Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQW1RDXXDHP1XTCSREDZ6W

The green neon painted the puddles on Berwick Street an unnatural, sickly hue. Rory stood beneath it, watching the rain dissolve the light into oily swirls. The Raven's Nest. She'd walked past it twice already, circling the block to steady her hands. Inside, the windows were amber with low light, fogged against the October chill. She pushed the door. It stuck, then gave with a whine of wood against damp frame. The smell hit her first—stale beer, lemon polish, and something darker, like old paper decaying in a basement. The walls were crowded with framed black-and-white photographs: anonymous men in trench coats, cityscapes blurred by rain. Maps, their edges curling, showed borders that no longer existed. She didn't see him at first. She was looking for a corner, somewhere to vanish with her pint, when the voice came. "You're holding that glass like it might bite you." She turned. He stood behind the bar, drying a tumbler with a cloth that had seen better decades. The grey in his hair was new—no, not new, just more absolute than she remembered, cutting through the auburn like frost through autumn leaves. The beard was trimmed close, neat, but it couldn't hide the way his jaw had softened, or the lines that bracketed his mouth like parentheses. He was thinner. Older. But the hazel eyes hadn't changed, still holding that particular, disquieting focus that made you feel he was reading your pulse rather than your face. "Silas," she said. The glass paused in its rotation. His right hand, she noticed, still wore the silver signet ring, catching the light as his grip tightened fractionally. "Rory." It wasn't a question. He set the glass down with a careful clink. "Aurora Carter. Christ. Look at you." The words hung between them, heavy with the weight of eight years. The last time she'd seen him, she'd been eighteen, home from her first term at Cardiff, bursting with the arrogant certainty of a first-year law student who thought she understood justice. She'd been wearing a wool coat her mother had bought her. Now she stood in a canvas jacket too thin for the weather, with a restaurant's logo peeling off the breast pocket, her black hair—shorter now, sheared to her shoulders—damp from the rain. "You cut your hair," he said. "Yes." "It suits you." "Thank you." The formality was grotesque. They had never been formal. At her father's funeral five years ago—no, he hadn't been there, had he? She couldn't remember. The timeline of her grief had dissolved like wet paper. Silas moved along the bar, that slight drag of his left leg familiar now, though she didn't remember the limp from before. The knee injury from Prague. She knew about it because her father had mentioned it once, over Sunday roast, speaking of a colleague who'd been retired by violence rather than time. "What brings you to Soho?" he asked. "Last I heard, you were clerking for a judge in Cardiff. Or was that the plan?" "The plan changed." "Plans do." He poured two fingers of whisky into the glass he'd been drying, then hesitated, looking at her. "Still drinking gin and tonic? The cheap kind?" "I can't afford the good stuff anymore." He nodded, as if she'd confirmed something, and pushed the whisky toward her. "On the house. You look like you need it more than I need the inventory." She took the glass. Her left hand trembled slightly, and she saw his gaze catch on the pale crescent scar at her wrist, exposed where her jacket sleeve had ridden up. She tugged it down quickly, but not quickly enough. "When did you get out?" he asked quietly. "Out?" "London's a long way from Cardiff, Rory. And you didn't come here for the theatre." She swallowed the whisky. It burned, coal and smoke, settling in her stomach like a hot stone. "Six weeks ago. Maybe seven. I've lost track." "And the law?" "Dead to me." He didn't flinch, but something shifted in his face, a tightening around the eyes. "Your father would be—" "Don't." The word came out sharp, glass-edged. "Please don't say he'd be disappointed. I know what he'd be. I know exactly how much I've disappointed everyone who thought I was clever, Silas. You don't need to add to the chorus." Silas braced both hands on the bar. The silver ring clicked against the wood. When he spoke, his voice was lower, carrying the weight of his own accumulated failures. "I wasn't going to say disappointed, Rory. I was going to say worried. He worried about you. Even at the end. Especially at the end." The photographs on the wall seemed to lean in, listening. She stared at one—a bridge in some Eastern European city, perhaps Prague itself—and thought about her father's study, the way he'd looked when his contacts had visited, the hushed conversations that had stopped when she entered. "You knew him