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“Uh, just—” he fumbles. “How’s my girl doing?”

See? I still feel it, that phantom tug somewhere beneath my ribs. But I know better than to be swayed by it. I steel myself. “I’m fine, Dad. What’s up?”

He guffaws. If I didn’t know better, I’d think he was nervous. But my father doesn’t get nervous. He has, however, hit me up for cash before. “Can’t a father call up his little girl on a whim?” he challenges.

“He can,” I say slowly. “Mine just doesn’t, typically.”

There’s a pause on the other end. One so prolonged, I’d hang up if I couldn’t hear him breathing. The quiet splinters with a sandpaper-rough laugh. “Fair enough,” he says. “I still wanted to check in. How’s school going? Those kids treating you right?”

I resume walking, making a deal with myself: I’ll talk to him until I get to the train, and then I’ll have a legitimate reason to hang up. If he doesn’t cough up the real reason he’s calling by then, then that’s too bad. I’m not responsible for him. I can’t be. The mental speech sounds a lot like my college therapist. That’s fine. She’s the one who drilled the words into my head in the first place.

Those words are an anchor I hold onto, while I make surface-level small talk with the man who never, ever made it home to tuck me in with my mother. Who missed my high school graduation. And my college graduation. All of it, because his job was always too important to show up.

Why? Well, I don’t know. He didn’t want to talk about it back then. Even now, when I ask him how his work’s been, he’s cagey about it. He wants the highlight reel of life at public school. He tells me he’s proud of me, in a nonspecific way that doesn’t mean a damn thing. I tell him thanks. He says we should grab dinner sometime. I agree. We both know we won’t.

Eventually, I can’t take it. “All right, Dad. I have to go, so—”

“Okay, Meera. You—you take care of yourself, okay, sweetie?”

I hang up.

I stand there on the sidewalk, my phone gone dark in my hand, the Tupperware of curry cooling against my hip. Tension is a tightly wound ball in the middle of my chest. I try to shake it off. I’m good at that, ordinarily. Shaking things off is my most well-honed skill at this point. Maybe even more refined than teaching. I drop my phone in my purse and force myself to keep walking.

I don’t hear the van coming until the whoosh is right beside me. It materializes at the curb as if from nowhere, like it dropped from the sky. The side door is already open when my eyes land on it.

My body knows before my brain does. Somewhere within the ancient, lizard-brain wiring—that doesn’t deal in logic or reason, but has been keeping mammals alive for a hundred thousand years—an alarm trips. Epinephrine floods my system, traveling across synapses like jumping from rock to rock in a lake.

I take one step.

That’s all I get.

One step—and a hand clamps over my mouth from behind. I taste leather, its acrid smell filling my sinuses and coating the back of my throat before the pressure at my neck registers. An arm cinches around my waist, a vice around my ribs, before I’m hoisted off the pavement like a ragdoll. I am five-foot-nine and two hundred and nine pounds. That is nothing to whoever grabs me and drags me.

The curry hits the ground first. Somehow, the sound of Tupperware cracking against concrete is deafening to me.

My mother made that curry. She slow-cooked it all day. Now, it’s leaking across the sidewalk and I can’t just—

I fight.

I bite at the leather. I claw at the arm around my waist like a feral terror, raking my nails across whatever flesh they can find. I try to scream, and the glove smothers it. It reaches nobody. I kick backward—once, hard—and my heel connects with… A shin, I think. A grunt puffs hot air right against my ear. The grip does not loosen. Viciously, it tightens.

The back of another gloved hand cracks across my face. “Dumb fucking cunt,” a masked face growls into my face.

“Not her fucking face,” he hisses at my ear.

Another pair of hands seizes my ankles. I’m horizontal now. Carried between two bodies like a piece of furniture. Tears blur the stars.

That’s the last thing I see before I’m tossed into the van.

Everything goes black.

Chapter 3 - Leonid

Miron hadn’t hesitated when I’d told him I got a text from a random number. Everything about it is shady. That fact hasn’t escaped me at all. I’m painfully fucking aware that, for all I know, I could be leading us into a trap. Yet all my brother had done was push back on me not wanting to bring along any guards. He picked ones he’d vetted, personally. With the way he’s been showing up lately, he deserves trust.

I even let him drive. He’s been uncharacteristically somber tonight. That tells me he’s taking this seriously. I appreciate that more than I’d admit to him. Our youngest brother is a lot of things—clever, idealistic, immature, a handsome motherfucker like the rest of us—but when the stakes are high, he can zero in on the target. He’d been in bed with some woman when I’d texted. He’d gotten out of there that very second.

Gotta appreciate that kind of focus.