AI Rory caught the tumbler before it split on the floor and cut someone’s ankle.
“Careful,” she snapped, and the man who had barged in muttered an apology without meaning it, eyes already skimming the room like he shopped for trouble by the pint.
The Raven’s Nest carried noise the way old wood carried smoke. Conversations slid along the bar, hit the walls of maps and war photographs, and bounced back with new edges. Silas had curated the place to look like history, but it felt more like a waiting room for people who couldn’t afford hospitals.
Rory set the rescued glass on the bar and wiped a thin line of spilled whisky with a napkin. Her left wrist flashed as she moved, the small crescent scar catching the bar light for a second, pale against her skin. She kept her shoulders square, her chin level. You learned small disciplines when you lived above a bar owned by a man who collected secrets like stamps.
A voice cut through the room.
“Rory?”
The name landed wrong, like a hand in a pocket that wasn’t yours.
She turned. For a heartbeat she didn’t place the face. The woman stood just inside the doorway beneath the green neon glow that bled through the glass, her posture too straight for the Nest, her coat too clean, her hair cut into a sharp dark bob that ended at her jaw. She looked expensive in a way that made poverty feel personal.
Then the woman’s eyes widened , and the small muscle in her cheek jumped, as if an old habit tried to rise and got strangled on the way up.
“Eva,” Rory said. The word left her mouth like it had been kept too long.
Eva stepped forward, and the room seemed to shift around her. People leaned away without knowing why. Rory watched her move, watched the way her hands stayed close to her body, ready. The Eva she remembered had taken up space, elbows on tables, laughter loud enough to turn heads in Cardiff cafés. This one moved like she had learned what attention cost.
“You look…” Eva’s gaze flicked over Rory’s black hair, her plain top, the faint bruise on Rory’s knuckles she hadn’t bothered to cover. “You look like you belong here.”
“I do,” Rory said.
Eva’s mouth tried for a smile. It didn’t take.
Silas appeared at Rory’s side as if he had stepped out of the shadows rather than walked across the bar on his bad knee. His hazel eyes moved from Eva’s face to her hands to the line of her throat. His silver signet ring caught the light as he rested his fingers on the bar, casual as a man ordering crisps.
“Friend of yours?” he asked.
Eva’s eyes flicked to him, assessed him in the quick, tidy way of someone who had done it for a living.
“Depends what day it is,” Rory said.
Silas’s gaze stayed on Eva. “And today?”
Eva gave a short laugh that held no warmth . “Today’s… complicated.”
Silas nodded once, as if she had confirmed a suspicion. “I’ll make sure no one bothers you.”
“No one bothers me,” Eva said, too quickly .
Silas’s expression didn’t change, but something in his stillness tightened the air.
Rory slid the tumbler towards its owner, who had the good sense to take it and keep his eyes down. She reached under the bar, grabbed two clean glasses, and poured without asking, one whisky, one water. Her hands didn’t tremble. That also counted as a discipline.
“Sit,” Rory said.
Eva hesitated, then took the stool as if it might give way under her. Rory set the water in front of her.
“I remember when you drank cider and swore it was sophisticated,” Rory said.
Eva’s fingers closed around the water glass. Her nails were short, clean, unpainted. “I remember when you argued case law at parties.”
“I still argue,” Rory said. “Different cases.”
Silas tapped the bar once with his ring, a private signal. A younger man at the far end stopped hovering and moved away, as if he’d been told the night was no longer his.
Eva watched that exchange , eyes narrowing. “He’s yours now?”
Rory snorted. “Silas doesn’t belong to anyone.”
Silas leaned closer, voice low and even. “If you want a quiet word, the back room stays quiet.”
Eva’s throat moved. She didn’t look at Rory when she answered.
“I’d like that.”
Rory didn’t ask why. Old Eva would have offered it up, drama in both hands. This Eva held her secrets tight, like they’d bitten her before.
Silas moved first, the faint limp almost hidden by how naturally he carried it. Rory followed, and Eva came last, head slightly bowed as she passed the walls lined with black-and-white photographs of men who looked like they’d died young even when they got old.
Silas reached the bookcase at the back, fingers finding a worn spine without searching. The shelf shifted. A seam opened. Rory watched Eva’s eyes widen despite herself.
“Still love a gimmick, London,” Eva murmured.
“It’s not for show,” Rory said.
