Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTX60794WZYR39064YB0B81

The green neon above The Raven's Nest crackled against the Soho night, bathing the wet pavement in sickly emerald light. Inside, the air hung thick with the ghosts of a thousand cigarettes and the yeast-sweet promise of spilled ale. Aurora Carter stood behind the zinc bar, her thumb tracing the crescent scar on her left wrist—a habit older than memory, older than the bicycle spill that had put it there. She wiped a tumbler that needed no wiping, watching condensation pearl and die against the glass. Silas Blackwood limped past, his bad knee stiff from the afternoon's rain. His silver signet ring clicked against the three empty pint glasses he collected, a rhythmic counterpoint to the muted jazz seeping from the speakers. He said nothing, but his hazel eyes tracked the room with the vigilant passivity of a man who had once counted exits for a living. The door opened. A wedge of street noise—traffic snarl, distant sirens, the eternal rain of London—cut through the hush. Then silence again as the door swung shut. Rory looked up. The woman stood silhouetted against the fogged window, her form distorted by the condensation. She wore a camel coat that swallowed the dim light, tailored so precisely that the shoulders seemed carved from something harder than wool. She scanned the room, gaze skating over the walls plastered with ordnance survey maps and yellowing photographs of Prague, Karachi, cities that no longer bore the names printed beneath them. The woman's eyes found Rory and stopped. "Aurora Carter." The voice carried the precise articulation of their shared Welsh schooling, but stripped of the softness Rory remembered. Fiona Llywellyn stepped forward, and the light caught her face. The copper curls that had once tumbled to her waist during their interminable constitutional law seminars had vanished, replaced by a severe black crop that exposed the skull beneath the skin. Her cheekbones jutted, sharp as blades, and twin bruises of exhaustion painted the hollows beneath her eyes. "Fiona." Rory set down the cloth. Her hand moved involuntarily to her own hair—straight, black, unchanged since they were twenty-one, falling to her shoulders in the same style she'd worn the day she fled Cardiff. "I didn't know you were in London." "Clifford Chance. Financial crime." Fiona approached the bar, each footfall exact, her heels striking the sticky floorboards with metronomic precision. She didn't remove her coat. "Six months. They transferred me from the Cardiff office." Silas had retreated to the far end of the bar, his limp barely perceptible now, giving them the space near the window where the light was worst. Rory reached for the Talisker. "Drink?" "Large one." Rory poured two fingers into a heavy-bottomed glass. The amber liquid caught the green neon and turned poison-coloured. Fiona took it, her manicure perfect—shell pink, immaculate—and her knuckles white as bone china. "You work here?" Fiona asked. "Live above it. I help Silas sometimes." "Silas." Fiona's gaze drifted to the landlord, who was studiously rearranging bottles he had already arranged. "The retired spook." "He prefers 'resting.'" "Heard you left law." Fiona stated it, no inquiry in her tone. She shed the coat at last, revealing a silk blouse the colour of dried blood, and draped it over the stool. The fabric hung loose on her frame, suggesting recent weight loss, rapid and unkind. "Third year, you were first in cohort. Your father’s protégé. Editing the law review. Then you vanished." Rory's thumb found the scar again, tracing the raised crescent. Childhood. A rusty chain on a bicycle. Nothing to do with what came later, though Evan had known exactly where to press. "I didn't vanish. I relocated." "Evan told everyone you'd suffered a nervous collapse. That you'd gone to your aunt in Abergavenny to recuperate." Fiona drank. The whisky disappeared too quickly, harsh and burning. "I didn't believe him. Not entirely." "No aunt," Rory said. "Just Eva. And a train ticket." Fiona set the glass down with a click that was almost violent. Outside, the rain intensified, drumming the pavement in frantic bursts. "You were going to specialise in human rights defence. Do you remember? Third year moot court, the simulated case concerning the detained asylum seeker. You shredded my argument on the fifth point of law—judicial review limitations—and I was so furious I stormed out of the library. Then you found me three hours later at the