My voice came out thin. Wrong. Like it belonged to someone smaller, someone more afraid.
"My apartment. Manhattan. It's secure."
Four words. Clipped. Professional. No warmth, no reassurance, nothing like the voice that had told me to pack.
"And then what?"
"Then we figure out how deep this goes and how to stop it."
More questions pressed against my throat.Who sent the photograph? How did they know about Ptichka? How long have you been lying to me?But something in his voice stopped me. Something in the set of his shoulders, the white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel, the way he checked the mirror again like he was counting threats.
He wasn't here.
The realization settled over me like cold water. The man beside me—whoever he was—wasn't the same person who'd caught me in the gallery, who'd crouched down to let Ghost assess him, who'd saidlittle birdlike it was something precious. That man had been warm. Present. Human.
This man was a weapon.
I turned my head slightly, studying his profile against the blur of city lights. The sharp angle of his jaw. The tension in his neck. The way his hands moved on the wheel with mechanical precision, like he'd done this a thousand times before.
This is who he is, I thought. Not the Discord messages. Not the gentle check-ins. Not the voice that asked about my color level and reminded me to drink water. This is what "dangerous" means.
But even as the thought formed, another voice whispered underneath it.Both things can be true. He can be the man whomade you feel safe and the man who drives like this. He can be Lis and also whoever this is.
Ghost whimpered in the backseat. I reached back without looking, finding his muzzle with my fingers, offering what comfort I could.
"Almost there," Maksim said. His voice had softened slightly. Not warm—not yet—but something closer to human. Like he'd noticed my fear and was trying to contain his own to make room for it.
I didn't answer. Didn't know what to say.
The city lights blurred past like streaks of paint on wet canvas. Red, gold, white, the endless luminescence of Manhattan at night. Beautiful, usually. Tonight it looked like a warning.
I pressed my forehead against the cold window and watched the world streak by, and I tried not to think about what was waiting for us at the other end.
But we weren’t going to get to the other end.
I didn't understand what was happening until it was already over.
One moment we were driving through a narrow street in the Lower East Side, Maksim's jaw tight, his hands steady on the wheel. Brick buildings pressed close on either side. Fire escapes climbed toward a narrow strip of night sky. A delivery truck idled at the corner, exhaust plumes rising like ghosts.
The next moment, he said "Get down" in a voice I didn't recognize.
Flat. Cold. Utterly without emotion.
Something about the way he said it forced my body to obey before my brain caught up. I was crouched below the dashboard, my cheek pressed against the floor mat, my hands braced against the center console. Ghost scrambled onto the floor behind me, his claws scrabbling for purchase on the leather, his body pressing against the back of my seat with the particulardesperation of an animal who didn't understand but knew something was terribly wrong.
Then the world exploded into noise.
Metal screaming against metal. The crunch of impact, bone-deep and violent. Glass shattering—the rear window, I thought, or maybe the side mirror—raining down in a glittering cascade I could hear but not see. And then a sound I'd never heard before but recognized instinctively, the way prey recognizes the voice of a predator.
Gunfire.
Sharp. Percussive. Impossibly loud in the enclosed space of the car.
I was screaming. Maybe. Or maybe that was the tires squealing. Or maybe that was Ghost, howling in terror the way he'd howled during thunderstorms in the first months after I'd adopted him. I couldn't tell. I couldn't see anything except the floor mat and my own white-knuckled hands and the console above me and the strange surreal knowledge that this was really happening, this wasn't a nightmare, someone was shooting at us.
Then Maksim was gone.
The driver's door hung open. Cold air rushed in. I heard more sounds—footsteps, grunts, something hitting something else—and then two more gunshots.
