AI “Rory?”
The glass slipped in Aurora Carter’s hand and skidded across the bar, leaving a wet crescent in the spilled beer. She caught it before it hit the floor, heart already kicking against her ribs, and looked up into a face she had once known better than her own.
“Eva.”
Eva stood half-turned in the doorway, one hand still on the brass handle, as if she had walked in by mistake and had not yet decided whether to leave. Her coat hung loose on a frame that had sharpened where it once had softness. The hair was cut blunt at her jaw now, dark and glossy and severe. Her mouth, always made for laughter, had settled into a line that did not ask permission. Only her eyes gave her away, a fraction too wide, a flicker too quick.
Aurora wiped her palms on her apron.
Silas Blackwood glanced over from the far end of the bar, one grey-streaked brow lifting beneath the green glow of the Raven’s Nest sign leaking through the glass. He took in Eva, took in Aurora, and his expression shifted into the faint, watchful neutrality he used when he wanted to look like a man who saw nothing at all.
“I know that face,” he said, not unkindly . “Either trouble has walked in, or it’s owed money.”
Eva’s gaze slid past him, landed on Aurora again, and then held. “You always did enjoy a dramatic entrance.”
“You used to call me a coward for avoiding them.”
“That was before you got sensible.”
Aurora let out a breath that sounded too much like a laugh and too little like one. She leaned down, set the glass behind the bar, and kept her hands busy with a cloth and a bottle she did not need to touch.
“You’re in London.”
“So are you.”
“No, I mean here. In this dive. In Soho. In my bar.” She heard the edge in her own voice and softened it at once, though she could not quite strip the shock from it . “You vanished.”
Eva’s mouth twitched. Not a smile. “You did the same.”
Silas set a tumbler down with a muted click. “I’ll leave the two of you to excavate the past. If anyone asks, I was never here.”
He moved off with a limp that still seemed to offend him more than it inconvenienced him, his silver signet ring catching the green light as he passed beneath the photographs on the wall. Aurora watched him go, grateful for the distance and furious at needing it.
Eva slid onto a stool at the bar. She did not take her coat off. She kept one arm folded tight across her middle, fingers tucked under the opposite elbow as if she were guarding something brittle.
“Do you want a drink?” Aurora asked.
“You’ve still got that terrible honesty problem.”
“It’s a bar.”
“Then pour me something poisonous and let’s be civil.”
Aurora reached for a bottle of whisky and stopped with her hand on the neck. “You came in here by accident.”
Eva gave a small shrug that worked too hard to look casual. “I was passing.”
“Passing through Soho, past a bar with a green neon raven and a man limping behind it?”
“You always did live in a theatrical neighbourhood.”
Aurora poured two measures. The whisky smelled sharp and oaky, with a bitter sweetness under it. She set one glass down in front of Eva and kept the other.
Eva looked at the glass but did not touch it. “You look the same.”
“No, I don’t.”
“You’ve still got that look on your face like you’re deciding whether to fight someone or diagnose them.”
Aurora snorted despite herself. “And you’ve got a new haircut.”
“That’s the measure of years, is it?”
“No. It’s the measure of contempt.”
Eva finally took the glass and raised it a fraction. “To contempt, then. It survived better than we did.”
They drank.
The Nest hummed around them, low voices at the tables, the soft clink of bottles, the hiss of the fridge behind the bar. A man in a battered suit laughed too loud into his pint. Someone near the back argued in a language Aurora did not know. Old maps watched from the walls, their coastlines brown with age, their faded lines like veins under skin. Black-and-white faces stared from the photographs, men in hats, women with straight mouths, all of them caught in a moment that had long since turned to dust.
Aurora rested her forearms on the bar. “How long has it been?”
“You’re asking me?” Eva’s fingers tightened around the glass. “You were the one who stopped replying.”
Aurora looked at her. Really looked. The old indignation stirred, familiar and tired. “You left Cardiff without a word.”
