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“Now, Maddie.”

“Not until you tell me⁠—”

Rurik dragged me toward the SUV.

I fought him immediately. I twisted my wrist, drove my shoulder into his chest, and kicked at his leg when he refused to release me. One loose shoe flew off and struck the pavement behind us. Rurik barely reacted. One arm locked around my waist, lifting me against him while his other hand opened the passenger door.

“Put me down!”

“I’m keeping you alive.”

“By kidnapping me?”

The first man started across the street.

Rurik shoved me into the passenger seat. I caught the doorframe and tried to pull myself back out, but he stripped my fingers from the metal and forced my legs inside. I hit his shoulder, clawed at his wrist, and screamed his name until my throat burned.

He didn’t apologize. He didn’t loosen his hold. He slammed the door, and the locks dropped before I could reach the handle.

The men were running now.

One pulled a gun from beneath his jacket.

Rurik rounded the front of the SUV as I threw myself against the passenger door. He slid behind the wheel, started the engine, and pulled away before his own door had fully closed. Tires screamed against the pavement. A horn blared when he cut across traffic, and my body snapped sideways hard enough for my shoulder to strike the window.

A sharp crack split the air behind me.

I looked back. A white fracture bloomed across the rear glass but didn’t break through. Behind us, the three men were climbing into the sedan.

“Was that a bullet?”

“Put on your seat belt.”

“Rurik, was that a bullet?”

“Seat belt, Maddie.”

The SUV shot through an intersection as the light turned red. Cars swerved around us. Brakes screamed. I grabbed the dashboard to keep from being thrown forward, then fastened the belt because terror had made obedience indistinguishable from survival.

My phone rang in my hand.

The same unknown number filled the screen.

Rurik saw it. “Turn it off.”

“It could be my mother.”

“It isn’t.”

“You don’t know that.”

He reached over, took the phone before I could pull away, and tossed it out the window. Another choice disappeared beneath his hand as the sedan tore through the intersection behind us.

The sedan’s headlights filled the cracked rear window, then fell back again. I couldn’t see the faces behind the windshield, only the dark shape tracking every turn Rurik made. Those men had been waiting outside Colleen’s apartment. Someone knew where I slept. Someone knew Cian’s blood would be enough to pull me into the street.

Rurik drove with a precision that frightened me more than speed. He didn’t look panicked. He watched the mirrors, read the traffic ahead, and forced the SUV through gaps that seemed too narrow to survive. We dropped onto Storrow Drive with the sedan two cars behind us, its headlights vanishing and reappearing as traffic folded between us.

“Who are those men?” I asked. “Are they the reason the hospital is a trap?”