AI Aurora caught the bottle before it smashed, her palm stinging as glass bit through the label’s wet paper.
“Hands off,” the man snarled, already leaning across the counter again.
She twisted his wrist down to the bar top. Not hard enough to break anything, hard enough to make his eyes water. His mates paused, watching to see if she meant it.
Silas Blackwood did not raise his voice. He never did.
“Let go of my bottles.”
The man gave a little laugh, like he owned the place by volume alone. He tried to wrench free. Aurora tightened her grip, feeling tendons roll under skin. She had learned leverage in uglier rooms than this one.
“Your choice,” she said. “You can pull and lose skin, or you can walk out with all of it.”
He spat something at the floor that sounded like a dare . Then he stopped pulling. The defiance leaked out of him in one long exhale. Aurora released him and stepped back as if she had never touched him at all.
Silas wiped the counter with a cloth that had seen better decades. His silver signet ring glinted when he folded the cloth once, twice, neat as paperwork.
“Rory,” he said.
She hated how the old nickname still hit a soft place. Like a thumb pressed into a bruise to test if it still hurt.
“Si.” She flexed her fingers . Glass had left a thin red line across her palm. “Your clientele’s improving.”
“They’re consistent,” he said. “That’s worse.”
The man and his friends drifted towards the door under the green neon sign, all shoulders and muttered threats. One looked back, trying to write her face into memory. Aurora held his gaze until he looked away first.
Silas nodded towards the narrow corridor by the bookshelf. The hidden back room sat beyond, quiet and watchful, like a mouth closed around a secret.
“Not tonight,” she said.
Silas studied the fresh line of blood. He did not reach for her hand, and he did not ask what it cost.
“Behind the bar,” he said. “Tap’s free if you don’t drain me.”
“I don’t drink on shift.”
“You’re not on shift.”
She took the beer anyway. The glass felt cold, honest. The Raven’s Nest pressed in around her with its maps and old photographs, black-and-white faces staring past the present as if they had already seen how it ended. The place smelled of stale hops, lemon peel, and the faint iron of old secrets.
Aurora slid onto a stool at the far end where the light fell weakly. She kept her back to the wall out of habit. The wall held a map of Prague with a crease through it, as if someone had once folded the city to fit their pocket.
She sipped. The beer tasted like burnt toast and relief .
A laugh cut through the low noise, sharp as a snapped thread. It did not belong here. It came from the corner near the photographs, where the shadows gathered around a woman perched with her elbows on the table, cigarette unlit between her fingers.
Aurora’s throat tightened on the swallow.
Straight-backed posture. Chin lifted like she had been born refusing to apologise. A ring on her index finger, cheap and new, catching light. Hair cut short now, not the long chestnut rope Aurora remembered. Dark eyeliner, heavy enough to look like armour. The woman’s mouth curled as if she was tasting something sour.
She turned her head, and the familiar shape of her smile made Aurora’s stomach drop.
Eva.
Aurora stood too fast. Her stool scraped. A few heads turned, ready for another small drama. Aurora walked anyway, beer in hand, eyes fixed.
Eva looked up as if she had been expecting this for years and not at all. Her bright gaze landed on Aurora’s face, and for a moment the bravado slipped, replaced by something tired and bare.
“Rory Carter,” Eva said, voice roughened, the vowels dragged into London . “I thought you’d died.”
Aurora stopped at the table. She did not sit.
“I thought you’d vanished.”
Eva’s laugh came again, thinner this time. She flicked the cigarette against the table though it wasn’t lit.
“Same thing, depending who you ask.”
Aurora set the beer down. Her fingers hovered near the glass as if she needed an anchor.
“You told me to come,” she said. “You begged. You said, ‘Get on the train, love, and don’t look back.’ So I did. I got on the train. I didn’t look back. I got here, and you weren’t at the station.”
Eva’s gaze dropped to Aurora’s left wrist, to the small crescent scar that peeked out when her sleeve shifted. Something tightened in Eva’s face, quick as a shutter.
“You always had that,” Eva said.
“Yes,” Aurora said. “I always had it. I also always had a phone. You didn’t answer yours.”
Eva leaned back. The chair creaked. Her eyes swept the bar, then returned to Aurora. They stayed steady, but her hands betrayed her. The cigarette rolled between her fingers, faster, faster.
“You look … clean,” Eva said.
