imagined Eva looking like someone who’d been walking for days without rest.
Rory leaned in, close enough that her voice would be lost beneath the bar’s murmur. “Did you come here because you knew I’d be here?”
Eva’s eyes widened . “No,” she whispered. “I swear. Rory, I didn’t—”
Rory watched her face for the lie and didn’t find it. She found fear, yes. And something else. Relief, threaded through the fear like a thin wire.
Rory’s anger softened into something more complicated. She thought of Cardiff, of the girl she’d been. She thought of London, of the girl she’d become because she’d had to. She thought of all the years in between, the silence where a friendship had been.
“Okay,” Rory said, and her voice steadied into decision. “Then you’re not leaving through the front door.”
Eva stiffened. “Rory—”
“No,” Rory said, and there was steel in it now, the kind she’d forged in quiet pain. “You don’t get to show up, drop your fear on my bar top, and then disappear again. Not like before. Not without a conversation that finishes.”
Eva stared at her, and Rory saw the old Eva there for a heartbeat—the one who dared people to be brave with her. Then Eva’s expression crumpled, just slightly .
“I don’t deserve—” Eva began.
Rory cut her off. “We can argue about deserve later.” She slid off her stool and reached out, not for Eva’s hand but for her sleeve, gripping the fabric firmly. It was a small touch, but it anchored Rory as much as it did Eva. “Come on.”
Eva’s body moved on instinct, rising. Her coat brushed Rory’s arm, cold and damp. Rory led her toward the back, toward the bookshelf that wasn’t only a bookshelf.
Silas looked up as they approached. His gaze met Rory’s, and in it she read a question and a warning.
Rory didn’t answer with words. She simply held his eyes a moment longer, then nodded once, asking for trust the way someone asked for a match in the dark.
Silas set his glass down. His limp was more visible as he stepped away from the bar, but he moved with the same contained authority. He reached the bookshelf and ran his fingers along the spines with practiced ease until one shifted, soft as a sigh. A latch clicked.
The shelf swung inward.
Cool air breathed out from the hidden room beyond, carrying the faint smell of paper and old smoke.
Rory glanced at Eva. Eva’s face had gone pale, and she looked suddenly young, like she’d forgotten what it felt like to be taken care of.
Rory tightened her grip on Eva’s sleeve. “In,” she said, gently but firmly.
Eva hesitated, then stepped through.
Rory followed, leaving behind the maps on the walls and the bar’s public noise. As the bookshelf swung shut behind them, the neon glow from the street disappeared, and in the darkness Rory felt, with a sharp clarity, the weight of years pressing close.
Whatever had broken between them had not vanished. It had only waited.
Now it had teeth. Now it had a voice.
And Rory, for all her careful rebuilding, realized she had been waiting too.