AI A pint glass hit the floor and exploded into a fan of light and beer. Aurora kicked the chair back with the heel of her shoe, not gentle, not careful, the paper bag from Yu-Fei's rubbing against her thigh like a guilty hand.
"Oi," someone barked behind the bar .
Silas came out of the secret room with the slow, habitual patience of a man who measured his movements to save a sore knee. The green neon over the door crawled across his face. He stopped halfway, at the sight of her, as if someone had paused the film.
"Rory." His voice folded into the low music of the bar and the sound of glass.
She did not let herself smile. She did not, either, look away. Bright blue eyes caught the neon, the bar, the maps on the wall. Her black hair stuck briefly to her cheek where sweat had collected. The crescent scar on her left wrist showed when she threw the delivery bag onto the counter; the bag crumpled on top of the broken glass.
"Silas," she said, and her tone stripped whatever formalities might have existed between them. "Long time."
"Longer than either of us wanted." He set his hand on the counter. The silver signet on his right hand caught the light and held it like a small, private sun. "You alright? You look—" He stopped. Words for the way people aged either swelled into sentiment or dissolved into rudeness. He chose nothing.
"I am fine." She stripped her gloves off with a small, impatient motion and pressed them into the counter. "Work's fine. Yu-Fei's fine. The road's fine." The list hung like a set of defensive walls. "What are you doing here? Thought you were retired."
Silas's eyes drifted past her to the back door, the bookshelf that barely concealed the secret room, the maps that had once been battle plans in a different life. He smiled without teeth, the habit of a man who had smiled to keep from saying too much.
"I am retired," he said. "This is that retirement. The Nest is quieter than Prague, I grant you. Fewer gunshots, more bar fights about trivia. Mostly the latter, which is preferable."
She laughed then, a sharp sound that cut against the rim of silence . The laugh softened something in the bar, made a woman wiping glasses at the end of the counter glance up and then away.
"You look older," Aurora said, because there must be some honesty to keep the conversation honest. "But you still wear the same ring."
Silas's fingers toyed with the signet. "The ring was made to fit a different person. It has a strong memory."
"Like everything else here." Her gaze skimmed the black and white photographs until it stilled on one of a younger Silas in a suit that still fitted his shoulders like a promise. "You stare at the maps like they might mean something again."
"They do." He turned his body, the limp making him small for a second, then large again. "Different things, though. Routes now, not exits. Where to hide the good whiskey."
Aurora sat on a stool, too quickly , the stool complaining in a squeak. She uncapped a bottle from ceramic in the rack and did not drink. She had always been a woman who moved first and explained later; the controlling nerves of a law student had given way to quicker instincts, the kind that read danger like a late-night delivery route.
"You always were good at reading a room," she said. "Better than reading a statute."
"Someone gave you that line before." He stepped closer, the bar between them like the thin, familiar distance that had kept them safe when both of them were younger and not yet ready to name their fears. "You kept up with law then. What happened? Cardiff to London. That's not an errand."
She flinched. The name Evan hovered, sharp and uninvited. She folded her hands to hide the scar on her wrist. For a beat she let the old versions of herself enter the room, the student with arguments practised into the shape of her mouth, the girl with a neat binder and a stubborn jaw. Then she let them go.
"I ran," she said. "Fled is a dreamier word, but I fled. Someone I thought was safe ended up having other plans. Ava dragged me to London. I took a job. Got a room above a bar because it's cheap and the landlord pretends not to notice the ornaments."
Silas watched her with an expression that measured facts the way a surgeon measured pulse . "You ran where we told you to." He folded his arms . "You remember the plan."
She gave him a thin smile. "Plans, right. You taught me to compartmentalise. It works until it doesn't."
There was a shadow in his face then, an old fracture the years had not mended. He had watched operations that failed the size of continent, heard names roll like stones, carried the weight of miscalculations in a limp and a sleep that came too easily some nights. Aurora had once been the person he expected to save herself. She had been clever enough. She had been brave enough. The regret in his gaze did the unsaid work for him.
"You could have come to me," he said, soft, and the softness hurt more than a reprimand.
"I could have." Her jaw ticked. "But you retired. You closed doors." She did not say that she felt abandoned, or maybe she did, in the edge of her voice. "You left the front lines, Silas. Places that need you kept needing you. I needed a map and the map's gone."
Silas reached into the till and took out an old, folded cigarette packet, though neither of them smoked. He thumbed it like someone looking for an answer written on paper. "I walked away from the field for reasons you know. Prague was not kind. I failed to come back whole. I thought a bar would be manageable. I thought I could still be useful by being visible. Obviously vanity."
"You failed to be visible when it mattered." That came out harder than she intended. It landed like a thrown coin between them. "When Evan started showing up at lectures. When things began to go dark. You said the Nest was safe—"
"I said it was the best I could offer." He put the cigarette packet back. "I could have done better. I could have moved faster. I failed you then and I have felt like a man with a stone in his boot ever since."
Regret, when voiced, is a dangerous thing. It pleads. It admits. It opens soft places. Aurora had clenched herself closed around such moments for years. She felt the pull to forgive, to trace the lines back to softer truths. She also felt the long catalogue of evenings where a phone did not ring when she needed it to, of doors not answered. Time had a talent for collecting complaints.
"Prague did that to you," she said. "It did that to a lot of people. It was messy."
"Messy is not the word," Silas replied. "Wrong is the word. We were wrong about the variables . We paid for it. I paid for it." He lifted his chin, as if to seal a wound with bone. "And if you think I closed a door on you, I apologise. Old habits are hard to break."
The apology was not clean. It sat in the air, wet and present, and then someone in the corner laughed a laugh that sounded like they were trying to be cocky and ended sounding thin. The bartender, a young man with an unfortunate nose, slid over a glass with an apologetic tilt.
