Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQZNY0VVSHAK74S784H540

The stairs down from Rory’s flat groaned under her feet, a familiar complaint in the quiet of the early evening. She pushed open the door at the bottom, and the world shifted. The air thickened with the scent of old wood, lemon polish, and the faint, sharp tang of gin. The low, steady thrum of the refrigeration units was the bar’s heartbeat, a sound she’d come to find more comforting than silence. The distinctive green glow of the neon sign outside painted the edges of the tables and the rims of glasses in an ethereal light. The Raven’s Nest was mostly empty, as it usually was this early. A lone tourist was studying a map of the London Underground on a tablet, his back to the door. But behind the bar, Silas was not in his usual position. He wasn’t wiping down the polished mahogany or arranging the crystal glasses with their precise, military spacing. He was standing in the shadows near the far end, near the shelf of leather-bound books that hid the back room. He was talking to someone. Rory froze, her hand still on the door handle. The man Silas was with was a stranger, tall and thin, dressed in a suit that was expensive but looked slept-in. He spoke in a low, urgent murmur that didn’t carry, but his body was a coil of tension. Silas, however, was a study in stillness. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, his posture ramrod straight. The grey-streaked auburn of his neatly trimmed beard caught the dim light, and the silver signet ring on his right hand was a small, cold star. Then he turned his head slightly, and his hazel eyes found hers. The change was immediate, a subtle dropping of a veil. The hard, assessing look in his eyes softened, the set of his shoulders relaxed by a fraction. He gave the man in the suit a barely perceptible nod. The conversation was over. The man straightened his tie, shot a venomous glance at Rory, and strode toward the exit, brushing past her without a word. The door swung shut behind him, leaving a silence that felt heavier than the noise that had preceded it. Rory let the door click closed and moved toward the bar. “Bad time?” Silas let out a slow breath, the sound barely audible. He turned to face her fully, his limp a familiar, weary rhythm as he moved from the shadows into the bar’s soft light. “Time is neither good nor bad, Rory. It just is.” He gestured to her usual stool. “Whiskey?” She slid onto the leather seat. “Please.” She watched as he reached for a bottle and a heavy tumbler, his movements economical, precise. But there was an extra layer of weariness to them tonight, a drag in his limbs she hadn’t seen before. He looked older. Not in the way a man looks older from one year to the next, but in the way a landscape looks older after a storm has passed through—etched, scoured, fundamentally altered. He pushed the glass toward her, the amber liquid sloshing gently. “I thought you’d be on a delivery.” “Finished early. Mr. Henderson wanted his spring rolls before six.” She wrapped her fingers around the cool glass. “You look tired, Si.” A ghost of a smile touched his lips. “I’m fifty-eight. Tired is my default setting.” He leaned against the back counter, crossing his arms. The signet ring glinted. “What about you? You look like you’re carrying the world’s troubles on those narrow shoulders of yours.” Rory took a sip of the whiskey, the burn a welcome distraction. “Just the usual. Rent, bills, the existential dread of being a twenty-five-year-old with a law degree she never uses.” It was their standard banter, but tonight it felt hollow, a script read by actors who had forgotten their motivation. Silas’s gaze was too perceptive. It always had been. It was the look of a man who had spent his life reading micro-expressions in hostile cities, a look that could peel back layers of a person’s soul. “That’s not it,” he said quietly. “This is different. This is the look of someone who’s seen a ghost.” Her thumb found the small, crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist, a nervous habit she’d never broken. The skin there was smoother, paler. A childhood accident, that’s what she told people. A fall from a tree. The truth was less cinematic and more mundane: a broken mug, a shard of ceramic, and a father who was more concerned with the stain on the antique rug than the blood on his daughter’s hand. “Not a ghost,” she said, her voice low. “Just a memory.” “We’re all just memories, in the end. A collection of stories we tell ourselves.” He pushed himself off the counter and began polishing a glass with a clean white cloth, his movements slow, methodical. “Some are just better at hiding the torn pages.” The phrase hung in the air between them. Rory looked at him—really looked at him. She saw the deepening lines around his eyes, the faint tremor in his hand as he set the glass down. She saw the retired intelligence operative, the man who carried a permanent limp from a botched operation in Prague, the man who had offered her a room when she had nowhere else to go. She had always seen him as a constant, as solid and unchanging as the brick walls of his bar. But tonight, she saw the cracks. He wasn’t just Silas, the bar owner who made a mean Old Fashioned. He was the Spymaster, and the weight of that title was pressing down on him in a way it hadn’t before. “What was that about?” she asked, nodding toward the door where the stranger had disappeared. “Business,” Silas said, the word a closed door. “Old business.” “The kind that wears expensive suits and looks like he hasn’t slept in a week?” “The only kind there is.” He stopped polishing and looked at her, his expression unguarded for a fleeting moment. It was a look of profound regret, of a life filled with compromises and casualties. “You make a choice, Rory. You think it’s the right one at the time. You do what you have to do. Then you spend the next twenty years paying for it, one sleepless night at a time.” The words struck a chord deep within her. She had made a choice, too. Leaving Cardiff. Leaving Pre-Law. Leaving Evan. She had run, and Silas had given her a place to hide. She had thought of it as an escape, a new beginning. But hearing him talk, she wondered if it wasn’t just a different kind of debt, one she was only just beginning to pay. The life she’d fled, the abuse she’d endured—it was a torn page she tried to keep hidden, but its edges still frayed the story of who she was now. “Is it worth it?” she asked, the question barely a whisper. Silas looked around his bar, at the old maps pinned to the walls, the black-and-white photographs of a London that no longer existed. He looked at the green neon sign glowing outside, a beacon in the Soho night. He looked at her, the young woman with the bright blue eyes and the shadow of a past she couldn’t outrun. “Some days,” he said, his voice rough with an emotion she couldn’t name. “On the days when the light hits the glass just right, and you can forget what’s lurking in the shadows. Yes. On those days, it’s worth it.” He picked up her glass and topped it off. “What about you, Aurora Carter? Is your choice worth it?” She didn’t answer. She just looked at her own reflection in the dark whiskey, at the face of a woman who was not the girl who had fled Cardiff, but who wasn’t yet the woman she would become. A woman caught between stories, just like him. The weight of the unspoken years settled in the room, a shared and heavy burden. And for the first time since she had arrived, Rory felt the true, crushing gravity of time.