AI She snatched the glass before he could finish his sentence. The liquor sloshed, a bright green smear of the neon sign flaring in the rim like a small, urgent wound.
"You always drank neat," he said.
"Always," she answered, more tightly than she meant to. Her wrist brushed the crescent scar under her sleeve. It felt like an accusation.
He sat back on the stool as if the years were weight and not distance. Hazel eyes measured her over the rim of his glass. The auburn in his hair had silver now, the neat beard had softened the lines of a face she remembered as lean and dangerous. He favoured his right leg, the limp subtle, practised—an old soldier's rhythm. His silver signet ring caught the green again, then the light fell away.
"Silas?" The name fell out like a test. She had rehearsed different openings for this moment, nothing like this: no stage, no audience, just the bar's low hum and the clack of a poker machine in the corner.
"You look like someone who hasn't slept in a week," he said, then, almost apologetically , "or ten."
She laughed, small. "Between shift work and a landlord who insists on 'community events' upstairs, who sleeps?"
He watched her hands. The fingers had a steadiness she recognised and did not trust, the way a person keeps their hands visible in a room full of sharp things.
"You left Cardiff suddenly ," he said.
"You left sooner."
Silas's mouth tightened. "I vanished for a while. Prague. A mistake that grew teeth."
"Prague." The word existed as a memory she had been taught to keep tidy. He did not have to explain. She had read the small items in the back of newspapers, the quiet paragraphs about 'operations gone wrong'. She had been twenty when his name was whispered at family dinners like a prayer gone wrong.
"You were twenty-six," she said, answering something he had not spoken. "You opened a bar."
"It was the sensible thing." He tapped the signet ring with a finger. "A front, a hobby, a place to keep certain conversations off the record."
"You've always said off the record and meant it." She did not move to sit, though a seat waited. Habit placed distance between them; habit kept edges sharp.
Silas tilted his head, old courtesy returning for a moment. "You never finished law."
She bristled despite herself. "Pre-Law was an accounting of what I thought I should do. I switched to counting bus routes."
"You delivery-girl for a Chinese restaurant is a kind of counting," he said. "It keeps you present."
"It pays," she said. "And it buys my rent."
His gaze softened, not with pity but with a calculation that had once made him very dangerous. "You're good with numbers," he said. "You always were. You were a quick study. I thought you'd be an advocate, not a courier."
"I thought I'd be something clean," she said. "Turns out clean can be another kind of dull."
A half-smile ghosted over his lips. "You have never been dull."
They circled the past like two wary animals in a shed. Outside, the neon sign hummed, casting the maps on the walls into strange, green seas. The Raven's Nest smelled of lemon-oil polish and the ghost of cigar smoke; the photographs on the walls watched them as if remembering things they would not say aloud .
"You never called," she said suddenly .
He took a breath. He spoke only when necessary; when he did, the sentences were precise, surgical. "I had to step away."
"For what?"
He pinched the bridge of his nose. It was a gesture she remembered from when he taught her to keep her voice even in interrogation rooms. "Duty, poor timing, worse management. I left because I wanted to stop being asked for things I could not give without losing pieces of myself."
"You thought leaving pieces behind would make them easier to find later." Her voice skewered between memory and syrup. The pub quieted for a moment; a couple at the far table lowered their voices, sensing the shift.
Silas's laugh was a small, dry thing. "No. I thought I would be able to hold them together for longer than I did. I miscalculated."
"Miscalculated." The word had tasted metallic coming off his tongue. A miscalculation in Prague had cost him a leg and something else he did not say. He did not have to .
"You came to London because of Eva," he said. "You were—"
"Running," she supplied. Her mouth filled with years; she swallowed them. "From Evan. From a history I could not dress up in arguments."
He watched her. He had the look of a man assembling a map from fragments, knowing where the roads ended and began again. "He followed you."
The bar seemed to inhale. Around them, the usual patrons moved through their rituals; a man laughed too loudly at a joke he had heard before. Above, the flat she rented thrummed with an argument in the thin walls. It felt like the world was a living organism with small complaints.
"How do you know that?" she asked.
He did not answer directly. "Networks breathe. People exchange notes in napkins. A name appears."
"You've been watching me," she said, but the accusation lacked heat . It was softer, edged with something she had not named.
"I watched because I worried."
"You were right to worry." She set the glass down carefully , avoiding the green reflection. "You always were."
Silas's signet ring turned on his finger. He had a habit of worrying that metal like one might stroke a rosary. For a moment he looked simply tired, the fatigue of a man who had seen too much and still had to stay awake.
"Do you regret leaving?" she asked.
He considered, and that small, internal pause told her more than any explanation. "Yes," he said finally. "In ways that are exacting. In ways that hurt other people. In ways that make me wake some mornings and wonder if the ledger would have balanced differently had I stayed."
She wanted to tell him about Evan's calls, about the nights she had slept on trains with the bag of change tucked under her jacket. She wanted to tell him she had wanted to call him once, maybe to slip into the safety of a name that meant something. Instead she shrugged. "I thought I could manage on my own."
