AI He saw the crescent of white at her wrist before he saw her properly.
She filled the doorway with an economy of movement, a delivery bag slung over one shoulder and a face that had been sharpened by some private wind. The green neon above the door cut across her black hair, made her blue eyes look colder for a second. Silas set the glass down a little harder than he meant to. It sang against the wood.
"Rory," he said, because some names needed to be said aloud to be believed.
"Silas." She let the delivery bag fall to her feet. Chopsticks clicked inside a paper box. "You still keep the worst biscuits."
He smiled without humour. He had kept the same bar because it had been simpler than keeping a secret. The walls smelled of lemon oil and old smoke. Maps sagged in their frames. A bookcase hid the back room, and the signet ring on his right hand caught the light as he rubbed it, keeping a familiar motion between them.
"You left," she said.
"Lots of people left," he answered, and the sentence could have been about Prague, about spies, about the slow exodus that had emptied the lives he'd known. He moved behind the bar, polishing the glass as an excuse to place a thin wall between them. "You went quiet for a while."
"Life tends to get noisy if you let it," she said. She spoke like someone who had learnt to measure words, to stack them where they would do the hardest work. "I delivered here once. Didn't know the owner counted stock by memory."
He looked at her as if he were cataloguing a set of photographs: the straight shoulder-length black hair, the bright blue eyes, the way her hand hovered near the crescent scar on the inside of her left wrist, the small thing that no one had ever noticed except him now. He had seen scars before, on other people's hands, on his knees. He kept a mental catalogue of necessities, of who could be trusted.
"You live above," he said.
"For now." She shrugged. She kept the shrug small. "Rent's cheaper than the liver I used to have in Brixton."
"Golden Empress?" He named the restaurant before she could, because she worked there, part-time, deliveries. He had known a lot of small facts about the people he'd once watched over. They arrived to him like currency.
"Yu-Fei's place," she said. "Cooking keeps the hands busy at the end of the day. And the boss is kind."
Silas considered the word kind in relation to his life. Kind had a way of softening edges people could not afford. He reached for a bottle, not for drink but for ballast .
"You look …different." He said the truth as question. He had started enough conversations that way. It allowed people to answer without immediate defence.
She laughed, and it was a sound that had learned to duck. "You mean crisper? People think the city buffets you into better posture."
"You cut your hair."
"And you kept the limp. Decorative."
He let the comment sit. He had kept the limp the day Prague shut down and the other men's faces went blank. The limp was history that didn't need repeating. She had kept the scar. There was an economy of loss between them.
"Why didn't you come when Eva wrote?" he asked, and the name landed softly, like a stone dropped in still water .
Rory's shoulders tightened. "Because I made another plan."
"Plans are how people forgive themselves," he said. He wanted the conversation to take the easier route—the weather of their lives, the small talk of loss. But the name Evan, buried in the spaces between her words, made the bar feel smaller. He had known of Evan, as everyone with a network did. Names circulated, reputations whispered down back alleys. He had been in positions where a whispered name could bend a man's future. He had chosen, once, not to bend when the decision should have been simpler.
"You could have come," he said, softer . "We had channels. I had ways to—"
"To what?" Her fingers drummed the paper bag. "To put a shadow over a life I was trying to escape? To make you feel less guilty while I kept looking over my shoulder?"
Silas did not deny guilt. He had shelves of it stacked behind his bar. Guilt had been a currency in Prague that did not convert. "I had a job."
"That job did a good job of being absent." She shook her head. "People disappear in that line of work, Silas. Not the good kind. Wives, friendships, faces. You disappear by consent, but the rest vanish because you left them to."
Silas' mouth tightened. He could have remembered other times he had left, clients who had relied on him. He could have recited procedural excuses. Instead he said, "I sent people."
"You sent people," she echoed, as if tasting a memory . "I watched them stand in the doorway of my flat and not come in."
"You told them not to," he said.
"I told them to be subtle," she corrected. "Which meant ineffective."
