AI The bell above the door jingles, high and tinny, slicing through the hum of the jukebox. Rory Carter pauses, her rag hovering over a smudge on the mahogany bar. The neon green sign outside bleeds through the dusty window, casting a sickly glow over the walls—old maps pinned crookedly, black-and-white photos that might be Berlin in ’89, a sailor in a peaked cap. She blinks, wipes faster. *Just a regular *, she murmurs, though it’s half a lie. The bar’s empty save for the dartboard, its darts hanging like forgotten teeth. She turns, ready to say *evening *—stops.
A man stands in the doorway, backlit by the streetlight. Tall, broad. Hair grey-streaked auburn, trimmed close, cut even with the cropped beard. Hazel eyes, sharp as a blade. Limp—left leg stiff, dragging like a weighted bag. He’s wearing a leather jacket, scuffed at the cuffs, a signet ring glinting on his right hand, etched with a black raven. The name hits her like a fist. “Silas?”
He stops, too. The bell jingles again, echoing . “Rory.” His voice is lower, rougher than she remembers, like sandpaper on wood. “Thought I’d recognized the name. The delivery notes… Yu-Fei’s.”
She sets the rag down, hard. The sound startles her, a crack that bounces off the walls. “You—you got a package from Yu-Fei’s?”
“No,” he says, stepping closer . His limp is more pronounced now, a shuffle that makes the floor creak. “I come here to drink. After all these years, I thought… thought the ghost of the place might still hold you.”
Rory stares at him. The man who let her sleep on the couch when the radiator broke, who bought her tea when she cried over Evan’s texts, who taught her to spot a lie before it left someone’s mouth. The man who asked her once, *Ever gonna tell me why you’re running?* and when she’d shaken her head, said, *I’ll wait *.
She looks down at her hands. The scar on her left wrist, a thin white crescent, glints in the light—from a kitchen knife, Evan’s anger, a mistake she’d made thinking she could fight. “Thought you’d left,” she says, finally . “Prague, maybe. Gave up the spy game.”
He laughs, a dry huff that hits the ceiling and falls. “Left? Can’t leave a place that’s buried itself in your bones. The Raven’s Nest… smells the same. Pipe smoke, old beer, regret. Same as when I opened it.”
Rory’s throat tightens. “Regret’s all I know,” she says, before she can stop herself. The words hang, thick, a spiderweb in the air. She looks up. His eyes are on her face, studying, like he’s trying to etch the years into his memory.
“You changed,” he says. Not a question.
“You too,” she fires back, but it’s flat. He’s 58, she’s 25—how could he not? But his hair, once black with a few grey strands, is now auburn streaked with silver, like autumn leaves. His face is lined, crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes, his posture a little stooped, as if he’s carrying a secret the size of a suitcase.
He takes a step closer, and she can smell the whiskey on his breath, warm and sharp. “Better,” he says.
“Better?” She scoffs. “Or just… quieter? You used to talk. About Prague, about the people you saved, about how the world’s not all sunshine and rainbows.”
His face hardens, just for a second. “Prague’s a long time ago.”
“How long?” she asks. “Ten years? Eleven? When I showed up here, red-eyed, trembling, you said… *Aurora, you don’t know me. Stay out of my business.* But then you let me stay. Let me work here, even when Yu-Fei wanted me to deliver at 3 a.m. Let me keep the front room as my bedroom when the rent was two months late.”
He doesn’t answer. He just stands there, watching her, like he’s afraid she’ll disappear if he looks away. The silence stretches, broken only by the ticking of a clock behind the bar—old, brass, slow.
“Why’d you leave?” she asks suddenly . The words are out before she can think better of them.
He flinches. Just once, a sudden jerk, like she’s touched a raw nerve. “Retired. Got hurt.” He nods at his leg. “Knee. Botched operation. The bullet didn’t get me, but the anesthesia did. Paralyzed me for six months. They said I’d never walk again.”
“Botched? Or you were just… bad at it?”
The words land like a punch. She braces, waiting for him to storm out, to call her ungrateful, to say she has no idea what she’s talking about. But his face doesn’t change. “I was good. Too good. Some missions you can’t win. You just… survive.”
“You survived,” she says. “But you stopped living. Opened a bar, closed yourself off. What’s the point of being a spy if you can’t save the people you care about?”
He steps back, as if the words hit him. “You think I wanted to open a bar? Thought I’d grow old counting change and telling drunks they should *just smile * at their problems? Eva wrote to me. Said you were in London, that you’d run off to escape an ex. Said you needed help. I should’ve ignored her. Should’ve let you figure it out on your own. But….” He trails off, looks at the scar on her wrist, and for a second, she sees Evan’s face in his eyes—cold, angry, *mine *. “You were sixteen that day I found you, huddled in an alley, crying. And you fought back. Kicked him in the balls, I think. Said you weren’t going to let him take what you had left.”
