"Good. I've been a Petrenko long enough. I'd like to try being nothing for a while." He squeezes my hand. "As long as you're nothing with me."
"We are ghosts, Nikolai. Ghosts don't have titles."
"They have each other."
I close my eyes. The morphine is pulling at me again, the heavy veil of sleep descending. But for the first time, the darkness doesn't feel like a Processing Room. It feels like a shield.
"One day," I murmur.
"One day," he agrees. "And then we find the end of the map."
I drift off to the sound of his breathing, the machine’s steady beep, and the realization that my training was wrong. The Kennel taught me that love is a vulnerability that leads to death.
They were wrong.
Love is the only thing that made me want to live.
Chapter Twenty-Three
NIKOLAI
The keys are heavy,cold, and notched with age.
They sit in my palm like a lead weight, an archaic piece of metal that predates the digital world I was raised to rule. Katya hands them over without a word of encouragement. She doesn't have any to give.
The Lada Niva is a block of faded green steel, squat and ugly, parked in the shadows of the facility’s rear garage. It is an artifact of Soviet-era engineering—a vehicle that predates GPS tracking, digital fuel injection, and every electronic signature that makes modern cars so easy to pluck from a satellite feed. It smells of gasoline, old tobacco, and the pervasive dampness of the Russian winter.
It is perfect.
“No cellular connectivity,” Katya says, her breath hitching in the frigid air. “No satellite uplink. No computer systems to ping. If they find you in this, it will be through human observation, not a server in Chicago.”
I wrap my fingers around the keys. The metal is worn smooth by decades of hands that were likely as desperate as mine are now.
“The route avoids the primary highways,” she continues, her eyes scanning the dark corridor behind us. “Stay on the secondary roads. Refuel only at independent stations—the corporate chains have camera networks linked to the central databases. If you hit a toll, turn around. You are invisible as long as you stay in the dirt.”
“Understood.”
She looks at me then, her gaze sharpening as it travels over my shorn hair and the oversized sweater I’m wearing. She is reassessing me. The Petrenko heir she expected—the one with the silk shirts and the arrogant sneer—is a ghost. The man standing in front of her is a scavenger, a traitor, and a survivor.
I don't wait for her to finish her evaluation. I turn to the task of moving Alexei.
Getting him into the vehicle is a brutal reminder of how much of him I’ve already taken. He insists on walking, of course. The machine doesn't accept assistance. The weapon doesn't acknowledge that its firing pin is bent. He makes it four steps from the facility door before his knees buckle, his breath coming out in a sharp, hissed intake through his teeth.
I catch him before he can hit the deck. My arm slides around his waist, my shoulder taking the brunt of his dead weight. He is burning with a fever that hasn't fully broken, his heat radiating through the thick wool of our shared sweaters. We’ve done this dance before, in the Tower’s corridors and the loading dock, but the positions were reversed. Then, he was the one holding me together. Now, I am the brace.
“Lean on me,” I growl.
He doesn't argue. That is the most terrifying thing about this morning. He just sags into me, his head dropping toward my shoulder, his fingers fumbling for purchase on my arm.
I guide him to the passenger side. The Niva sits high, designed for mountain tracks and mud. I have to physically hoist him, my muscles—atrophied and screaming from three weeks of the chair—straining until I see spots. I guide his legs into the footwell, careful of the way the movement pulls at the raw, stitched meat of his side. I see the muscles in his jaw jump, a frantic, rhythmic tic as he fights the urge to groan.
“Easy,” I whisper. “Take it slow.”
“I am... functional,” he rasps.
“You’re a liar,” I say, slamming the door. “You’re capable of tearing those sutures and painting this vinyl red. Sit down and breathe.”
I circle to the driver's side and slide behind the wheel. The seat is adjusted for someone with a much longer reach, and I have to fumble with a rusted manual lever to bring it forward. The steering wheel is enormous, a thin plastic ring that feels like it belongs to a tractor. The dashboard is a collection of analog dials and toggle switches, simple and honest.