A waitress passed with a tray and gave them the distance that bar staff give to conversations with sharper edges. Silas watched the girl's back, the way she crossed the room as if she could carry away the sound of old arguments. He wanted to say sorry in the way adults say sorry, with caveats and footnotes, but he had never been practised at small mercies.
"What did you expect, coming here?" he asked finally. "A reconciliation? Wine? An old friend with a limp and a little bit of redemption?"
"Truth," she said. "Closure. A look that said this was the line and we both stepped over it."
Silas thought of the Prague operation, the mistakes made in the cold, the single message that had trickled through and undone them all. He had packed a life away after that, because the alternative had been to keep living inside the fault. He had thought his retreat would be mercy. He had thought he was sparing them both.
"Well," he said, "truth is rarely comfortable ."
Her mouth flattened. "You seem to be doing all right with comfort now. The bar suits you."
"It's honest work," he said. "People spill the truth here. They also spill everything else."
She watched him. For a moment, the years folded and he saw the boy who had once played at being older than he was, the man who fed words to those who had none. There had been a time when she had sought him out for advice. Now she measured every syllable.
"Do you miss it?" she asked.
"Some days," he admitted. The admission was small, a window opening. "Other days, I miss the certainty of knowing the next wrong could be fixed with a choice."
"Certainty." She tasted the word. "You were always in love with certainty, weren't you? You married it with a neat ring and a tidy resignation."
He felt the signet on his right hand as if it were an anchor. "A ring keeps you honest," he said, because his hands moved to tell the truths he avoided saying aloud.
"You were never honest with me," she said.
The accusation landed with the weight of everything they'd both left unsaid. It was not sharp; it was patient. Silas reached for a towel, recovered his composure like an operative retrieving a plan from memory.
"You said you didn't want help," he reminded her. "I respected it."
"I said I was fine." Her voice dropped to the level of confessions. "When you asked me if I needed to leave, I said I was fine because leaving sometimes means you get followed. I said I was fine because admitting you're not makes you a target even longer. I said I was fine because I was proud in the way stupid people are proud, and silence felt like bargaining."
Silas folded the towel, folding such a way that the movement grounded him. "Pride is expensive," he said. "And lonely."
Their conversation had been a tide, pulling them closer to the raw coast of regret and then pushing them away. The room filled with the regular noises of a bar: a spoon scraped a saucer, a couple argued in sullen tones at the far table, the neon hummed like a small animal. The intimacy of the past was a pressure against the ordinary.
"Are you all right now?" he asked.
She laughed again, softer. "Since when do you ask out of concern?" she said. "Since when did you have spare concern?"
"Since I stopped doing worse things for better reasons," he said.
"You mean since Prague?" Her voice contained an impossible mixture of distaste and curiosity.
"Since then," he said, and the word contained a world .
She glanced at the bookcase, at the seam where the hidden room lived. She had been in the bar before, years ago, in a different life, and she remembered the way the back room smelled of old paper and colder things. She looked at him as if she had always wanted to know whether he'd left a light on for her in the dark.
"You could have told me," she said.
"I could have," he agreed. "But sometimes telling is worse than silence . And sometimes silence is how you keep people safe from the part of you that wants to fix everything."
Her fingers stroked the scar as if reading Braille . "Safety," she repeated. "You made a business of it."
He did not answer. A small pause dragged between them, heavy with the weight of old promises and new refusals.
"Do you want help now?" he asked finally.
"Depends on the help," she said. "If help looks like…organised men in suits who have a way of making people disappear for a while, no thanks. If help looks like someone who'll sit in the dark and listen while I plan my next move, then yes."
Silas inclined his head. He had been an expert in listening once, taught to harvest information from people's silences. He had missed the practice. "I can do that," he said.
A hand slid under the bar. It was routine—trays, napkins, the daily grind. Then a paper envelope slid across the counter and stopped at his palm. The handwriting was no good at civility. The air in the room changed, the ordinary noises dimmed, like the theatre lights lowering.
