AI The green neon above the door buzzed like an insect trapped in glass as Aurora Carter shouldered through the Raven’s Nest crowd with a cardboard cup balanced in one hand and her phone in the other.
“Rory,” she heard someone say, sharp enough to cut through the clatter of pints.
She froze mid-step, the cup tipping but not spilling. She hadn’t walked into the bar for nostalgia. She’d walked in because Yu-Fei’s Golden Empress had undercooked her patience, and because Silas’ bar kept her out of the rain and out of the landlords’ questions.
She turned anyway.
Silas Blackwood stood by the counter, one hand resting near his silver signet ring, the other wrapped around a glass that looked too heavy for something that clear. His hair had gone greyer at the temples, his limp made the way he shifted weight almost choreographed, and the older he looked, the more deliberate his stillness became. Like he’d spent years training his body not to betray him.
His hazel eyes found hers with the same quiet authority she remembered, the one that made people talk faster and mean less.
“Aurora,” he said, and the name landed like a key into a lock. “You’ve got the same face you did when you thought you could outtalk the world.”
Aurora’s mouth went dry.
She’d told herself Silas was a man you met in emergencies. A man you remembered by reputation. She hadn’t allowed for the improbable detail that he could recognise her without effort, without apology.
Her left wrist flashed as she steadied the cup, the small crescent-shaped scar tugging under the skin when she moved. The scar always did that, like it wanted to remind her she survived things that were supposed to swallow her.
“Don’t,” she said. The word came out flatter than she intended. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“You remember me like we’re still friends.” She managed a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “And you use the old version of my name. Rory. Who says Rory at twenty-five?”
Silas’s gaze flicked to the cup in her hand, then to the delivery bag strap crossing her shoulder, then back to her face as if he counted her lies like coins.
“Someone who still hears it in the background,” he said. “Sit down before you drop that and spill your virtue on my floor.”
Aurora glanced down, then at the bar around her, at the dark wood and maps pinned under glass, at the black-and-white photographs that looked like they’d been taken in rooms where people didn’t ask for permission. She could feel eyes, too many, and she didn’t like how quickly they moved away when she looked back.
She didn’t sit. She stepped in closer instead, lowering her voice.
“What are you doing here?” she asked. “You don’t drink. You don’t… you don’t hang around in places with green lights.”
Silas’s mouth twitched. Not a smile. Something that wanted to be one and refused.
“I own the place,” he said. “I hang around because people like you tend to appear when they think they’ve got a clean exit.”
Aurora stared. Her chest tightened, not with fear exactly, but with the irritation of being seen through. She’d spent years tightening her own exits, building habits out of caution.
“Clean exit,” she repeated, and she hated how close the phrase felt to something she’d told herself on repeat after leaving Evan. After Cardiff. After the last time she’d promised herself she could just walk away from a problem.
Silas took a sip from his glass. The limp in his left leg pulled at the movement, subtle, like a reminder he carried without decoration.
“You still deliver,” he said, nodding toward the strap again.
“And you still collect secrets.” Aurora leaned in, letting her eyes harden. “That’s not an accusation. That’s… an assessment.”
His signet ring caught the bar’s low light when he turned his hand, silver flashing quick as a blade. Aurora felt her throat tighten. She hadn’t seen that ring since she was seventeen, since the last time she’d believed in hands that made the right moves.
Silas set his glass down. The sound cut cleanly through the noise.
“We need to talk,” he said.
Aurora barked a laugh. “We’re in a bar.”
“Bars are where people talk when they think the walls are too thick to carry.” Silas’s voice stayed level. “Come to the back.”
He didn’t gesture at the secret room the way a man indicated a shortcut. He simply walked, and Aurora followed because her body moved before her caution could argue.
They threaded through tables. A man in a flat cap leaned forward as Aurora passed and muttered something she couldn’t catch. His eyes snagged on her scar and flicked away, like he’d seen a label.
Silas didn’t acknowledge the man. He reached the far wall where bookshelves lined up like they belonged in an office. He touched one spine, slid it aside, and the bookshelf moved with a soft, practiced ease .
