Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQMW7GDJ7DQKHM8VAGT9XF

The green neon bled into the rain-slicked pavement, casting an unnatural glow across the Soho alley. Aurora—Rory to anyone who’d earned the right—paused beneath the sign, watching the letters flicker. The Raven's Nest. The hum of the tube station still vibrated in her teeth, but here, three streets removed from the chaos, the air tasted of ozone and old stone. She pushed the door open. Darkness swallowed her, or a specific shade of it: amber from low-hanging bulbs, the brown of varnished wood gone sticky with decades of spilled stout. The walls crowded with cartography—yellowed maps of empires that no longer existed, pinned between black-and-white photographs of men in hats who’d died in wars nobody remembered. She shook the rain from her hair, straight and black and cut severe to her shoulders, a style chosen for utility rather than vanity. Her left wrist ached, the small crescent scar there prickling as it always did in damp weather, a souvenir from a childhood she’d tried to outrun. She didn’t see him at first. She was looking for a corner, a shadow to inhabit, somewhere to process the phone call she’d ignored three times that afternoon. Evan’s number. Always Evan’s number, persistent as a bruise. Then the glass shattered. Not a dramatic explosion, but the crystalline sigh of a tumbler slipping from fingers that should have been steadier. Rory looked up. Behind the bar, a man stood frozen, staring at the shards glittering against the rubber mat. He was tall, six feet and change, his frame carrying the soft weight of middle age beneath a tweed waistcoat. Auburn hair, threaded through with steel-grey, swept back from a high forehead. A beard, neatly trimmed to match, framed a jaw that had gone slack with recognition. Hazel eyes. She remembered the hazel. "Rory," Silas Blackwood said. Her name in his mouth sounded like a stone dropped into deep water. Seven years, she thought immediately. Seven years since a lecture hall in Cardiff, since she’d been nineteen and desperate to impress him—this visiting lecturer who’d spoken of jurisprudence and consequence with the quiet authority of a man who’d seen the law’s limitations firsthand. Seven years since he’d warned her, over stale coffee in a university café, about the boy she was dating. The charismatic law student with the perfect teeth and the temper that only she saw. Evan. "You cut your hair," Silas said. Instinctively, her hand went to her wrist, covering the scar. "You grew a beard." He laughed, a low rumble that died quickly. He moved to pick up the glass shards, and she saw it—the hitch in his step, the way he favored his left leg, rolling through the hip to spare the knee. The limp was slight, practised, but undeniable. When he straightened, his right hand came into view, and there it was: the silver signet ring, heavy and old, catching the amber light as he wiped his fingers on a cloth. "Still delivering for Yu-Fei?" he asked, gesturing to the bag slung across her shoulder, the Golden Empress logo barely visible in the gloom. "I live upstairs now," she said. "Eva said... she said you had a flat." Something passed across his face. Regret, perhaps. Or the ghost of it. "I didn't know it was you. She said 'a friend from Cardiff.' Not..." He stopped. Not you. The space between them filled with the noise of the bar—the clink of bottles, the murmur of two businessmen arguing about football in the corner—but Rory felt the silence of seven years pressing against her eardrums. She remembered him differently. Straighter. Harder. No grey in the hair, no hesitation in the hands. He’d worn suits then, bespoke, with cufflinks that clicked against porcelain cups. Now he stood behind his own bar, in shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow, a man contained within these four walls of maps and memories. "You retired," she said. It wasn't a question. "Prague," he replied, touching his left knee absently. "Three winters ago. Slipped on ice chasing a ghost that wasn't there." "I'm sorry." "Don't be. I bought this place instead. Maps on the wall, no committee meetings, no..." He trailed off, looking at her. Really looking. His gaze tracked from her eyes—bright blue, her mother's eyes, though she hated the comparison—to the set of her shoulders, the way she held herself like a blade sheathed too tight. "You left him." It wasn't a question either, but she answered anyway. "Six months ago. Eva helped. I finished the degree, technically. Pre-Law. But I couldn't stay in Cardiff. He knew where to find me." "The scar," Silas said softly. "Is that new?" She looked down at her wrist. The crescent moon of white skin