His eyes lock onto mine through the rear window.
He looks destroyed.
He reaches out. His mouth forms a word I can’t hear through glass and distance and the growing space between us.
Anya.
He shrinks in the rear window, his arm dropping. He stands alone in the street in nothing but a towel while blood seeps fresh through the gauze on his ribs, and his men finally catch up to him and try to drag him back inside.
A part of me wants to tell the driver to stop. A part of me wants to go back and let him explain, let him give me an answer that makes this make sense.
The rest of me knows there isn’t one.
Left side down. Facing the window.
I turn away.
“Drive,” I whisper. “Just fucking drive.”
* * *
The passport gets me through check-in.
Yelena Markovic. Serbian national.
I clutch the USB through security with my fingers wrapped so tight around it that my knuckles ache, and the guards wave me through without a second glance.
They don’t see the half a billion worth of stolen research pressed against my palm. They don’t see the signature burned into my memory. They don’t see the woman wearing her mother’s killer’s jacket because she needed the warmth and hates herself for needing it.
Gate B7. Brussels. One-way.
I have to get to Mishka before Vadim does. Before Roman does. Before anyone else can use my fourteen-year-old brother as leverage in a war I never wanted to fight.
I buckle into my window seat and stare at the runway while my phone sits heavy in my pocket, screen broken, the intake form saved to my camera roll because I couldn’t bring myself to delete it even though looking at it makes me want to vomit all over again.
My mother’s face in that photograph. Roman’s signature at the bottom.
He loves. I know that now. But his love has teeth. And seven years ago, he sank them into my mother.
The plane lifts. Turkey falls away beneath the wings. The Black Sea shrinks to a dark smear against the coast, and somewhere down there is a yacht at the bottom of the ocean and a man standing in a towel in an alley and a marriage that lasted weeks before the truth burned it to ash.
I close my eyes and see her face. Not the hollow photograph on the intake form—the real face. The one who sang lullabies before everything fell apart. The one that used to smell like lavender and kitchen warmth instead of hospital antiseptic and desperation.
She’s dead because he signed a piece of paper.
I’m alive because he signed another.
And somewhere between those two signatures, I let myself fall for a man who was never going to be anything but the weapon that made me.
The plane climbs higher into clouds that look soft from a distance but turn to nothing when you pass through them.
MISHKA — Sint-Baafsplein Boarding School, Ghent, 14:22
The black king rolls off the board and hits the floor with a sound that echoes through the empty common room.
I’m reaching down to pick it up when the door slams open and my sister walks through wearing a jacket that swallows her whole, black wool hanging past her wrists, and her face is wrong in a way I’ve never seen before.
“We need to leave.” Russian, no hello, no explanation. “Now. Get your passport.”