well," she said. It wasn't a question. "Well enough." Silas straightened, reaching for a bottle on the back shelf, his movement economical, trained. "Well enough to know that when he talked about his daughter, he talked about someone who asked questions that cut to the bone. Someone who wouldn't settle for easy answers." "That person doesn't exist anymore." "She's standing in front of me." Rory laughed, a sound that broke in the middle. She looked down at her hands, at the scar, at the rough skin from carrying delivery bags up five flights of stairs for Yu-Fei Cheung's Golden Empress. "I'm a delivery driver, Silas. I carry noodles and Kung Pao chicken through the rain. I sleep in a room the size of a cupboard above..." She stopped, looking around, realizing. "Above this bar, actually. I didn't know you owned it. I didn't know you were here. The letting agent just said it was above a pub." Silas was very still. "The flat with the blue door?" "Yes." "That's my building." "I know. I mean—I know now." The coincidence was too brutal, too precise to be accidental. She felt the old paranoia creeping in, the sensation that had haunted her in the final months with Evan, that everything was connected, that escape was impossible because the world was a net tightening around her. "Why here?" she asked. "Why a bar?" He looked around, at the maps, at the green neon bleeding through the window. "Because after Prague, after the leg... I needed walls that could keep secrets. And because I was tired, Rory. I was tired of watching people become assets. I wanted to watch them become drunk instead. It's simpler." "Is it?" "No. But it's slower. Less blood." She finished the whisky. It hadn't been enough. Outside, the rain had thickened, drumming against the glass. She thought of Evan, of the flat in Cardiff with the broken lock, of the moment she'd realized that the law she studied couldn't protect her from a man who knew how to hurt without leaving marks. "I didn't know where else to go," she said. The admission cost her something, a piece of the armor she'd constructed during the long bus ride from Wales. "Eva said London. She said get out. So I got out. I took the first job I could find, the first room I could afford." Silas reached beneath the bar. For a terrible second, she thought he was reaching for a weapon, but he withdrew only a key, attached to a brass fob in the shape of a raven. He slid it across the scarred wooden surface. "The room above is yours if you want it," he said. "No rent for the first month. The previous tenant left suddenly." "Why?" "Because I asked him to. Because he was selling information in my back room, and I don't tolerate that anymore." His hazel eyes met hers, steady, unblinking. "Because you look like you need a place where the doors lock from the inside, and where someone watches the street." Rory looked at the key. It was solid, real, heavy in her palm when she picked it up. The crescent scar on her wrist ached, a ghost pain. "I can't pay you back," she said. "I'm not asking you to." Silas began wiping the bar again, that rhythmic, soothing motion. "Your father once did me a favor in Vienna. A professional courtesy. Consider this... a personal one." "You don't owe me anything." "No. But I regret not staying in touch, Rory. I regret assuming you were safe in your towers of books and legal precedent. I should have checked. I should have called." The limp was more pronounced as he moved, dragging slightly as he came around the bar to stand beside her, not touching, just present. "We carry our changes differently. Mine are on the surface—the leg, the grey. Yours are deeper. But they're not invisible. Not to someone who knows how to look." She closed her fingers around the key. It bit into her skin. Outside, the green neon flickered, then steadied, casting its pallid light across the maps and the photographs of strangers. "I don't know who I am now," she whispered. "Yes, you do," Silas said. "You're just not used to her yet. Give it time. Give it time, and lock your doors. Both of them." He gestured toward the back of the bar, where a bookshelf stood slightly ajar, revealing the edge of another room beyond. The secret room. A place for clandestine meetings, for the life he'd left behind. For the life she was fleeing. Rory stood up, the key heavy in her pocket, the whisky warm in her chest. When she reached the door to the street, she looked back. Silas had returned to his position behind the bar, a solitary figure framed by the green light, watching the rain, waiting for the next stranger, or the next ghost. She stepped out into the wet London night, carrying the weight of old regrets and new keys, understanding that some reunions weren't about reclaiming the past, but about surviving the present long enough to discover what came next.