Aurora caught the smell of dust and old paper. She caught something else too, faint but sharp beneath it, like ink dried too long in a sealed room.
She stepped through after him.
The secret room held a long table, two chairs, and a lamp with a shade the colour of bruises. Maps cluttered the tabletop, their edges darkened as if they’d been handled with wet hands. A single file sat open. Aurora didn’t need to read a title to know it wasn’t for leisure.
Silas shut the bookshelf behind them. The sound of the bar became distant, sealed off like a memory you didn’t trust.
Aurora stayed standing. Her delivery bag thumped lightly against her hip.
“Why now?” she asked.
Silas sat, but he sat forward, elbows on the table, hands close enough to show the ring without offering it like a threat.
“Because you showed up like a ghost at a funeral,” he said. “And because ghosts don’t usually walk into my bar with their wrists uncovered.”
Aurora’s fingers tightened around the cup until it creaked faintly. “My wrist’s uncovered because I delivered food today. It’s not a code.”
“It’s always a code,” Silas replied. His eyes stayed on hers. “Even when you think you’re just trying to get through the shift.”
Aurora’s jaw clenched . The last time she’d been in a room like this, she hadn’t known what codes looked like . She’d been a girl with too many theories and not enough proof. She remembered how Silas had laughed softly at her insistence that she could reason her way out of danger.
Back then, it had felt like comfort .
Now it felt like a net.
“What do you want?” she asked.
Silas didn’t answer straight away. He slid a photograph across the table.
Aurora didn’t reach for it at first. Her eyes dipped, tracking the edge of the paper. Black-and-white, grainy. A street corner. A man half in frame. A woman beside him, her face turned away. And in the woman’s posture, in the way her shoulders sat, Aurora felt the sickening click of recognition.
It looked like Eva.
Not exactly. Not the Eva she remembered, bright and stubborn and reckless with her smile. But the angle of the neck, the set of the chin. The shape of her body in a stolen second. Like someone had lifted her from a scene and pasted her into another life.
Aurora’s voice came out thin. “That’s not—”
Silas interrupted. “You recognise the posture.”
Aurora stared at the photograph until her vision narrowed around the details. She wanted it to be coincidence, wanted it to be a trick of grain and shadow. But she couldn’t unsee the way her friend had held herself like she expected the world to try something and decided it wouldn’t succeed.
Silas leaned closer, his limp making him move slower without making him weaker.
“Eva’s gone,” he said. “And that means someone pulled a string tight enough to make her disappear.”
Aurora felt her heart kick against her ribs, an angry animal. “I haven’t spoken to her in years.”
“You did,” Silas said. “In the ways you keep alive when you pretend you don’t care.”
Aurora sucked in a breath. The air tasted of paper and old smoke.
“You’re doing this to punish me,” she said, though she didn’t have a clean reason. She just had the weight of years pressing down on her throat. “For leaving.”
Silas’s eyes didn’t flinch. “You didn’t leave. You escaped. There’s a difference.”
Aurora almost laughed again, but the sound stuck.
“What difference does it make,” she said, “if the person you ran from ends up swallowing everything anyway?”
Silas picked up the open file and turned it so she could see the inside page. There was a name listed at the top in neat handwriting. Not Eva’s. Another name. One Aurora hadn’t heard out loud in years.
Evan.
Her stomach dropped. The room tilted just enough to make her feel dizzy.
“That’s—” She stopped herself. She didn’t know what she wanted to claim. She didn’t know what she wanted to deny.
Silas’s voice stayed calm. “He has contacts. He has patterns. And he has a habit of putting his hands where they don’t belong.”
Aurora’s fingers went numb around the cup.
She remembered Evan’s smile in the kitchen of her first London flat. She remembered his careful phrasing, how he talked like he was explaining a simple rule, not setting a trap. She remembered how she’d thought she could love her way out of it, then learned love didn’t stop teeth.
She forced herself to look at Silas instead of the file.
“Why are you telling me this?” she asked. “Why not the police?”