“I sent letters.”
“Two.”
“Three.”
“Two I found. One I missed because I was dealing with my father asking why his daughter was flunking a pre-law degree and sleeping on a friend’s sofa in London.”
Eva’s eyes sharpened. “You were on a sofa?”
Aurora felt her jaw clench. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Look surprised when I was miserable. You wrote from Berlin like you were on a gap year with secrets. I was working nights, trying not to answer my phone, and you sent me postcards from places I could not afford to hate.”
Eva stared into her whisky. “You always could make guilt sound like a bus timetable.”
“And you always could make leaving sound like ambition.”
That landed. Eva’s shoulder moved once, a tiny flinch. She swallowed and set the glass down with care. “You were always better at saying the thing than I was.”
“You were better at not saying it at all.”
Silas returned with a clean cloth over one shoulder, a bottle in hand, and his hazel eyes taking in the tension between them with the ease of an old intelligence operative who had spent a lifetime reading rooms before they could read him.
“Another round?” he asked.
“Not for me,” Aurora said.
Eva did not answer straight away. “Gin, if you’ve got it.”
Silas gave a short nod, fetched the bottle, and set it down with the practised economy of a man who understood when to speak and when to vanish.
When he moved away again, Eva watched him for a beat. “He still runs this place like an operation.”
“He runs everything like an operation.”
“Is that why you stayed?”
Aurora’s hand paused over the bottle. “Stayed where?”
“In his orbit.”
The question was light enough to pass for idle and sharp enough to cut through the room. Aurora twisted the cap back on and set the bottle down.
“I live above the bar. That’s proximity, not allegiance.”
Eva gave a dry little hum. “You always were good at narrow definitions.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you used to live in rooms that had no exits you couldn’t see.”
Aurora laughed once, without warmth . “And now?”
Eva’s gaze flicked to her left wrist, where the sleeve of her shirt had slipped enough to show the edge of the small crescent scar. “Now you wear your exits in public.”
Aurora pulled her sleeve down at once. The movement was automatic, old and private, and for a moment she hated the scar with a ferocity that surprised her. The thing had not hurt in years. It still spoke too loudly.
“Careful,” she said. “You sound like you’ve been practicing on yourself.”
Eva’s mouth tightened. “Maybe I have.”
She took a longer drink. The whisky caught at the back of her throat. She did not cough. Aurora remembered her coughing from cheaper vodka in Cardiff kitchens, from stolen gin in a field outside town, from that same stubborn refusal to show weakness even when she had gone pale with it.
“Berlin suits you,” Aurora said.
Eva barked a laugh. “Does it?”
“You look… expensive.”
“That sounds like an insult.”
“It was meant as one.”
“Good. I earned it.”
Aurora studied her. The new coat, the careful nails, the controlled stillness. Not elegance, not exactly. Something more defensive than that. A woman who had dressed herself in finish because the underneath had become too visible.
“What do you do?” Aurora asked.
Eva’s fingers moved once over the rim of the glass. “I consult.”
“For whom?”
“For whoever can pay.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the answer.”
Aurora let the silence stretch. Then, “You left art history for that?”
Eva’s eyes lifted. There it was, the first real crack. Not shame, not regret. Something harder. “You remember that?”
“Of course I remember. You spent a year trying to convince me the Renaissance was a crime scene.”
“It was. All those dead men and their patron saints and their money. Same old violence, just with prettier ceilings.” She tilted her head . “And you, of all people, remember my degree?”
Aurora looked down at the ring of moisture on the bar. “I remember more than you think.”
“Then you’ll remember why I left.”
The words sat between them like a cup set down too hard. Aurora did remember the arguments. The note pinned to her door. The night train to London with a backpack and a borrowed coat. She remembered anger, too, and the kind of hurt that turned everything blunt.
“I remember enough,” she said.
“That’s another way of saying not enough.”
