"Ptichka," she repeated. Her voice was barely a whisper. "You called me that. You actually said it."
"I've been calling you that for five months." I took another turn, accelerating through a yellow light. "I'm sorry it took so long for you to hear it."
"Maksim—"
"Pack, Auralia. We'll talk when I get there."
I ended the call before I could say anything else. Before I could tell her I loved her, or beg her to forgive me, or make promises I wasn't sure I could keep.
The bridge stretched out before me, the East River dark and glittering below. Somewhere behind me, my brothers were mobilizing for war. Somewhere ahead, the woman I loved was stuffing clothes into a bag and trying not to fall apart.
And somewhere in the city, Anton Belyaev was watching. Waiting. Planning whatever move came next in his bloody game of chess.
I pressed the accelerator harder.
Ten minutes. Maybe less.
Chapter 7
Auralia
Thetenminutesbetweenhis phone call and his arrival were the longest of my life. This was counting seconds while shoving clothes into my duffel bag without looking at what I was grabbing, my hands moving on autopilot while my brain ran calculations it couldn't complete.
Four sweaters. I'd packed four sweaters and no underwear. I realized this halfway through, standing in my bedroom with a handful of socks and absolutely no memory of walking there.
Ghost followed me from room to room. His claws clicked on the concrete floor in a rhythm that matched my heartbeat—too fast, unsteady, the percussion of panic. His dark eyes tracked my movements with the particular intensity of a dog who knew something was wrong but couldn't name it. Every few steps he pressed his long body against my legs, seeking reassurance I didn't have to give.
"It's okay," I told him. The lie tasted like ash. "We're okay."
He whined, low in his throat, and didn't believe me either.
I kept looking at the photograph.
I'd set it on my worktable when I started packing, telling myself I needed both hands free. But my eyes kept drifting back to it like a wound I couldn't stop touching. The image was sharp, professionally composed. Someone had stood close enough to capture the texture of Ghost's brindle fur, the loose thread on my jacket sleeve where I'd caught it on the studio door last week, the exact angle of my jaw as I watched the water.
We'd been at the waterfront that morning. Just Ghost and me, our usual route, the one I'd walked a thousand times without incident. The pier where fishermen gathered before dawn. The spot by the railing where Ghost liked to watch the seagulls with predatory interest he'd never act on.
Someone had watched me watching. Someone had documented my most unguarded moment like evidence for a trial I didn't know I was attending.
I went and picked up the photograph and as I held it, I noticed something taped to the back for the first time. A sheet of folded paper. I unfolded it.
Cyrillic letters, handwritten in black ink, neat and precise. I didn't read Russian, but I took a photo and got google to translate it.
We know about Ptichka.
My heart almost stopped.
They knew. They knew about little bird. They knew about the most private, vulnerable part of me, the part I'd never shown anyone in my physical life, the part that existed only in the space between my screen and someone I trusted.
Had trusted.
Still trusted, maybe, despite everything. Despite the kissing and the leaving and the twelve hours of silence that had felt like abandonment. Despite the fact that I still didn't know who he really was.
My hands were shaking. I noticed this distantly, the way I noticed things during meltdowns—my body doing things my mind couldn't control. I pressed my fingernails into my palms. Counted the pressure points. Two, three, four, five.
The studio lights buzzed overhead. Too bright. They'd been fine this morning, fine yesterday, fine for the three years I'd lived here, but now they felt like needles. Everything was too loud, too sharp, too much. Ghost's breathing. The hum of the refrigerator. The distant rumble of traffic on the street below.
I grabbed Ghost's leash. His food. His anxiety wrap—the one I should have already packed, the one I'd somehow missed in my earlier panic. The motion was mechanical, muscle memory from a thousand ordinary departures, but nothing about this was ordinary. Nothing about this would ever be ordinary again.