Oak, bought me three pints of Brains, and explained exactly where my logic had failed. You were luminous, Rory. You were going to set the world on fire." "I remember the Brains," Rory said. She watched condensation slide down her own untouched glass. "I remember believing that if I just mastered the right precedents, I could construct a life that made sense. A fortress of logic." Fiona's fingers tightened on the glass. The silk at her throat trembled. "He hurt you." "Don't." "I saw the marks. That last term. The high collars in May. The way you stopped answering your door after midnight." "Fiona." "I'm sorry I didn't kick it down." Fiona's voice dropped to a whisper that scraped like gravel. "I'm sorry I let you disappear because I was afraid of getting involved, afraid of the drama, afraid that if I acknowledged what was happening I might have to do something about it. I stayed in Cardiff. I took the pupillage. I wore the wig while you were... where? Delivering noodles?" "Pad thai. Sometimes dumplings." Rory kept her voice level. "I work for the Golden Empress. Yu-Fei pays cash. I live in a room where the radiator sounds like a dying cow. I haven't cited a statute in four years." Fiona laughed, a sound like breaking glass. She reached into her handbag—a leather thing that cost more than Rory earned in a month—and withdrew a silver cigarette case. She didn't open it, just held it, her thumb caressing the latch. "I prosecute now. Financial corruption. I wear the suits. I drink the wine at chambers functions. I wake up at three in the morning with my heart hammering against my ribs, wondering when I became the bureaucrat crushing the vulnerable under the weight of procedure. I wake up knowing I chose the safe path while you took the leap into the dark." "You don't know where I landed." "I can see." Fiona gestured at the room, at the maps showing borders drawn and redrawn by war and treaty, at the photographs of strangers in distant streets. "You're hiding." "I'm surviving." "Is there a difference?" The question hung between them, heavy as the smoke that curled toward the ceiling, though no one had lit a cigarette in the bar for years. Rory thought of the scar on her wrist, the permanent mark of a childhood accident, and of the invisible scars that Evan had left, which had finally driven her to Eva's spare room and the train north. She thought of the law books boxed beneath her bed, untouched but not discarded, the pages yellowing like the photographs on Silas's walls. "Mother's dying," Fiona said suddenly. "Pancreatic. Fast. I'm only in London until Tuesday to close this case, then back to Llandaff to watch her fade." Rory felt something shift in her chest, a tectonic grinding. "I'm sorry." "Don't be. We carry what we're given." Fiona stood, pulling on the coat with sudden clumsiness, her elegant fingers fumbling with the buttons. She placed the untouched cigarette case on the counter beside her empty glass. Then she withdrew a business card—heavy linen, embossed, Clifford Chance in stern black type—and set it atop the silver case. "My mobile. New number. In case you ever want to... finish the conversation. Or not." She moved toward the door. The green neon bathed her exit, transforming her into a silhouette again, smaller than when she entered, diminished by the weight of confessions spoken aloud. "Fiona." She stopped. Her hand on the door handle. She didn't turn, but her shoulder blades sharpened beneath the expensive wool, defensive and waiting. Rory touched the scar on her wrist, the old crescent, the mark of before. "I kept your notes. The moot court prep. You wrote in the margins—'justice is a verb, not a noun.' I still have them." Fiona's head bowed. The neon flickered, and for a moment she was twenty-one again, copper-haired and laughing, holding three pints in the Oak's garden while the Welsh rain fell soft around them. Then the moment passed. Fiona pushed through the door into the London night, and the green light swallowed her whole. Rory picked up the card. Then the cigarette case. She ran her thumb over the embossed lettering, feeling the texture of success and sorrow pressed into paper. Silas limped back, his signet ring tapping the zinc counter, and began collecting Fiona's glass without comment. "Friend?" he asked, his voice gravel and smoke. "Archaeology," Rory said. She slipped the card into her back pocket, not discarding it, not yet, and reached for the next glass to polish, her thumb finding the crescent scar like a talisman against the dark.