I was running fromsomeone.
And if I let anyone catch me—even people who wanted to help—Dr. Richard Brand would catch me too. Then the helping would stop, and the dying would begin, and Frank and Mrs. Zi would learn what I'd learned six months ago: that caring about someone like me was just another way to paint a target on your back.
The congee was still warm when I got back to the basement. I ate it standing over the sink, mechanically, fuel for a body I needed to keep functional. It tasted like kindness, which is to say it tasted like danger, which is to say I threw half of it away and hated myself for wanting more.
Threequickknocks,pause,two slow—the pattern I'd given to exactly four people, and three of them were dead.
My hand found the scalpel before my brain finished processing the sound. Two PM—wrong time. Daylight was for hiding, darkness for working. Anyone who knew the pattern also knew the rules. Unless something was catastrophically wrong.
I crept to the door, heart hammering against my ribs hard enough to hurt. Through the peephole, a distorted face. Familiar but impossible. My breath caught.
Irina Topolov. Surgical nurse, Brighton Medical Center. The one who'd held retractors steady during my longest surgeries, who'd known which instrument I'd need before I asked. The one who'd been in the room when I'd tried to report the organ trafficking six months ago, who'd watched security escort me out while Dr. Brand stood there with his sympathetic face and lying mouth.
She shouldn't know where I was. No one from my old life should know where I was.
I opened the door a crack, blade still in my hand. "You shouldn't be here."
"Please." Her voice cracked on the word. "I have nowhere else to go."
She slipped inside before I could stop her, and in the basement's harsh fluorescent light, I could see what I'd missed through the peephole. Irina looked like I felt—hollowed out, eaten alive by something. Dark circles under her eyes so deep they looked like bruises. Hands shaking. The careful composure she'd maintained through twelve-hour surgeries completely gone.
"How did you find me?"
"Rumors." She clutched her purse against her chest like armor. "People talk. Patients. They say there's a doctor in Brighton Beach who helps people who can't go to hospitals. They describe you—small, dark hair, surgical precision. I've been looking for three months."
Three months. She'd been hunting for me for three weeks while I'd been hiding, thinking I was invisible. My throat closed.
"I can't help you, Irina. Whatever you need—"
"I have troubling proof." She pulled out a flash drive with shaking fingers, held it between us like an offering. "Everything Dr. Brand is doing. Patient names, surgery schedules, payment records. I've been copying files for months, ever since you were fired. Ever since I realized you were right."
The flash drive was small, black, unremarkable. It could have been anything—music, tax documents, family photos. But I knew it wasn't. I knew it was death, packaged in plastic and silicon.
“What is he doing?” I asked, my voice harsh, my pulse racing.
“Organ trafficking. For the Bratva. It’s evil.”
My eyes widened.
"Why didn't you go to the police?"
A bitter laugh. "I'm undocumented. Have been for six years. If I report this, ICE will deport me before I can testify. Back to Belarus, where my ex-husband is waiting to finish what he started." She touched her throat, and I saw the faint scars I'd never noticed before, hidden under the surgical scrubs she used to wear. "But you—you were going to report it before they framed you. You have citizenship, credentials—"
"Had." The word tasted like ash. "I had credentials. They stripped my license, Irina. Discredited me. Painted me as a drug addict who operated while high. I'm nobody now. My testimony would be worthless."
"Not with this." She pushed the flash drive into my hand. Her skin was fever-hot. "Bank records. Wire transfers. Photos from surgeries. Email chains. He got careless after you left. Thought he was untouchable."
I stared at the drive. Such a small thing to hold so much weight.
"There was a girl," Irina continued, and her voice broke completely. "Three days ago. Nineteen years old. Belarusian, like me. Came in for appendicitis. Routine surgery. She left without a kidney."
My hand clenched around the drive.
"She doesn't even know it's gone, Maya. She's walking around missing an organ she didn't consent to give. They told her the incision was larger because of complications. She believed them. She thanked Dr. Brand for saving her life."
Something cracked in my chest. Not broke—cracked. Like ice when spring comes, still holding but not for long.
"How many?"