"Keep it," Silas said, a small courtesy that felt like truce . "You didn't come here to settle debts, Aurora."
"No," she said. "I came because they sent me down."
"Who sent—"
She stopped. The bar's doorway flung open and two men walked in like the closing of a gate. They looked like they had been used by life, not finished with it. One of them wore a jacket that had seen better winters; the other smelled of sweat and something sharper, the smoke of alliances.
"Rory Carter?" the man in the jacket called, and his voice folded itself into the room like a claim.
Silas moved slow but decisive, the years of habit making him faster than the limp suggested. He stepped so that his body set itself in front of Aurora. The men hesitated, assessing the terrain, the patrons, the owner.
"Not tonight," Silas said. "We do not drag old ghosts into the Nest."
"Where is she?" The man reached for the counter but kept his hand out of harm's way. "You owe, Carter. You ran with the money."
Aurora felt heat press against her skin behind her ribs. The name landed wrong. She had been using other names, small lies, to keep things neat—no lingering debts, no records. Evan's memory, or someone who knew him, had never fully left. The scar on her wrist prickled like old frostbite.
"I have no money," she said, and the avoidance in her voice was not a lie so much as a resource. "I deliver for Yu-Fei. Ask him."
"Do you think we want his dumplings?" The man laughed. "Heard you had a run-in with Evan. Thought you were safe. Silas, he's a name in bad papers. He doesn't forget."
Silas's hand found the signet ring, the ring that belonged to lineages, to promises made under oath. He could feel the weight of it. He had taught people to find angles, to read a room for exits. He had forgotten for a heartbeat the smallest detail of hospitality: when threats came through the door, you learned who wanted the fight and who wanted the story.
"Outside," he said, quietly, but the word carried. "Now."
The men looked at him and then at Aurora. Pride warred with calculation. Pride lost.
"Outside then." The man in the jacket smiled in a way that claimed ownership of the rest of the night.
Aurora stood. Her stool scraped; the sound felt like a pistol . Her wrists wanted to shake. She had rehearsed running drills in the back alleyways of the city for reasons she would not have named if someone had asked. The old rules pinged in her head: don't run straight, don't look back, don't let them herd you underground. She broke two rules at once. She looked at Silas.
"You shouldn't have done that," she said, voice low .
"I am not explaining hospitality to you," Silas replied. His voice had an edge like a polished blade. He pushed away from the counter and led the way to the back door, the men following like storm clouds.
In the doorway, rain greeted them with immediate intent. It plastered Aurora's hair to her neck. The cold hit like a truth. Silas closed the door behind them in a move that was more theatre than lock; patrons craned necks at the sound. The neon sign painted their faces the colour of old promises.
The man in the jacket stepped forward. Up close, his jaw was hard as a decision. He did not look like Evan, though the name he carried did. "You run with the cash," he said to Aurora. "You run with our people's money. You owe."
"I don't owe you." Aurora's hands curled into fists around the fabric of her jacket. "You don't know what you're talking about."
"You ran from Evan." The other man said the name like a benediction and spat. "That's payment enough."
Silas's hand moved then, quick, practised. He pinched the man's wrist with the kind of force that left a message. "Leave. Now. Out of my doorway. Or do this like men who do not want trouble and walk out with the dignity you had before you came in."
The man's face changed in a breath, the kind of change men show before they break. He stepped back. He mouthed something that was not a threat but a promise . "This is not over."
He and his companion went, the rain swallowing their shapes. The door shut. The bar was a room with breath. Inside, the patrons went about a thousand small recoveries, the conversations knitting themselves back together around the hole of near-violence. Silas leaned against the door and laughed once, a dry sound that did not reach his eyes.
"First rule of the Nest," he said. "Do not let anyone make threats in your doorway. Second rule, if they do, make sure they leave embarrassed."
Aurora looked at him. Her bright blue eyes were not the same as they had been in Cardiff. They were wired with the present. She felt the old versions of herself like thin costumes she could step into and out of. For a moment she wanted nothing more than to fold into the safety of a remembered arrangement, to let Silas take the weight , to let him be the man who fixed things.
"Thank you," she said, and the words were small, but they came .
Silas did not soften. He simply moved his hand to the signet and ran his thumb over the crest. "Get out while the rain feeds the pavement. Go home, Aurora. Find out who sent them. Tell Yu-Fei to watch his shipments."
She hesitated, the city holding its breath. The secret room's bookshelf gave the faintest creak behind them, like a reminder of other doors. A car alarm somewhere screamed, a high sore note that threaded through the night. Aurora's thumb rubbed the scar on her wrist without thinking. The contact stung, and the sting was a compass.
"I will," she said. "And Silas—"
"Don't make promises you will not keep," he said, and it was not quite a rebuke . It was not quite forgiveness either .
She turned to leave then, and for a second the two of them existed in the space people occupy before history closes around them again. She reached the door and her hand touched the handle. Behind her, someone called her name in a voice that sounded like the past had come back with better tailoring.
"Rory!"
The voice split the air. The bar heard it and froze. The sound of the name had the weight of a remembered thing, the kind that unravels neat patterns. Aurora's hand on the handle tightened. She did not turn.
Footsteps quickened on the pavement. Someone ran toward them from the street, a figure wrapped in rain like an accusation. Silas's hand slid to his pocket where, once, a different device would have lived. He found only the memory of it. He looked at Aurora. There was nowhere to put the regret now.
The man on the pavement reached for Aurora and a flash of a familiar face crossed his features, not the face of Evan but of someone who had a claim on her . He called out a name, and the bar, the city, the night all folded into the single thin wire that held them together.
"Rory, stop running."