Silas snorted softly , and the sound held no humour. “Because the police don’t know how to follow money they can’t touch. They file it. They forget it. They go home.”
Aurora’s throat tightened. “And you do?”
Silas tapped the file with one finger, a precise motion. “I know where rumours gather. I know what doors open when the right person knocks.”
Aurora took a slow breath. “So what, you want me to… what? Be your errand girl again? Crawl through dark corridors until you feel satisfied?”
Silas’s gaze sharpened. “Don’t put words in my mouth.”
Aurora stood straighter, forcing her fear to behave like anger. “Then tell me what you want.”
Silas stood too, the limp noticeable now that he rose. He circled the table and stopped beside her, close enough that she could feel the warmth of him, the stubborn human weight in his body.
“I want you to confirm something,” he said. “And I want you to do it without telling anyone you’re doing it.”
Aurora’s eyes narrowed . “That sounds like a setup.”
“It’s a test.” Silas’s voice dropped, the authority in it hardening. “You’re not the girl who believed in reason anymore. Good. You’ll survive better that way.”
Aurora swallowed. “Survive. Right. Always survive.”
Silas’s attention flicked to her delivery bag strap. “Open it.”
“No.”
“Open it,” he repeated, and this time his tone carried an edge. Not anger. Urgency.
Aurora hesitated for a beat too long. The lamp’s light trembled slightly as her fingers fumbled the zipper.
Inside lay a foil-wrapped tray and, underneath, a small parcel she hadn’t meant to bring. A thin black box wrapped in brown paper, tied with string that bit into her fingertips.
Her pulse hammered. She hadn’t ordered anything like it.
When she lifted the box, it felt heavier than it should have. Not with weight , with intention.
“What is this?” she asked, and her voice betrayed her.
Silas didn’t touch it. He only watched her hands like he expected them to shake.
“Someone used you,” he said. “They used your route. Your habit of not asking questions.”
Aurora lifted her eyes to his. “You knew?”
Silas’s silence stretched.
In that silence , the bar noises filtered faintly through the bookshelf, muffled but not gone. Laughter. A clink of glass. The ordinary life continuing like nothing underneath it was bleeding .
Then the ordinary sound cut, snapped off mid-sentence. Footsteps sounded in the hallway outside the secret room, too many, too quick. Someone rattled the handle of the bookshelf.
Aurora’s body went cold.
Silas’s right hand went to his signet ring, thumb pressing the underside as if readying a weapon without admitting it was one .
“Who’s there?” Aurora snapped, and she hated how her voice jumped.
A man’s voice answered from beyond the wood, smooth and close. “Silas. We need five minutes.”
Silas didn’t shout. He spoke over the handle like he owned the walls.
“You’ve already had five minutes,” he said. “You just didn’t know it.”
The handle rattled again, harder this time. A soft scrape followed, like something thin slid into the gap.
Aurora stared at Silas, then at the black parcel in her hands.
“You said don’t tell anyone,” she whispered. “Well, now someone’s trying to get in.”
Silas’s eyes met hers, hazel, sharp as polished stone.
“I didn’t say you wouldn’t fight,” he replied.
The bookshelf shuddered.
A click came from inside the mechanism. Aurora felt it through the wood, like a lock deciding to give up.
Silas stepped half a pace closer, putting his body between her and the door.
“Don’t open that box,” he ordered.
Aurora’s fingers tightened around the parcel until it hurt. “You think I’m going to?”
The bookshelf lurched , and the first sliver of darkness outside widened into a gap.
A face appeared in that gap, smiling like he’d rehearsed it. His eyes swept the room fast, landing on Aurora’s scar, then the foil tray, then Silas’s ring.
“You brought her,” the man said, almost delighted. “Good. This makes it easier.”
Silas’s signet ring caught the lamp’s bruise-coloured light.
Aurora took one step back, setting her heel against the leg of the table, ready to shove it, ready to run, ready to do something that wasn’t just fear.
Then the door pushed wider, and the next voice behind the first answered from the hallway.
“On your left, mate,” it said, and a second hand appeared with a weapon held low, too confident to be for show.