He did not look at the envelope at once. His fingers curled around it as if something inside would prick. He felt the old reflexes, the compartment blinking open in his skull that catalogued threat. Not very operatively, a bartender. He opened it carefully , like someone used to dealing with fragile things.
A photograph fell into his hand. Colour bled at the edges. It was taken from across a street—a building shot, a unit circled. He could tell the angle, the eye of the camera, the patience of whoever had made it. And at the bottom, in sharp print, a name.
Aurora Carter.
Rory's knife of a breath cut the space between them.
"A warning?" she asked.
Silas flicked the photo toward her. The circle around the flat was neat, clinical. There was a matchstick cross taped to the image, a child's ritual made monstrous in intent.
"You left London because you thought you could choose your silence ," he said. "Someone didn't get the memo."
Footsteps on the staircase above—the slow, measured step of someone who knew the building. A door banged. The sound was accidental and not. Everyone in the bar listened. Rory's fingers closed on the photograph, knuckles whitening.
"Who?" she asked.
Silas did not answer. He reached for a drawer, fingers finding the small, cold thing he had kept for when talk became action. The signet ring gleamed. He slid it on, the weight of a different life settling into his palm, into the room.
There was a soft crash from above, a hollow that sounded like a door being forced, and then a single, dry report, muffled, like someone closing a book with too much force. The sound hit the room and made every head turn. Rory's delivery bag slumped to the floor as if the weight within had been struck .
Silas moved before the second sound could name itself. He swept the towel aside, caught Rory's hand, and the two of them moved together toward the bookcase, toward the seam that had been a secret for fifteen years and now had to be something more.
The back room's panel gave with a practiced sigh. He pushed her through and heard the bar door open, footsteps that were too quick, too purposeful, spilling into the main room they had just left. Voices rose, strangers' clipped voices with an accent he recognised only by an imprint in his spine—operational, not social.
"Stay behind the shelf," he said.
"You're not leaving me," she said.
"You're not leaving the city," he replied. He had not planned for tenderness this evening, but plans had always been unreliable. He felt the old adrenaline slide along nerves that had not been used for everyday life in a long while.
They stood pressed between book spines and old maps while voices moved across wood and glass. The green neon hummed through the cracks. The air tasted of old paper, and something newer, metallic, like the scent that comes before rain. The door to the back room hovered at his fingertips. He could keep the past folded behind him; he could push forward. His next move would be decisive.
Someone laughed in the bar, a brittle, small sound that matched a threat. The man in the doorway called a name that made Rory flinch.
"Aurora Carter, we know you're here."
Silas' hand tightened on his ring until it bit the skin. He could feel the signet's cold decision. He slid the shelf back an inch, listening to the scrape of wood and the low murmur of voices. The world outside the seam of books had not forgiven them. The past had a way of arriving as a knock and then as a bullet.
"Stay low," he said.
She did not argue. She reached for his wrist in a quick, almost careless movement and the crescent scar brushed his palm. For a moment, the years shrank to an inch, to the curve of scar against skin. He saw the point where they had both diverged and the place where they now walked back toward the same danger.
Someone outside whistled, a thin sound that carried menace.
Silas steeled his shoulders. He pushed the panel closed behind them, the books clicking into place like soldiers forming ranks. The bar's warmth dimmed to a near-light through paper and wood.
He found the small radio under the counter, his thumb flicked it to a channel he had not used in years. Noise hummed, then matched him with a single, clear voice.
"Raven's Nest," he whispered into it, shorthand for the place and the man. "We have a problem."
The reply crackled, faint, the voice of a network he had once put together as a safety net and now needed to cast again.
"On our way," the voice said.
Rory looked at him then, face open in a way it had not been for years. There was no time for reconciliation. There was only the sudden present, the old skills called by necessity. Around them, the bar settled into a waiting shape, the maps on the walls keeping watch.
He gave her a curt nod.
"Ready?" he asked.
She smiled without humour, the same expression she had opened with.
"As I'll ever be," she said. A gunshot answered her courage with the rattle of glass in the room below.