The morning sun was creeping through the windows now, painting stripes across the bed. Malysh had migrated to the foot of the mattress, making room for us. Zmeya was grooming herself with aggressive efficiency, proud of her dawn attack.
Maya's weight against me was familiar. Right. The smell of her shampoo, the damp cold of her hair, the way she fitted into the space beside me like she'd been designed for it.
A year ago, I would have called this weakness. Would have said softness was dangerous, that caring about someone gave your enemies a weapon to use against you.
Maybe I still believed that. But I'd learned something else too.
Some things were worth the risk.
"Breakfast?" Maya asked, her voice already softer. Sleepy despite the shower.
"I'll make eggs."
"You always make eggs."
"You like eggs."
She hummed against my chest. Agreement or contentment or both. The cats had settled. The morning stretched ahead, full of small moments that would have been unimaginable a year ago.
I pressed a kiss to her wet hair and let the monster sleep.
ThedrivetoSunsetPark took eighteen minutes on a good day. Twenty-three if we hit the morning school traffic on Fourth Avenue. I knew the route by muscle memory now—every light, every turn, every stretch where I could push the speed and every one where I couldn't.
Maya sat in the passenger seat with her second coffee of the morning, reviewing patient files on her tablet. Her wet hair had dried into the wavy chaos she never bothered to control. She was wearing scrubs now—soft blue ones, not the oversized sweaters she hid in when she'd been treating people in that basement. These were proper medical scrubs. The kind people wore when they worked in actual clinics.
"Mrs. Gonzalez is coming back for her follow-up today," she said, scrolling through notes. "The wound care looks good but I'm worried about her blood sugar levels."
"You're always worried about blood sugar levels."
"Because half the patients I see have untreated diabetes, Kostya. It's an epidemic."
I let her talk. Medicine made her animated in a way nothing else did—the clinical precision, the problem-solving, the way she could look at symptoms and see patterns other people missed. Three months ago, she'd been stitching up criminals in a damp basement, operating in shadows because the world had taken everything legitimate from her.
Now she worked in daylight. Used her real name. Helped people without looking over her shoulder for cops or Syndicate hitmen.
Different. Better.
I still drove her every day. Had insisted on it from the start, back when she'd argued about independence and not needing a babysitter and being perfectly capable of taking the subway like a normal person.
She'd stopped fighting it about a month in. Not because I'd won the argument—Maya never admitted defeat in any argument—but because she'd figured out what I couldn't say. That the twenty-three minutes in the car were mine. Time when I could keep her close, watch her read her files, listen toher complain about insurance companies and pharmaceutical pricing and all the systemic failures that kept poor people sick.
The clinic came into view around the corner of Forty-Third Street. Small building, red brick, used to be a dentist's office before Dr. Okonkwo had converted it. The windows were bright with morning light. A hand-painted sign over the door read "Sunset Park Community Health Clinic" in English and Spanish.
It served the same population Maya had helped from her basement. Immigrants, undocumented workers, people who couldn't afford hospitals or didn't trust systems that had failed them. But now she did it with proper equipment. With colleagues. With a salary that she kept insisting was too much even though I knew exactly how little community clinic coordinators made.
"There's parking behind the building," Maya said, like she told me every morning.
"I know where there's parking."
"You always park in the same spot."
"It has a good sightline."
She laughed—the soft one, not the big one—and finished her coffee as I pulled into my usual space. The spot did have a good sightline. I could see both entrances from here, the side alley, the fire escape. Old habits. The kind that kept people alive.
Maya gathered her bag, her tablet, the extra sweater she always brought because the clinic ran the AC too cold. She was about to open the door when she stopped. Froze. Her attention caught on something through the windshield.
An older woman was walking toward the clinic entrance. Hispanic, maybe sixty-five, moving with the careful gait of someone whose joints had seen too many years of hard labor. She wore a floral dress that had been washed thin and a cardigan despite the warm morning.
