I sit on a bench with Lily angled against me. We wait.
Five minutes. Ten. Twenty.
I don’t move. I don’t ask anyone anything. Asking leaves a trail—an interaction they can recall later. I keep my head down and Lily close. She gets fussy, then sleepy. I pull her into my lap, rock her gently, hum under my breath until she sags against me, heavy and warm.
I give it a full hour.
Long enough that if Aleksander is tearing that diner apart, his first nets might already be out—the parking lot, nearby cameras, bus routes that left in the first wave of panic.
Only then do I stand and check the map.
Brooklyn. Familiar enough. Far enough. Big enough to disappear in for a few hours.
We catch a bus heading that way. I pay in cash again, slide into a window seat. As the city starts to thicken around us—buildings tightening, graffiti becoming more frequent, billboards giving way to laundromats and bodegas—I finally pull out my phone.
One bar. Then two.
I scroll to Maya’s name and call.
She picks up on the second ring. “Hello?”
“It’s me,” I say.
There’s a beat. “Bella? What—where are you? You sound weird.”
“I’m fine,” I lie. “Mostly. I’m with Lily.”
That at least steadies her. “Okay. Where?”
I look out the window, scanning street signs as we roll past. I rattle off the cross streets, a landmark, the direction we’re heading. “Can you come get us?”
“Of course I can come get you,” she says. There’s steel under the shock now. “What happened? Is he?—”
“I’ll explain when I see you,” I cut in. “Please just…leave now.”
She blows out a breath. “I’m on my way. Twenty, thirty minutes.”
“Okay.” My throat feels tight. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” she says. “You sound like you’ve been through a blender.”
She’s not wrong.
The call drops as we dip under an overpass. I keep staring at the blank screen for a second, then tuck the phone away.
Lily stirs, rubbing at her eyes. “Mama?”
“Almost there, baby,” I whisper, kissing her hair. “We’re going to see Auntie Maya.”
I look down at my dirty dress, at the faint streak of something on Lily’s sock. I should feel stupid. Reckless. Unprepared.
Instead, I feel…light. Terrified, but lighter than I did in that penthouse, than I did on that plane, than I did sitting across from Aleksander while he talked about his world.
I stare out the bus window, watching the buildings smear past in streaks of gray and brick and graffiti, and I feel like my skin doesn’t quite fit.
I did the right thing.
I know that. I know it in the way you know a stove is hot or a car is coming too fast. Aleksander is dangerous. Not metaphorically, not “he’s bad for me, ha ha, cocktails and red flags” dangerous. The real kind. The kind with guns and blood and men who don’t live to see forty.
