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The difference, this time, is that the hands are on my side. These hands carry me into an elevator, into a garage, into a car that smells like new leather and pine. It isn’t a van. There’s no needle plunged into my neck. Another door slams shut in my face, and my heart is in pieces, filling my chest cavity with blood. I squeeze my eyes shut, and blood is all I see.

So I force them back open, right as the engine rumbles to life. The car lurches forward at breakneck speed, and something about the motion kicks my mind into gear too. Thought after thought floods my head.

Why him and not me?

If these were the people who’d taken me off the street, stolen my dignity and autonomy and sold me on the auction block like an object, then it isn’t unreasonable to assume I’m who they’d come for. Unless… I was bait. Leonid has told me about the messages he’d gotten from an untraceable set of numbers, pointing a bottle at me, making him go to that auction and then bid on me until he won.

I’ve been so caught up in the mindblowing shift of gears in my life, with my universe being flipped upside down many times over, I’d been so eager to savor the stability and joy and fun Leonid and I’ve been engaging in for weeks now. I’d never paused to wonder what he was standing in the way of, between me and whatever came for me. Or whatever came for him, and he refused to use me as a shield. He stayed behind to protect me. He went back in, refusing to let his men die while he fled with me.

That’s the kind of man he is.

The kind who doesn’t leave a man behind. Who would take as many bullets as it took for me. He’s proven it, more than once.

I’ve been a coward all my life. I’ve dressed it up in many different ways, but that’s what it boils down to, isn’t it? I haven’t wanted to rock the boat. I’ve held fast to practicality and untenable standards and made peace with loneliness as the better pay-off. I’ve never pushed my mother about being a different mother to Neil. I’ve never asked my father pressing questions, though I have them—of course I do, I’m only human. I’ve always asked myself, What’s the point? As if my happiness isn’t enough of a reason.

I had thought contentment and peace were better than happiness.

Until him.

I owe him. I need him.

The car takes a turn, and my hand moves before I notice it moving. It drifts to my stomach and settles there, low on my belly, the way it’s been doing since I took the test in the store bathroom on dubious impulse.

I never got to tell him.

I should’ve, yesterday. I shouldn’t have wasted this much time preparing the hundred different ways I could break the news to him. To practice how to say, Leonid, I’m late, I took a test and I think we have to take another one, a blood test, because the false-positive rate on these things is functionally negligible and what are the chances my birth control actually failed against your sperm? Any version of it would have been better than this—than his absence, and the potential of this secret, this possible upheaval of fate, for me to bear alone.

I’ve tried to logic my mind around it every way I could. I’ve told myself that one test is simply a preliminary finding. I’m a scientist; I know better than to trust a single trial. And I also know what I know. I did everything right: every pill, at the same time every morning, swallowed down with breakfast. The statistics on the back of the package always warn, in too-tiny lettering, that even perfect use still leaves you point-three percent vulnerable.

Somebody has to be the point-three percent, don’t they?

The universe has spent the past month of my life teaching me exactly which kind of statistic I am.

I press my palm flat, where there is nothing to feel yet. Where there is everything to feel.

“I have something to tell you,” I whisper to the window, to the dark, to a man being driven through the same night in some other direction, in some other car, alive, alive, because they wanted him alive and so do I.

Come back, Leonid. Come back to me.

Chapter 19 - Leonid

Wakefulness doesn’t come slowly. Awareness floods in all at once, making me wish it hadn’t in a matter of seconds. There’s no pain quite like a broken rib or two; it’s bad enough to polka dot my vision with white.

Jesus fucking Christ, my head is fucking killing me, is my first thought. It’s only when I instinctively move, squirming for comfort that doesn’t exist, that it strikes me that my wrists are bound behind me. By now, I can identify the zip-ties—doubled up, as a matter of fact—are what hold me in place. The awful ache is the cold iron of a rusty pipe against my spine. It’s no wonder the room reeks of rust and decay. Something probably died down here.

Besides, potentially, me soon.

I swipe my tongue across my dry mouth and taste the copper tang of blood. My lip is split. It’s so fucking dark, I don’t process that my right eye is swollen shut for a minute. Once I do clock it, it’s annoying; a hurdle I don’t goddamn need.

I suck in a sharp breath and force myself to slow down my pounding heart as best I can. I don’t get very far. The dank odor fills my lungs. Panic spears through my chest as I get distracted by my leaden legs. For a second, I’m not sure they aren’t broken. Objectively, I can immediately see what a useful tactic that would be to slow a man my size down. Unbridled relief floods me when all it takes is wiggling my toes to realize they’re just asleep. Though, that tells me that I’ve been down a long time.

But I can handle this. I have to.

“Good morning, sunshine,” someone chortles from the shadows. Only then do I see him: a man propped up in a folding chair about eight feet away from me. He lounges with an ankle over his knee. The severe light from the bare bulb hanging down from the ceiling bounces off his face. At his feet, there’s a glass bottle that refracts the light, illuminating the familiar silver of a Beluga Noble label. It’s already unscrewed. I don’t have to question it, because he picks it up and swigs straight from the neck when our eyes meet. “Happy to see they didn’t scramble your eggs for good.”

I’ve spent weeks staring into those eyes—Meera’s eyes. It’s bizarre, seeing them in another face. How strange, to finally put a voice to the man I’ve been building a dossier on for over a month now. Ray Gallagher sounds exactly like I thought he would.

“Hello, Ray,” I grunt. “Interesting choice of interrogation room.”