Thirty Seven
Cassian
SleepisacountryI am no longer welcome in.
For three days I have existed on black coffee and the raw, corrosive fuel of my own rage. The loft is a command center. My laptop is open, displaying a satellite map of the city gridded into sectors. My phone is a constant stream of dead ends and false hopes.
“Yeah?” I bark into the phone, not bothering with a greeting.
“Boss, it’s Marco. From the downtown crew,” my foreman’s voice crackles. “We got a possible sighting. Girl matching the description, barefoot, heading into the subway at 4th and Main.”
“Time stamp?” I demand, my eyes already pulling up the public transit camera feeds for that intersection.
“About an hour ago.”
I find the feed, and I watch the river of anonymous faces flow into the mouth of the station. I rewind, I play it frame by frame. My eyes ache from staring at grainy footage. There. A flash of dark hair, a thin frame. My heart gives a single, hard jolt. But as she turns to the ticket machine, the face is wrong. Too sharp, too old.
“It’s not her,” I snarl, ending the call without another word. I slam the phone down on the concrete desk, the impact jarring my broken hand. A fresh spike of white-hot agony shoots up my arm. I welcome it. It’s a clean pain, a simple pain. It is nothing compared to the serrated edge of her absence.
She is a ghost. A phantom. For three days, my army has turned this city upside down. We’ve shaken down every flophouse, checked every bus station, and leaned on every informant on my payroll. Nothing. It’s like she dissolved into the fucking air.
The shame of my mistake is a constant, grinding stone in my gut. I left the door unlocked. I, who built my life on control, on foresight, on the cold, hard logic of action and consequence was undone by a ghost saying a name.
Leonidas.
The memory of her saying his name is a fresh wound. It was a violation. She took the most sacred piece of my pain and turned it into a weapon. She has no idea what that name means, the history it carries, the blood it’s soaked in. She’s a child playing with a loaded gun, and I’m the one who handed it to her.
My rage is a physical thing, a restless energy that won’t let me sit still. I pace the length of the loft, from the wall ofwindows overlooking the city to the cold, empty bed that still smells faintly of her. I failed to protect Leo. I will not fail her. The thought is a frantic, desperate prayer, but the line between protection and possession has blurred into nonexistence. I don’t just want her safe. I want her back. Here. Where I can see her, where I can touch her. Where she can’t run from the beautiful, terrifying thing we are creating in the dark.
My personal phone vibrates on the counter, a different ringtone. I snatch it up. It’s Sergei.
“Wraith,” his gravelly voice says. “It is Saturday. The fans are hungry. They want their champion.”
My first instinct is to tell him to go to hell. The thought of the ring, of the mindless violence, feels hollow. The punishment I sought there didn’t work.
But then, a new thought emerges from the fog of my rage. The loft is a prison. My mind is a prison. I need an outlet. I need to hit something until my knuckles are pulp, until the noise in my head is drowned out by the roar of the crowd and the singular, brutal focus of the fight.
“There’s a new challenger,” Sergei continues, sensing my hesitation. “An animal from the docks. Calls himself ‘The Butcher.’ They say he killed a man in a bar fight last year.”
The name barely registers. They are all just obstacles. Bags of flesh and bone waiting to be broken.
“I’ll be there,” I say, my voice flat.
“The usual time?”
“Yes.”
I hang up. A decision made, a few hours of oblivion. A few hours to channel this storm into something productive.
I walk to the window and look down at the sprawling, indifferent city. She’s out there somewhere, a ghost in my machine. Hiding. Planning. Thinking she’s free.
She has no idea. She thinks she’s escaped the cage but all she’s done is run into a bigger one, and I am the warden.
The hunt is no longer about brute force. It’s about thinking like her. Where does a ghost go to hide? Not a bus station. Not a shelter. She would go somewhere personal. Somewhere she feels safe. Somewhere that belongs to her.
A new, cold certainty settles over me. I’ve been looking for a victim, I need to start looking for a survivor.
I will go to the fight. I will break this animal from the docks and when I come back, the hunt will begin anew. Not with an army, but with a scalpel. I will find the one thread of her old life she’s clinging to, the one place she thinks is safe.
