Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTYXP8AGF0CE5Q6W6B2E2WT

The green neon bled across the wet pavement, turning the November rain into liquid emerald. Aurora pushed through the heavy oak door of The Raven’s Nest, her shoulders hunched against the wind that had chased her down Greek Street. She had avoided this room for six days, taking the external staircase to her flat, pretending the buzz of voices below was merely city static. Tonight, the silence upstairs had grown teeth. She stood at the threshold, dripping onto the scarred floorboards. Maps papered the walls—Budapest, Prague, Belgrade—cities pinned with rusted tacks like specimens in a case. Black-and-white photographs crowded the gaps between cartography: anonymous men in trench coats, women with cigarette holders, landscapes blurred by motion or time. The air tasted of charred lemon peel and whisky fug. A man moved behind the bar, his gait uneven, favouring his left leg. Auburn hair, heavy with grey at the temples, caught the low light. He reached for a bottle, and the silver signet ring on his right hand scraped against the glass with a sound that made her teeth ache. Aurora’s fingers twitched toward the crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist, hidden beneath her jacket cuff. She stepped forward. A floorboard creaked. He turned. Hazel eyes, flecked with gold, tracked from her boots to her face. For a moment, nothing registered beyond professional assessment— sizing up a potential threat, a potential customer. Then the cloth in his hand stilled. "Brendan Carter’s girl." Not a question. His voice had acquired gravel since she’d last heard it, a whisky-and-cigarette rasp that belonged to someone older than the fifty-eight she calculated him to be. "Silas." The name emerged flat, toneless. She had not prepared for this collision. In her mental geography, Silas Blackwood remained sealed in the Cardiff years, a figure who appeared at her father’s dinner table in a linen suit, discussing jurisdiction and Vienna over her mother’s lamb stew. She had been fifteen, ambitious, convinced that law was a sword she would wield with surgical precision. She had not expected to find him here, limping between beer taps in a Soho basement. "You’re taller." He resumed polishing the glass, the motion deliberate, circular. "Or perhaps I’ve simply shrunk." Aurora slid onto a stool. The leather sighed beneath her weight. "The leg?" "Prague. A disagreement about departure routes." He set the glass down with a precise click. "You’re living upstairs." It wasn’t an accusation, but the weight of it settled between them like sediment. She had rented the flat through an agency, a faceless transaction involving deposits and terse emails. She had not known the building belonged to him. If she had, she might have kept running. "I arrived last Tuesday." "I’ve been in Berlin." He reached for a bottle of Bushmills, pouring two fingers into a tumbler without asking. The amber liquid caught the neon light from the window. "Your father wrote to me. Said you’d left Cardiff." The mention of Brendan Carter—still practicing, still disappointed—sent a sharp pain through her sternum. She took the glass, her thumb brushing the scar on her wrist. The crescent shape, a childhood accident with a bicycle chain, had faded to white, but it still itched when she lied. "I left university," she said. "I know." "You know everything, then." "I know you were third in your cohort. I know you clerked for Justice Harrow in your second year." He braced his hands against the bar, the signet ring tapping a slow rhythm against the wood. "I know you were meant to be called to the Bar next spring." The past conditional hung in the air, heavy as incense. Aurora brought the whisky to her lips. It burned clean, medicinal. She remembered Silas differently—broader, unbroken, laughing at something her father had said about the European Court. Now the lines around his eyes ran deep as trenches, and his left knee stiffened when he shifted his weight. "Evan," she said. The name tasted of copper. Silas’s expression shuttered, not with surprise, but with a recognition that suggested he had been waiting for this particular ghost. He reached beneath the counter, producing a second glass for himself. "The boyfriend." "Fiancé, briefly." "Until?" "Until I realised the bruises weren’t accidents." She rolled the glass between her palms, watching the light fracture. "Until he locked me in the bathroom during a dinner party because I’d spoken to his colleague for too long. Until I stopped being Laila Carter and became something he kept in a box." Laila. She hadn’t used the diminutive in months. It had died somewhere between the M4 and the Severn Bridge, along with her textbooks and her certainty. Silas drank. His throat moved, the grey in his beard catching the dim light. When he set the glass down, his hand remained wrapped around it, knuckles white. "I should have been there," he said. "You were in Prague. Or Berlin. Or wherever the Crown needed you before they put you out to pasture." The bitterness surprised her. She had not known she was carrying it. "I retired five years ago." He touched his left knee, unconsciously, a soldier’s check on an old wound. "But I knew Evan’s family. Shipping, primarily. Some concerns in the Baltic. I had reports—" "You had reports." Aurora laughed, a short, hollow sound. "Of course you did. You’re the Spymaster, even when you’re pulling pints." The accusation landed. Silas straightened, and for a moment she saw the field agent he had been—the straight spine, the predator’s stillness. Then the barkeeper returned, shoulders rounding, the limp asserting itself as he moved along the counter. "I had reports," he repeated, quieter. "And I did nothing. Because you were civilian. Because Brendan assured me you were happy. Because I told myself that the girl who argued Habeas Corpus at sixteen could handle a man with soft hands and a hard temper." He reached across the bar. Before she could withdraw, his fingers closed around her wrist—not the scarred left, but the right, turning it palm-up. His grip was warm, dry, trembling slightly. "I failed you," he said. "Not as an agent. As your father’s friend. As someone who watched you once, at a garden party in Penarth, explain the finer points of the Geneva Convention to a Border Collie with more conviction than most QCs." Aurora looked at his hand covering hers. The silver ring pressed cold against her pulse point. Outside, a siren dopplered past, red light washing through the green neon, turning the maps on the wall the colour of old blood. She thought of the secret room behind the bookshelf—she had heard the rumours from the delivery drivers, the ones who whispered about Silas’s "meetings"—and wondered how many other bruised girls he had catalogued without touching. "I’m not her anymore," she said. "The girl with the dog. The one with the future." "Neither am I." He released her wrist, the loss of contact immediate. "I’m a landlord with a bad knee and a cellar full of Czech beer I can’t sell. I’m a man who looks at maps and sees only exits, never destinations." He poured again. The bottle gurgled, emptying. Aurora touched her left wrist, tracing the crescent scar through the fabric of her sleeve. In the low light, Silas’s hazel eyes were opaque, unreadable. "What now?" she asked. "We drink." He lifted his glass. "We acknowledge that time is a blunt instrument. Tomorrow, if you like, I’ll show you the back room. The books need cataloguing, and you always had a systematic mind." The offer hung suspended, a thread connecting who she had been to whoever she might become. Not penance. Not rescue. Simply work, and walls that knew how to keep secrets. Aurora clinked her glass against his. The sound rang clear in the empty bar, drowning out the neon’s electric hum. Outside, the rain continued, washing the streets clean, or as clean as London ever got.