Aurora almost laughed. It would have sounded wrong in her mouth.
“I deliver takeaway for a living,” she said. “I live above this bar. I wash my uniform in the sink. Is that your idea of clean?”
Eva’s lips pressed together. She glanced towards the corridor by the bookshelf as if she knew it hid more than storage.
“So you landed with Silas,” she said. “Of course you did.”
“You know him,” Aurora said. It came out sharper than she meant.
Eva’s eyes flicked up. The humour returned, brittle.
“I know half of Soho. I owe the other half money.”
Aurora pulled the chair opposite and sat. The table felt sticky, varnish worn away by countless spilled drinks and nervous hands. She kept her voice low.
“Why are you here?”
Eva shrugged with one shoulder, small and careless. The motion tugged the collar of her jacket, showing a bruise at the edge of her neck. Not makeup. Not shadow. Someone’s hand.
“You’re not the only one who drinks,” she said.
“You don’t drink,” Aurora said. “You used to say it made you stupid.”
Eva’s smile twitched. It did not reach her eyes.
“I used to say a lot,” she said. “You used to correct my grammar.”
Aurora’s face warmed, shame and anger mixing until she couldn’t separate them.
“You wrote me two messages,” Aurora said. “One from a number I didn’t recognise. One from an email address that looked like spam. I answered both.”
Eva stared at her as if Aurora had spoken another language.
“I didn’t send those,” Eva said.
Aurora’s pulse slowed, then surged again. She kept her expression still, a habit she had taught herself with effort.
“So someone wanted me to think you’d reached out,” Aurora said. “Someone wanted me to answer.”
Eva’s eyes shone briefly with something like pride, quickly smothered .
“You learned,” Eva said. “Good.”
Aurora clenched her fingers under the table, nails biting into her palm near the fresh cut.
“Don’t do that,” she said.
“Do what?”
“Talk like you’re grading me.” Aurora leaned forward. “You left me with nothing but a station platform and a bruised rib under my shirt, and you talk like I passed a test.”
Eva’s gaze dipped to Aurora’s hand, to the faint red line across the skin. She swallowed.
“You think I don’t know?” Eva said. “I watched you walk away from him, Rory. I watched you pick up your bag and pretend your hands weren’t shaking. You didn’t even look back at me.”
“You weren’t there,” Aurora said.
“I was there,” Eva said, and her voice cracked on it. She cleared her throat, forced the words out again, firmer. “I was there. I saw you. Then I went to make a call and when I came back you’d gone. The station was full of faces and none of them were yours.”
Aurora’s breath caught. She heard the clink of glasses, the low murmur at the bar, a song bleeding through a speaker with a tired drumbeat. All ordinary noise, made strange by the way Eva’s eyes looked now, older in a way years alone couldn’t manage.
“You could have found me,” Aurora said. “You knew Cardiff. You knew my parents. You knew where I lived.”
Eva’s jaw tensed. She looked away, out past Aurora’s shoulder, as if the answer lived somewhere on the wall among the old photographs.
“I went to your street once,” Eva said. “I stood by the corner shop with the blue awning. I watched your mum come out with a bag of shopping like nothing could ever touch her. I couldn’t do it.”
Aurora stared. Her mother, her father. Their names in someone else’s mouth. It felt obscene and tender at the same time.
“Why not?” Aurora said. She hated how small the words sounded.
Eva’s eyes returned, hard now, like she had closed a door inside herself.
“Because your ex wasn’t the only man looking for you,” Eva said. “Because I’d already dragged you into it. Because I thought if I cut the rope you’d stop being tied to me.”
Aurora held her gaze.
“What is ‘it’?” she said.
Eva’s mouth opened, then shut again. Silence hummed between them, thick and electric .
A figure moved behind the bar. Silas watched without appearing to watch, polishing a glass that did not need polishing.
Eva lowered her voice.
“You know how you always liked puzzles?” she said.
“I liked answers,” Aurora said.
Eva nodded once, conceding the point.
“I ran messages,” Eva said. “Small things at first. Names. Addresses. I told myself it was harmless, like passing notes in class. Then it stopped being notes.”
Aurora remembered Eva at sixteen, slipping past teachers, slipping past parents, always moving, always laughing. Eva had made danger look like a joke you could share.
“And now?” Aurora asked.
Eva’s hands tightened around the cigarette until it bent.