"You could." He said it plainly, almost too plainly. "But management is not safety."
The phrase landed heavy and true. Her jaw tightened. "Sometimes safety is a closed door."
"There are closed doors and there are doors you lock from the wrong side," he said. "I have—" He bit the word off like something it might sting to speak. "I have kept people behind doors because I thought it would keep them whole."
"I used to think you were a hero," she said, and the admission surprised her . "You told stories like you were crafting them out of purpose."
He looked at her then with something approaching regret that was not about him. "Rory, I wasn't always careful with stories. Sometimes I wrote people into plots without checking they wanted to be in them."
The bar's sound swelled with laughter then dropped on cue, as if the room tilted back into its regular orbit. A young man dropped a pint; the crash spooked an old woman into coughing. For a second neither of them moved, suspended in the thin half-light.
"You could have said so," she said, because she did not know how to say anything else. "You could have told me to run, to hide, to change my name."
"I did not know you needed that kind of instruction." He reached for a napkin, wrung it once and folded it with careful fingers. "I assumed you would find yourself."
"You assumed a lot," she said, and bitterness laced the words before she could temper them.
"And you assumed I would not notice." He offered the napkin as if it were an olive branch. She took it and wrapped her fingers around the paper with no ceremony.
A bell over the door clanged. The bar's air shifted; the room's attention rolled toward the entrance like a skin pulled tight. Two men came in, well-cut suits and the kind of quiet that meant they had been trained to move without creating friction. One of them paused at the doorway and let his gaze pass over the room as if checking items off a list . It stopped on her.
"Rory Carter," he said, and the name landed like a verdict .
Silas's hand was on the counter before she could think of moving. The signet ring flashed against the wood.
"We're just closing a small matter," the man said, pleasant and thin.
"Leave," Silas said. He did not use threats. He spoke like a man withdrawing curtains.
"Silas Blackwood." The man's lips tightened at that name as though it had been expected , then chewed on it. "We have a question."
The other man moved with a practiced disregard for spectacle. He came up close enough that she could smell cologne and something cleaner, chemical and sharp. He held a small photograph, the kind printed on ordinary paper, worn at the edges.
"Recognise her?" he asked, and his finger tapped the photo where a pale face smiled back, hair shorter, the bright blue eyes unmistakable even in grainy black and white.
She could see it, the image of past self like a paper cut where memory bled. Her throat closed.
Silas's bar became a different room in an instant. The maps on the walls and the novels on the shelves seemed to lean forward. The bookshelf behind the bar, the one with the novels no one touched, sat like a sleeping hand. She remembered its promise, a secret room often joked about when the crowd was too loud.
"You're making a mistake," she said, and it sounded thin, rehearsed.
The man smiled like he had all the time in the world. "Mistakes are expensive. Allegiance, even more so."
"She lives above," Silas said. "You've come to the wrong place."
"A home. A harbour." The man's voice had no warmth . "A harbour will do, but harbours wash up old things."
His companion produced a small device with a red light. It hummed like an insect. The hum felt obscene, intimate. People in the bar shifted, backs scraping against seats. A baby's wail started from somewhere outside, an unhelpful soundtrack.
Silas's signet ring hit the wood again, a dry sound full of intent. He did not reach for the hidden switch in the shelf, though his hand hovered as if knowing the precise location.
"You've been careful," the man said. "Too careful. We prefer neat ends."
Rory backed up, the stool knocking a little as she moved. Her scar burned under her sleeve like heat left over from a cauterised wound.
"Stay where you are," the man said. He sounded like a judge who had suddenly taken pleasure in the sentence.
Silas did not move his jaw but his eyes sharpened. The limp in his left leg shifted; he had stood a fraction differently as if preparing to take weight on the other foot .
"Don't," he said, not as suggestion but as a final, brittle truth .
The man laughed softly . "You don't get to tell us much, Silas."
From somewhere behind the bookshelf, a faint click sounded as if some long-untouched mechanism had awakened. The hidden door breathed once, a sliver of darkness yawning between the paperbacks.
Time narrowed to thready focus. Her hand flew to her bag beneath the stool. She felt foolish for thinking a delivery bag could be a shield, ridiculous and brave.
"Don't move," the man repeated. The device's red light pulsed . His partner's hand rested at his side like someone prepared to pluck a string that would snap the world tight.
Silas leaned forward. "Rory." The name was a blade and a plea all at once. "Get out of the open."
She could see, in the slight tilt of his mouth, the memory of other rooms where he had said the same and not had time to mean it. The maps on the wall folded into shadow. The neon sign buzzed like a warning.
She stood, every muscle set to run, but the doorway behind her filled with the cool, sidelong stares of the two men. The bar's regulars had frozen, caught between curiosity and self-preservation. A pint clinked against glass; someone swore under their breath.
"Now," the man said, and the quiet that followed had the shape of a loaded gun.