Rory’s breath catches. She didn’t remember that. Not the specifics. Just the cold, the rain, the way someone had grabbed her arm, skin as hard as a stone, and then… a hand on her shoulder, gentle, saying, *It’s over. You’re safe now *.
“You came looking for me?” she asks.
“Every day for a month,” he says. “I watched you through the window. Delivering packages, ducking into the bar when the rain got too bad. You’d sit in the corner, read a book—*law * books, for chrissakes—and never drink, never go out. I thought… if I could just keep you here, keep you safe, you’d start living again. Let yourself *breathe *.”
“I did start living,” she says. “I work at Yu-Fei’s. I make good money. I have a routine. Some people need that.”
“Routine’s not living,” he says. “It’s surviving. Like me.”
She looks away, towards the bookshelf that hides the secret room. Silas had told her once, *Don’t go back there. It’s not for you *. Now, she wonders what secrets are buried behind it—dead letters, a gun, a photo of a woman who isn’t Eva, or maybe she is.
“You never told me your name,” she says.
His blink is slow, deliberate. “My name? Silas Blackwood. No nickname. Just… Blackwood.”
“Aurora Carter,” she says. “But you can call me Rory. Only my father called me Aurora. He said it suited me. Like a song.”
He smiles. It’s small, tight, but it’s there. “Rory.”
She closes the distance between them, halfway around the bar. “Why didn’t you tell me you were Eva’s father? After all these years?”
His smile fades. “Eva and I… we had a fight. When she was sixteen, she ran off with a boy. We tried to find her. Found her in a motel, pregnant. She hated me for it. Said I’d always been too controlling, that I didn’t trust her. Told me I’d never understand what it was like to be her. I should’ve trusted her to make her own mistakes. But I didn’t. And now… now she won’t even return my calls.”
Rory stares at him, at the way his hands are clenched , at the way his eyes are glassy—like he’s trying to hold back a storm. The man who saved her is, in some way, the man who abandoned another.
“Why are you telling me this now?” she asks.
He takes a deep breath, like he’s trying to fill his lungs with something, anything . “Because I’m dying. Cancer. Stage four. Spread to my bones. The doctors say I have a few months. Maybe less.”
The words hit her like a truck. She staggers back, hitting the bar with her elbow. The pain makes her gasp. “No. You’re fine. You just… you have a limp. That’s it.”
“Cancer,” he says, quiet . “Not a bullet, not a botched operation. This time, there’s no fixing it. No coming back.”
She looks at him, at the way he’s holding himself, and she realizes she never really *saw * him. Not the man, just the landlord, the mentor, the man who helped her escape Evan but never let her escape the past . The same past that’s still clawing at her, even now.
“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” he says.
“You didn’t hurt me,” she says. “You just… didn’t know how to help me. How to let me help myself.”
He reaches into his jacket, pulls out a photo. It’s a younger Silas, in a dark uniform, a gun slung over his shoulder, smiling. Next to him, a woman—Eva, she realizes, 18, but the same sharp eyes, the same tilt of the chin.
“Eva’s in Dublin,” he says. “Shes got a daughter now. A little girl, same age as you were when you first came here. She has my eyes. Her name is Lila. After her mother’s grandmother.”
Rory takes the photo, her fingers trembling. Lila. She can almost see her—dark hair, sharp eyes, a temper like fire.
“We can fix it,” she says. “Me and you, we can… I can write. You can call. Tell her—tell her about you. About how brave you were. About how you saved me.”
“Fix it?” He laughs, a wet, broken sound. “What’s the point? I don’t have time. I don’t have *anything * left.”
She looks up, and there it is—the regret. The guilt. The man who spent his life saving others can’t save himself, or the ones he loves.
“You could try,” she says.
He shakes his head, but he’s smiling, a little sad, a little tired. “You’re a lot like her, you know. The girl who fought back. The one I should’ve protected, not kept locked away.”
“Eva?”
“Both of you,” he says. He pauses, then adds, “Tell her I’m sorry. For everything. Tell her I love her. Even if she never says it back.”
She nods, unable to speak. The clock behind the bar ticks on, louder now, a heartbeat.
He turns to leave, his limp more pronounced. At the door, he stops, turns back. “You’re living, Rory. More than I did. Don’t stop. Even when it gets hard. Especially then.”
She watches him go, the bell jingles, a reminder that time doesn’t wait. The jukebox starts up again, a soft, slurring tune—*I’ll Be Seeing You *. She sits down, the bar empty around her, the scar on her wrist throbbing.
She picks up a pen, finds a napkin from Yu-Fei behind the bar, and starts writing. The words flow, slow at first, then faster, until she can’t stop. *Dear Lila *, she writes, *Your grandfather is a brave man. He saved me when I needed saving…* And as she writes, she feels it—the weight of time easing, just a little, the regret unspooling like thread.
The bar grows dark as she writes. The neon sign flickers, but she doesn’t notice. She’s already moving, towards the bookshelf, towards the secret room, towards the secrets she kept for too long.
The bell jingles again, but she doesn’t look up.
She’s home.