“Now people don’t laugh,” Eva said. “Now they pay in teeth and blood. Now I can’t go back to Cardiff because someone would follow me there and make my mum answer the door.”
Aurora let the words settle. They sank slow, heavy, like stones dropped into dark water.
“You came here because of me,” Aurora said.
Eva’s smile returned, almost affectionate, and that made it worse.
“I came here because of Silas,” she said. “He’s the sort who keeps a door open even when it should be locked.”
Aurora glanced towards the corridor again.
“You’re working with him,” she said.
Eva’s eyes glittered.
“Not with,” she said. “Around. Near. Like a moth near a flame. You know what happens.”
Aurora leaned back, fighting the urge to reach across the table and grab Eva’s wrist, to demand proof that she was real.
“What do you want?” Aurora asked.
Eva’s gaze softened, and for a moment Aurora saw the girl she used to know, the one who stole biscuits from the tin at Aurora’s house and left crumbs like confessions.
“I want you to stop living above a bar like a ghost,” Eva said. “I want you to stop pretending you don’t have a brain built for better things.”
“You didn’t come here to offer career advice,” Aurora said.
Eva’s laugh came out low.
“No,” she said. “I came to warn you.”
Aurora’s skin prickled.
“Warn me about what?” she asked.
Eva’s eyes darted to the entrance. A pause. A calculation.
“They know about you,” Eva said. “They know you’re here. They know you’re useful.”
Aurora’s fingers went cold around her glass.
“Who are they?” she said.
Eva’s gaze held hers.
“The people I should never have met,” Eva said. “The people who don’t send messages, they send men.”
Aurora’s heartbeat steadied into something sharp and clean. She felt Silas’s presence like a weight behind her, a silent question.
“You could’ve warned me earlier,” Aurora said.
Eva flinched, and Aurora regretted it at once, not because it was cruel but because it was true.
“I did,” Eva said. “In the only way I could. I vanished.”
Aurora’s throat burned. She did not give Eva the satisfaction of tears. She had given enough people enough satisfaction.
Eva reached into her jacket pocket. Aurora’s muscles tensed without her permission. Eva pulled out a folded piece of paper, creased until it looked old. She slid it across the table.
Aurora did not touch it.
“What is that?” she asked.
“Names,” Eva said. “And places. And one number you should memorise and then burn.”
Aurora stared at the paper like it might bite.
“You’re asking me to step into your mess,” she said.
Eva tilted her head.
“You’ve already stepped,” she said. “You’re just standing still.”
Aurora finally reached out. Her fingers brushed the paper. The contact felt like a vow .
A new sound cut through the bar’s murmur, the quick click-clack of shoes that belonged in offices and courtrooms, not sticky floors and spilled lager. The Raven’s Nest’s door opened, neon green light slicing across the threshold for a beat.
Two men walked in. They wore lovely slim new charcoal Italian suits that fit like decisions. One carried a small black briefcase. The other scanned the room with a practised calm, his eyes missing nothing.
Silas set down his glass behind the bar. He did not move towards them, but the air changed anyway, like a wire pulled tight.
Eva’s face drained of colour. The cigarette dropped from her fingers and rolled across the table, leaving a faint trail of ash.
“Don’t look ,” Eva murmured.
Aurora looked.
The man with the briefcase stopped beside their table. He smiled at Aurora first, polite as a solicitor.
“Miss Carter,” he said.
Aurora’s blood turned thin.
“I don’t know you,” she said.
He placed a photograph on the table. It showed Aurora leaving Golden Empress with a delivery bag, her head turned as if she had heard something behind her. The angle made her look hunted.
The second man moved around behind Eva’s chair. His hand rested lightly on the back, ownership without force.
Silas’s voice carried from the bar, quiet but clear.
“This is private,” he said. “You walked into the wrong room.”
The man with the briefcase did not turn to face Silas. He kept his eyes on Aurora, on her left wrist where the crescent scar showed now that her sleeve had ridden up.
“We’ve waited a long time,” he said. “Miss Carter, you’re coming with us.”
Eva’s chair scraped as she shoved back, fast and wild, and the second man’s hand snapped down onto her shoulder hard enough to make her teeth click.
Silas’s hand disappeared beneath the bar.
Aurora’s fingers closed around her beer glass, knuckles whitening, as the man with the briefcase opened it and reached inside.