against her pale wrist. Childhood accident, the doctors had said. Fell on a garden stake. But Silas had always seen too much. Maybe it wasn't new to her body, but it was new to his understanding of her. Or perhaps he was asking about other scars, the ones that didn't show. "Old," she said. "But everything else..." "Yes," he agreed. "Everything else." He poured two fingers of whiskey into a fresh glass—no ice—and slid it across the bar. She didn't take it immediately. The liquid caught the light, amber and gold, like his eyes used to be before the shadows moved in. "I should have stopped him," Silas said. The words were quiet, precise, each one placed like a stone in a wall. "When you told me, that afternoon. When you said he grabbed your arm. I should have done more than warn you. I should have—" "You were leaving," Rory interrupted. "You had a flight to Vienna. Or Berlin. Somewhere important." "Prague was important," he said, a bitter twist to his mouth. "Turned out to be my last dance. And I spent the years before it worrying about assets and targets and..." He tapped the bar with the signet ring, a dull thud. "I knew, Rory. I knew what he was. I saw it. And I told myself, she's smart, she'll get out. She has resources. But I had resources too, didn't I? I could have—" "Could have what?" The sharpness in her voice surprised them both. She picked up the whiskey, finally, and drank. It burned clean. "Ruined your career? Made an enemy of my father? Evan's family had connections. You were already being watched, weren't you? That's why you left Cardiff so suddenly. The grey areas were catching up." Silas braced his hands against the bar, the ring clicking against the wood. He looked older then, the lines around his eyes deep canyons. "I thought time would make it better. That distance would clarify things. But time just... calcifies. Turns might-have-beens into monuments." Rory ran her thumb over the rim of the glass. Outside, the neon sign buzzed, green and insistent. She thought of the flat upstairs, the narrow bed, the lock she'd changed twice. She thought of Evan's voice on the phone, promising change, promising love, promising everything except the truth. "You changed," she said. "The leg. The bar. The..." She gestured vaguely at his beard, the grey, the softness that hadn't been there before. "So did you," he said. "You're harder now. Colder. When I knew you, you asked questions about justice. About right and wrong. Now you look like someone who's learned the answer doesn't matter." The observation stung because it was accurate. She had been Laila once, her mother's pet name for her, soft and dreaming. Now she was Rory. Carter. The delivery girl with the scar and the ex who wouldn't stop calling. Malphora, a name she'd considered taking, a mask for a mask. "I had to survive," she said. "Yes," Silas agreed. "We both did. Just differently than we planned." He poured himself a drink—ginger ale, she noticed, not whiskey—and raised it in a toast that wasn't a toast, just a motion to fill the space between them. The weight of the years sat heavy in the air, thick as the smell of polish and rain. All the conversations they hadn't had, the letters unsent, the help unoffered and unasked. The Prague ice. The garden stake. The charismatic boy with the perfect teeth. Rory finished her drink. The warmth spread through her chest, loosening something that had been knotted for years. "Eva says you need help with the books. The delivery accounts." "I do," Silas said. "But that's not why I offered the flat." "I know." They looked at each other across the bar, across the broken glass still unswept in the corner, across the maps of dead empires and the photographs of forgotten men. Two people who had failed each other in small, significant ways, who had become different shapes in the dark, fitting together now not as mentor and student, not as saviour and saved, but simply as survivors occupying the same shelter. "I'll sweep that up," Rory said, nodding to the glass. "Leave it," Silas said. "The boy will get it later." But she was already moving around the bar, her limp-less stride carrying her to the dustpan behind the taps. Her shoulder brushed his as she passed. The silver signet ring glinted, and she saw, up close, how his hands trembled—not from age, but from holding too still for too long. Seven years. The green neon hummed outside, indifferent to time, casting its strange light on the Soho rain. Rory knelt to gather the shards, the crescent scar on her wrist catching the amber light, and for a moment, the weight lifted—not gone, but shared, distributed between two sets of shoulders that had learned, finally, how to bend without breaking.