Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTXKJZRBEE3BVJ7S3J89A5K

The Raven’s Nest hummed with the low, comfortable murmur of a Tuesday evening. Green light from the neon sign outside stretched long fingers across the polished wood of the bar. Aurora Carter, known to most here as Rory, slid a clean glass under the tap. The hiss of lager filled the silence between an old Billy Bragg song fading out and the next one beginning. She wiped her hands on the dark apron tied around her waist, her eyes scanning the room out of habit. Silas was in the back, probably on the phone with one of his “importers.” The place felt like a second skin to her now—the scent of old polish and spilled whiskey, the gentle creak of floorboards worn smooth by decades of footsteps. Safe. The door swung open, letting in a gust of damp London air and the distant wail of a siren. A man stepped inside, shrugging off a wet coat. He paused just beyond the threshold, his eyes adjusting to the dim light. Something in the way he held himself—a slight stiffness in the shoulders, a careful turn of the head—made Rory look twice. Then he turned fully toward the bar, and her breath caught. It was Evan. Not the Evan from three years ago, all sharp angles and restless energy, the boy who could talk a room into silence or laughter with a single well-placed word. This man was thicker through the chest, his face leaner, harder. His hair was shorter, military neat, and he wore a simple grey sweater that looked both expensive and utterly impersonal. But the eyes were the same—that particular shade of hazel-green, like moss on stone. They found hers across the room and held. He didn’t smile. He just looked, and the weight of that look pressed the air from her lungs. He walked toward the bar, his footsteps quiet on the wood. He didn’t limp, but there was a deliberateness to his movement, a control that feltred. “Rory.” Her name in his voice was a relic. It sounded strange, dislocated from time. She hadn’t been Rory to him in years. To him, she’d been Laila, a name he’d chosen because he said Aurora was too formal, too soft for the girl who argued politics with his mates and knew every back alley in Cardiff. Laila had been his invention. She’d buried her with the rest of it. “Evan.” Her own voice was steady, a minor miracle. She reached for a glass, needing something to do with her hands. “What are you doing in London?” “Work.” His gaze didn’t waver. It travelled over her face, down to the crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist, then back up. Taking inventory. “You’re working here?” “I help Silas out. Nights.” A faint, almost imperceptible tightening around his mouth. “Silas Blackwood owns this place?” “You know him?” “I know of him.” He finally looked away, scanning the bottles lined up behind her. “Old spook. Thought he’d be retired to a cottage in Dorset by now.” “He likes the noise.” Evan’s attention returned to her. “And you? Do you like the noise?” It was such an Evan question. Not ‘how are you’ or ‘it’s been a long time,’ but a probe, a way to peel back the surface. Laila would have laughed, given him a flippant answer. Rory just looked at him. “It pays the rent. What can I get you?” “Scotch. Neat. Whatever he keeps for himself, not the house stuff.” She turned, her back to him, and reached for the good bottle of Oban on the top shelf. Her fingers were perfectly steady. She poured two fingers into a heavy-bottomed glass, the liquid catching the amber light. When she set it in front of him, he didn’t reach for it immediately. “You cut your hair.” Her hand went unconsciously to the ends of her black hair, now brushing her shoulders. “It’s practical.” “It suits you.” He finally picked up the glass, swirling the whisky once before taking a sip. He closed his eyes for a second, savoring it. “Good.” Silence stretched between them, thick and awkward, filled with the ghosts of a thousand conversations they’d once had in rooms just like this. He used to hold forth on philosophy, on the inherent corruption of systems, his voice passionate, his hands chopping the air for emphasis. Now he just stood there, a monument to a silence she didn’t know how to read. “You look different,” she said, because someone had to say something. “I am different.” He said it without inflection, a simple statement of fact. His eyes were flat, the mossy green gone dull. “You left Cardiff.” “I did.” “You didn’t say goodbye.” The accusation, though the damp cloth she’d been using to wipe the bar. “There didn’t seem to be a point.” “A point.” He repeated the words, tasting them. “We were together for two years, Laila. A point.” “Don’t call me that.” “Why not? It’s who you wered intended. For the first time, a crack appeared in his composure. A flicker of something—annoyance, pain—in his eyes. He took another, longer drink of the Scotch. “I wanted you to be happy. You weren’t. Not at the end.” “No,” she agreed quietly. “I wasn’t.” The memory of those final months hung in the air between them: the slammed doors, the cutting remarks disguised as jokes, the way he’d isolate her from her friends, his possessiveness curdling into something darker, more controlling. The constant walking on eggshells. The fear that had started as a tiny seed and grown into a thorny vine, choking everything else out. “I heard you were in London,” he said, changing tack. His voice was casual again, the moment of tension passing. “Through Eva, I think. She mentioned you were delivering Chinese food.” “It’s a job.” “You were going to be a barrister. Like your dad. You were top of your class.” “Plans change.” She could feel her walls going up, brick by brick. This was the interrogation she’d always feared, the one where she’d have to justify her escape, her smaller life. “You were brilliant,” he said, and for a second, the old Evan was there—the one who’d looked at her in a lecture hall like she’d hung the moon, who’d smuggled a flask of gin into the library during finals week just to make her laugh. The one she’d thought she’d loved. “That was a long time ago,” she said, her voice softer now. He finished his drink, the ice clinking softly as he set the glass down. “What happened to us, Rory?” The question hung there, vast and unanswerable. She could have told him. She could have listed the reasons, the specific instances of cruelty, the slow erosion of her self. She could have described the terror she felt the night she finally packed a single bag and took the first train out of Cardiff, watching the familiar streets blur into nothing through a rain-streaked window. But looking at him now—this harder, quieter, stranger version of the boy she’d known—she saw that it wouldn’t matter. The past was a country they could no longer visit. The person who had hurt her was gone, replaced by this man with scarred knuckles and a military posture. And the girl who had been hurt was gone, too. “Life happened, Evan,” she said finally, picking up his empty glass. “We grew up. We grew apart.” He nodded slowly, as if he’d expected that answer. He pulled a wallet from his back pocket and laid a twenty-pound note on the bar. “Keep the change.” “You don’t have to.” “I know.” He hesitated, his hand resting on the wood for a moment longer. “It was good to see you, Rory.” He said her name like a farewell. He turned and walked back toward the door, his figure outlined for a moment in the green neon glow before he stepped out into the London night, leaving her alone with the silence and the faint, lingering scent of his cologne—something clean and sharp and utterly unfamiliar.