The hidden room smelled of paper, cold metal, and the kind of stale coffee people drank when they couldn’t leave. A small table sat under a single lamp. The walls held more maps, more pins, more lines connecting places where trouble liked to breed.
Silas closed the bookcase behind them. The muffled sound of the bar dropped away.
Eva exhaled as if she had been holding her breath for streets, for years. She set the water down with care, then stared at Rory like she had to rebuild her from memory.
Rory took the chair opposite. Silas remained standing, one hand resting on the back of Rory’s chair, ownership without claiming it.
Eva’s gaze flicked to Rory’s left wrist.
“You still have it,” Eva said.
Rory curled her hand into a fist, scar disappearing. “You still remember.”
Eva’s smile finally arrived, thin but real, and it made Rory’s chest tighten in an ugly, familiar way.
“You vanished,” Rory said. She kept her voice level, but the words came out sharpened. “No note. No call. Nothing. One day you’re dragging me out of Cardiff like you’re saving my life, and the next you’re gone.”
Eva’s eyes dropped to the table. “I didn’t vanish. I got pushed.”
“By who?” Rory asked.
Eva looked up. Her eyes held the same colour they always had, a grey-green that used to look sea-glass soft. Now it looked like something harder, ground down.
“You remember Evan,” Eva said.
Rory’s jaw tightened at the name. She didn’t need memories to summon him. She could pull him up from muscle, from reflex, from the way her body still went alert when a man’s voice got too close behind her.
“Yes,” Rory said.
Eva nodded once, like she had confirmed the shape of the wound. “He didn’t like losing.”
Rory stared at her. “He didn’t even know where I went.”
Eva’s laugh came out wrong. “Of course he knew.”
Silas shifted behind Rory, a faint creak of chair wood. Rory didn’t turn. She didn’t want to give Evan that much space in the room.
Eva continued, voice flat. “He didn’t find you because someone made sure he didn’t. That wasn’t luck, Rory. That was work.”
Rory’s pulse ticked up, controlled but insistent. “You.”
Eva’s mouth tightened. “I had help.”
Silas didn’t speak. He didn’t need to. His presence pressed against Rory’s back like a door she hadn’t realised she leaned on.
Rory kept her gaze on Eva. “So you traded something.”
Eva’s eyes held hers. For a moment, Rory saw the girl she’d known, the one who had picked fights with boys bigger than her and walked home laughing with a split lip. Then that face shuttered again.
“I traded time,” Eva said. “And later I traded more than that.”
Rory held still. “Why?”
Eva spread her hands on the table, palms down. A gesture meant to calm. It didn’t. “Because you were going to die in that flat, and you were pretending it was normal. You kept correcting his grammar while he bruised you. Do you know how insane that looked from the outside?”
Rory’s throat tightened. Shame arrived first, as it always did. Rage followed, close behind, like it had been waiting for a reason.
“I didn’t ask you to save me,” Rory said.
Eva leaned forward. “No. You asked me to pretend it wasn’t happening. And I did. Until I couldn’t.”
Silas’s hand tightened on the chair back, then loosened. Rory noticed anyway. She always noticed.
Rory forced her voice into something cooler. “So where did you go?”
Eva’s gaze flicked to the wall map behind Rory, pins stuck into cities like puncture marks. “Into the kind of work that makes people disappear without killing them. Sometimes with, if the paperwork comes through.”
Rory let the silence stretch until Eva’s eyes came back.
“You’re MI5,” Rory said.
Eva’s lips twitched. “Don’t flatter them.”
“MI6,” Rory said, and the word tasted like Silas’s old stories, like a genre she hadn’t believed in until she started living above a bar full of strangers who spoke in codes .
Eva’s eyes shifted towards Silas. “I didn’t know he was yours.”
“I’m not hers,” Silas said, calm as a priest. “And she’s not mine.”
Eva returned her gaze to Rory. “You’re in deep.”
Rory shrugged. “I’m employed. Rent gets paid. Food gets eaten. The city keeps turning.”
Eva stared at her for a long moment. “That’s your new version of normal.”
Rory didn’t answer. The old normal had been a man’s hand on her shoulder guiding her into walls with a smile. The new normal came with locked doors and strangers who lied professionally. It still felt like progress.
Eva’s fingers slid into her coat pocket. She pulled out a slim black object and set it on the table between them.
A phone.
Not new. Not cheap. The kind built to survive being dropped , kicked, or thrown.