Aurora laughed under her breath. “You came in here and sat down. Don’t make me drag every fact out of you with tweezers.”
Eva’s face softened for the first time, only a little. “You still say things like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you’re already in the middle of a plan and everyone else has just arrived.”
The words caught Aurora off guard. She looked at Eva, at the angle of her cheekbone, the faint line beside her mouth she had not worn before, the change made not by age alone but by whatever years had done in the dark .
“And you,” Aurora said, “look like you came out the other side of something expensive and unpleasant.”
“That’s much closer.”
Silas set two coasters on the bar between them. “You two can stare each other down all night, or you can tell me whether I need to start charging emotional damage fees.”
Eva glanced up. “Do you have a loyalty scheme?”
“For survivors, yes.”
“I’ll take that,” she said.
Aurora watched them exchange that small, dry humour, and felt something shift inside her, not jealousy exactly, more like the strange ache of seeing a person step into a room she had once assumed was hers alone. Eva had always been quick, always bright in a way that made the rest of the world seem dimmer by comparison. Now she looked polished by pressure. Not broken. Not whole either. Sharpened.
The door opened again. Cold air brushed the room. A couple at the far end turned, then looked away.
Eva did not look back. “You still deliver for that restaurant?”
Aurora’s head came up. “How do you know that?”
“I pay attention.”
“Since when?”
“Since people started disappearing.”
That stopped her.
Silas, behind the bar, went still in the smallest possible way. The cloth in his hand stopped moving. He did not interrupt.
Aurora kept her voice level. “What people?”
Eva’s gaze held on the whisky glass as if the answer lived in the amber ring at the bottom. “A courier in Camden, three men who worked the clubs near the river, a woman out by Vauxhall who kept records for money they pretended not to need. Different corners. Same absence.”
“Absence?” Aurora repeated.
“Nothing dramatic. No bodies. No headlines. Just the kind of empty space people learn to live around.”
Aurora’s mouth went dry. “Why are you telling me this?”
Eva looked up at last. The old friend she remembered was there for one bare instant, stripped of polish and business and whatever had made her voice so careful. “Because your name came up.”
The room seemed to draw in around that sentence. A man laughed at the back, bottle glass against wood, and somewhere under it all Aurora heard her own pulse .
“My name?”
Eva’s fingers folded tighter around the stem of the glass. “Not Aurora. Not Rory.”
Silas’s hand moved once to the ring on his right hand.
“Laila,” Eva said.
Aurora did not move.
The name landed like a hand over the mouth. Not a nickname from school, not one of the careless private inventions of youth. It belonged to something else, something that had been tucked away and never spoken across a table where other people could hear. Her throat closed around old instincts she had spent years teaching herself not to obey.
Eva saw the change and, for the first time since she had walked in, looked afraid .
“That isn’t possible,” Aurora said.
“I know what I heard.”
“You’re wrong.”
“No.”
Aurora reached for the bottle, not because she wanted more whisky, but because her fingers needed something to do. She missed the neck once, caught it on the second pass, and set it down with a hard little knock.
“Who said it?”
Eva leaned in a fraction. “A man with a notebook and an accent I couldn’t place. He asked where to find the girl who used to run errands for Blackwood. Then he asked where Laila lived now.”
Silas moved. Not quickly . That would have betrayed him. He came to the end of the bar with his usual measured step, but the room had changed shape around him now, all the same.
“And what,” he said, “did you tell him?”
Eva looked from Silas to Aurora, and something in her face cooled into decision.
“I told him I had no idea.”
The front door banged open behind them.
A man stumbled inside, one hand pressed hard to his side. Blood slicked through his fingers and darkened the front of his shirt. His eyes found Aurora with the blind certainty of someone following orders too late.
“Rory,” he gasped, and then his knees folded, and he crashed into the floor at the foot of the bar as three more figures pushed in after him, one of them already lifting a gun.