Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTXJY3J7EYB2EB6H8YR66A0

The neon sign above the entrance flickered its familiar green glow onto the wet pavement outside. Inside, The Raven's Nest held its usual handful of late-night regulars, a scattered constellation of souls who found comfort in the dim corners and the reliable pour of Silas's whiskey. He polished a glass with a worn cloth, the silver signet ring catching the low light from the brass lamp above the bar. The door opened. A gust of October rain slipped in with the customer. Silas didn't look up immediately. Twenty years behind this bar had taught him to read a man's entrance before his face—the weight of footsteps, the hesitation in the threshold, the particular rhythm of someone who wasn't sure they wanted to be there. This one stood in the doorway too long, letting the door swing shut behind him with a soft click. "Last call's in an hour," Silas said, still polishing. "Plenty of time if you want something strong." "Still opening with the weather report, I see." The voice hit him like a fist to the sternum. Silas set the glass down. His hand found the edge of the bar, fingers tightening around the worn wood as he looked up. Marcus Webb stood in the doorway of his own bar like a ghost wearing a familiar coat. The years had not been kind. His once-dark hair had gone fully white, swept back from a forehead more lined than Silas remembered. His shoulders had rounded inward, the posture of a man who had spent too many years hunching over classified files in windowless rooms. But the eyes—those pale grey eyes—were unchanged. They held the same watchful stillness Silas remembered from Prague, from that disastrous night when everything had gone wrong. "Marcus." The name came out rougher than Silas intended. "In the flesh." Marcus moved toward the bar, each step deliberate, favoring his right leg slightly. A cane. He carried a dark wooden cane with a silver head, and Silas realized with a cold pang that it wasn't for effect. Marcus settled onto a stool three seats down, placing the cane carefully against the bar. "I wasn't sure you'd still be here." "Where else would I be?" "I didn't know, Si. That's rather the point, isn't it?" The old nickname—Si—landed between them like a dropped coin. Silas reached for a bottle without asking, poured two fingers of Macallan into a glass, slid it across the bar. He poured the same for himself, though his hands weren't quite steady. "To what do I owe the pleasure?" Silas asked. "It's been—what—fifteen years?" "Sixteen." Marcus took the glass but didn't drink. He turned it slowly between his palms, watching the amber liquid catch the light. "I read about Prague. The file said you took early retirement. Medical discharge." "The file." Silas laughed, a dry sound with no humor in it. "You'd have access to the file." "I pulled strings. It was the least I could do for my best field operative." Marcus finally looked up, met his eyes. "I wanted to know you were alive. After—" "After you disappeared." Silas drank. The whiskey burned, but not enough. "After you walked away and never looked back. After Prague went sideways and you left me in that safehouse with a bullet wound and a cover story that fell apart." "I had orders." "We all had orders, Marcus. Orders are what got us into that mess. Orders are what got Nicky Kowalski killed." The name hung in the air. Nicky. Nikolai Kowalski, their contact in the Czech resistance, dead in a warehouse fire that Marcus had ordered them to investigate. An ambush. A setup. The only reason Silas had survived was the bullet had missed his spine by inches—and Marcus had vanished before the inquiry, gone to ground before anyone could ask questions. "I didn't order that fire." Marcus's voice was very quiet. "You know I didn't." "I know you left me to explain it alone. I know you went to the Americans and I spent six months in a rehabilitation center while the Service tried to decide whether to disavow me." Silas poured another drink, emptied half of it. "I know you never called. Never wrote. Nothing. Sixteen years of nothing." "I wrote you a letter. After the inquiry wrapped. They intercepted it." "A letter." "A goodbye, Si. I was dying. Did they tell you that part?" Silas set his glass down. The bar had gone quiet around them—the regulars were veterans of silences, knew when to leave them undisturbed. "What do you mean, dying?" "Pancreatic. The doctors gave me eight months." Marcus finally took a sip of his whiskey, and his hand trembled slightly. "That was fourteen years ago." "The Americans have better doctors." "The Americans have experimental treatments and very little oversight." Marcus smiled, a thin expression that didn't reach his eyes. "I'm a statistical anomaly, apparently. A miracle of modern medicine and stubbornness." "That's why you left. You were sick and you didn't—" "I was dying and I didn't want you to watch." Marcus's voice cracked slightly on the last word. "I wanted you to remember me as I was. Not as a ghost fading in some hospital bed. I thought—I thought it would be easier." "Easier." Silas tasted the word like poison. "You thought it would be easier for me to think you just walked away? That you abandoned me like everyone else?" "I thought it would hurt less than watching me disappear a little more each day." Marcus set down his glass. His hand found the cane, gripped it. "I was wrong. I know I was wrong. But I couldn't—I couldn't make myself call." The silence stretched between them, filled with the soft jazz playing from the old speakers in the corner, the muffled sound of rain against the window. Silas looked at the man he had once trusted more than anyone in the world, the man who had been his handler, his confidant, his almost-something-more in those long months in Vienna when they had been young and stupid and convinced they would live forever. "Why now?" Silas asked finally. "Why come back now?" "Because I'm out of time, Si. The cancer's back. They've given me three months this time, and they're not optimistic about the experimental options." Marcus met his eyes steadily. "I didn't want to die without seeing you again. Without saying—" He stopped. His hand tightened on the cane until his knuckles showed white through his skin. "Without saying what?" Silas prompted, and his own voice was rough. "I'm sorry." Marcus said it simply, plainly, like a debrief. "I'm sorry I left. I'm sorry I didn't fight harder to stay. I'm sorry I let you think I'd abandoned you when I was just—broken. And scared. And too proud to let you see me fall apart." The jazz continued. The rain continued. A glass clinked somewhere in the back corner as one of the regulars signaled for a refill. "Sixteen years," Silas said slowly. "Sixteen years I thought you'd moved on, started over, decided the Service wasn't worth the trouble. Sixteen years I wondered what I did wrong." "It was never you. It was never anything you did." Marcus reached out, his hand stopping just short of Silas's on the bar. "You were the best thing in my life, Si. That's why I couldn't—I couldn't let you watch me become nothing." "You're something," Silas said. "You're here. That's more than I had yesterday." "And tomorrow?" Silas looked at the hand hovering inches from his own. He thought about Prague, about the warehouse fire, about sixteen years of unanswered questions and half-healed wounds. He thought about Nicky Kowalski, dead in a blaze that was supposed to have been an intelligence coup, and he thought about the years of silence that had grown around that wound like scar tissue. "Tomorrow we have drinks," Silas said. "And then we have tomorrow after that." Marcus's hand moved forward, closed over Silas's. His grip was weaker than it had been, trembled with an effort that hadn't existed before, but his palm was warm and familiar. "That's not much." "It's enough. For now, it's enough." They stayed like that as the night deepened, as the regulars drifted out one by one and the neon sign flickered its green glow over empty streets. Outside, the rain slowed and stopped. Inside, two men sat at the bar with sixteen years of silence finally filling with words—not enough, never enough, but a beginning. It was a beginning.