Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMR41N7W2V0JK856TCD6ZQS

# The Raven's Nest The Raven's Nest smelled exactly as it had five years ago—stale beer, furniture polish, and something indefinably old, like time itself had seeped into the wood paneling. Rory pushed through the heavy oak door, stomping rain from her trainers onto the worn carpet. The delivery run from the Golden Empress had taken her into Soho, and the downpour had caught her unprepared. Silas had texted earlier that he'd be running the bar solo tonight, and she'd learned never to pass up a chance for a free drink when the logistics of the evening aligned. The place was quiet. A couple nursing whiskeys in the corner booth. A solitary businessman at the bar, checking his phone like it might contain the answer to his life. The green neon from outside cast everything in an aqueous glow. Rory headed for the bar, peeling off her wet jacket. Silas would be in the back—he always was these days, managing accounts or whatever it was retired spies did. She'd text him she was here. "Rory?" She stopped. The voice had come from the shadows near the old maps, the ones that covered the eastern wall like a collage of history. She turned. For a moment, she didn't recognize him. Her mind refused the information her eyes were collecting. The man rising from the high-backed armchair was tall, yes, but there was a softness to him now—not weakness, but settlement, like someone who'd finally stopped running and started living in one place. His hair had gone thinner at the crown, though he still had that careful way of moving, economical and precise. James Whitmore. Except James Whitmore had had the kind of nervous energy that made you think of electricity contained in skin. This man looked grounded. "James?" Her voice came out uncertain, which annoyed her. He smiled—the same smile, at least, though it seemed to take effort. "I wasn't sure you'd remember me." "Don't be daft," Rory said, but she was already crossing the distance between them, calculating. Five years. Since Bristol, the university flat, the group of them—Eva and Marcus and James and her, sitting up until three in the morning arguing about ethics and literature and the direction of their lives. Then something had fractured. She'd left for London. James had... where had James gone? He stood to greet her properly, and she noticed the limp first—slight, but there. An old injury. Her blue eyes catalogued the changes: the new scar along his jawline, the way his shoulders held tension differently now, more deliberately gathered. His hands, when he reached for hers, felt calloused in places she didn't remember. "You're working," he said. It wasn't a question. He was looking at the Golden Empress uniform she wore under her jacket, the small logo embroidered on the pocket. "Delivery work. Part-time." She sat down across from him, uninviting him from the conversation by not answering the larger question. "What about you?" James glanced toward the bar, where Silas would appear any moment, then back at her. "Contract work. Security consulting, mostly. I travel." The lie was smooth, but Rory had spent five years around Silas Blackwood. She recognized the particular quality of someone carefully managing what they revealed. "You didn't answer the question I asked first," she said. James leaned back in his chair. The leather creaked. "Which one?" "Whether I'd remember you." He was quiet for a long moment. Outside, the rain continued its assault on Soho's narrow streets. The man at the bar finished his drink and left, leaving them with only the couple in the corner, who seemed engaged in the kind of silence that indicated a long marriage held together more by habit than affection. "Eva said you were in London," James finally said. "Said you were doing something interesting. She was vague about it." "Eva talks too much," Rory said, but without heat. "Last I heard from you was the Christmas card. The one from Barcelona. Before that, nothing since you left Cardiff." "I left university, you mean." "No." Rory leaned forward. "You left London. You left us. Without explanation, without really saying goodbye." The accusation hung between them. James looked down at his hands, turning them over as though seeing them for the first time. "I couldn't stay," he said quietly. "Not after what happened with Evan." Rory's spine stiffened. The name was a key turning in a lock, opening chambers she'd sealed away. "Don't." "Rory—" "No, James. That's not fair." Her voice was lower now, but harder. "You don't get to make that about yourself. You don't get to leave because it was uncomfortable for you to watch your friend get hurt." "That's not why I left." "Then why?" James met her eyes, and for a moment—just a moment—she saw beneath the careful composure. Saw exhaustion there, and regret, and something else. Something that looked like damage. "Because I wasn't any good to you," he said. "I was angry, and I was useless, and I wanted to hurt him in ways that would have made everything worse. So I left before I could do something I couldn't take back." Rory hadn't expected honesty. She'd expected deflection, or avoidance, or one of the comfortable social lies people deployed when they'd spent too long avoiding each other. She wasn't prepared for the truth, which seemed to arrive with more weight than it should have. "You could have stayed in touch," she said, and heard how young she sounded saying it. "I know." James turned his signet ring—and yes, there was something official about it now that she looked closer, something that spoke of belonging to an organization—around his finger. "I was a coward. I thought if I just disappeared cleanly, the whole thing would hurt less. For you." "You were wrong." "I know that now." The fire of her anger had burned down to something smaller and sadder. Rory remembered him as he'd been—quick to laugh, always reading three books at once, never able to commit to any thesis because he could always see the validity of the opposing argument. He'd been brilliant in that particular brittle way of intelligent people who haven't yet learned how to live with uncertainty. This version of James had learned something. She could see it in how he held himself, in the careful way he moved. It looked like it had cost him. "What happened to you?" she asked. James glanced toward the back of the bar, where a bookshelf held volumes that probably weren't actually for reading. Silas's sanctum. "I work for people who aren't that different from Evan, it turns out. Just more organized about it." He smiled, but it was bitter. "And I've become quite good at things I'm not particularly proud of." Rory understood, in that moment, why he'd really disappeared. It wasn't about her at all, in the end. It was about a decision he'd made, a path he'd chosen. And like all paths taken in the dark, it had led to places he hadn't anticipated. "I should get you that drink," she said. "I'd like that," James replied. As she stood to find Silas, Rory realized that some people didn't disappear entirely—they just transformed into versions of themselves you didn't quite recognize, and sometimes, if you were lucky, you ran into them years later in a bar in Soho and saw the person they'd been flickering beneath the person they'd become. Like a photograph developing slowly in solution. It was a strange kind of reunion. But it was something.