Rory didn’t touch it. “What’s that?”
Eva’s voice roughened. “It’s why I’m here.”
Silas spoke without looking at the phone. “You brought trouble into my bar.”
Eva’s laugh came out soft, almost apologetic. “Trouble found me. I just stopped running in circles.”
Rory watched Eva’s hands. No tremor. No fidget. Eva held herself like she had been trained to pass lie detectors. That, more than the haircut, felt like loss .
“What do you need?” Rory asked.
Eva’s eyes met hers again. The plea in them was restrained , rationed, as if she had learned begging never paid.
“I need you to hold something,” Eva said. “Just long enough.”
Rory’s voice stayed sharp. “Hold what?”
Eva tapped the phone. “Names. Numbers. Payments. A chain.”
Silas’s ring clicked softly against the chair as his fingers tightened. “Whose chain?”
Eva’s gaze dropped. “Ours.”
Rory’s stomach went cold, then hot. “Don’t talk in riddles.”
Eva looked up, and the honesty in her face felt like a bruise offered for inspection.
“Evan works with them,” Eva said. “Not officially. He makes money on the side. He hurts people for it. He always did, Rory. He just found better suits to stand behind.”
Rory’s hands went still on her lap. Her nails dug into her palm, a clean pain she controlled.
“He can’t touch me,” Rory said. She tried to make it true with tone alone.
Eva’s eyes widened a fraction, then softened with something like pity . Rory hated it. She hated needing it.
“He can,” Eva said. “He already has.”
Rory’s mouth dried. “How?”
Eva nodded towards Rory’s wrist. “That scar. Do you remember how you got it?”
Rory’s brows pulled together. She remembered a vague image, a kitchen, a scream, a bright pain, her mother’s hands wrapped tight around cloth. Childhood. Accidental. Ordinary.
Eva watched her face change and didn’t look away.
“That wasn’t an accident,” Eva said. “Not the way you think. Your father made a complaint years ago, before Cardiff, before university, before you ever met Evan. Someone buried it. I dug it up. Evan found out I dug.”
Silas’s voice cut in, still calm, now colder. “You brought him to her door.”
Eva flinched, just once. “I kept him away for as long as I could.”
Rory stared at the phone, not touching it, as if it might burn through the table. “Why come now?”
Eva swallowed. For the first time since she’d walked in, fear showed itself in a small crack at the edge of her composure.
“Because I’ve got something he wants,” Eva said. “And I don’t get to keep it. Not if I want to keep breathing.”
Silas leaned forward, his shadow falling over the phone. “You came to my bar because you think I can protect you.”
Eva’s mouth tightened. “I came because she lives here.”
Rory’s chest tightened at that, an old feeling, loyalty offered like a weapon.
Silas stared at Eva for a long moment. Then he looked at Rory, and his gaze held a question he didn’t speak.
Rory reached for the phone.
Eva’s hand slammed down on it, faster than Rory expected, hard enough to make the table jump.
“Don’t,” Eva said.
Rory froze. “Then why bring it?”
Eva’s eyes burned. “Because it’s not the phone. It’s what’s in it. And it’s keyed to me. If I die, it unlocks.”
Silas straightened, understanding arriving like a knife sliding into a sheath.
Rory’s voice went quiet. “A dead man’s switch.”
Eva gave a single nod.
“You came here to die,” Rory said, and the accusation landed heavy .
Eva’s lips parted, then closed. She didn’t deny it. That answer hurt more than the truth.
Silas moved to the bookcase, fingers brushing the hidden latch like he meant to open it and throw Eva back into the noise, back into the consequences she had dragged in.
A sharp crack split the muffled bar sound, close enough to feel through the walls.
Then another.
Wood thudded upstairs, somewhere above them, and glass tinkled as something shattered .
Silas stopped with his hand on the latch.
Rory pushed up from her chair so fast it scraped. “That’s my flat.”
Eva’s face went blank, training taking over. “He found me.”
Silas yanked the bookcase open.
Noise rushed in, along with a scream from the main room and the thick, metallic sting of fresh blood.
A man stumbled past the doorway clutching his throat, eyes wide, hands red and useless.
Behind him, someone else stepped into view, steady, unhurried, holding a pistol as if it weighed nothing at all.
Rory recognised the set of his shoulders before she saw his face.
Evan smiled when he saw her, like he had come home.