Page 25

Priya stays on my mind while Boston passes by in an autumnal blur.

I know, obviously, that I’m pretty good at my job. But there’s knowing it in theory and then seeing the way her voice had gone small when she asked if I was okay. The genuine concern in her eyes. So, it’s all well and good for Leonid to give me a satisfied nod when I’ve pulled it off—because it doesn’t matter to him, that I hate how I’d lied to her, even a lie of omission, which is technically better than the outright lie I’d pitched to Carol in the front office. Shockingly, the fact that she believed me without hesitation doesn’t make me feel better. Even if it did save her, as Leonid had put it, “a bullet in the fucking skull.”

It’s a mental image that haunts me as I press my forehead against the cool glass of the car window.

We pass a man who’s walking his dog along the sidewalk, ordinary and ambling. God, I envy him with an intensity that jostles me down to the marrow. And it isn’t helped by how, despite Leonid’s silence, tension radiates from him in waves.

I last a handful of minutes, before I have to ask, “What’s going on? Did something happen while I was inside?”

“Something is always going on,” Leonid says, shooting me a clipped, baleful smile.

The hair on the back of my neck stands on end. “That’s ominous.”

“I’m an ominous man living an ominous life.”

“What does that even m—”

My question never makes it all the way out of my mouth. It splinters into a scream I don’t realize came out of me until my lungs are already burning. By then, the world is already on fire.

The whole, heavy frame of the SUV lurches sideways when something with a roaring engine rams full-force into its side. It happens so quickly, the impact is a physics problem I have no time to solve. Force equals mass times acceleration, and the mass is a vehicle, and the acceleration is catastrophic, and my body becomes a variable in an equation I never consented to. The seatbelt cinches across my chest hard enough to drive the breath out of me. My skull snaps sideways and cracks against the window, my vision a haze of darkness.

When it clears, it’s to spiderwebbed glass.

My breath leaves me in aching pants.

“DOWN!” Leonid bellows. “Meera, get down—” His hand finds the back of my neck, and shoves me down until I fold forward against the seatbelt. My forehead hits my thighs just as the first shot rings out.

It’s nothing like it is on TV.

It feels stupid to realize, in this very moment, that I have never heard a gun fired before. Media doesn’t warn you about the sheer pressure that moves through the car and through my body and through the fillings in my teeth, and then there’s another shot, and another, while glass rains down around me in glittering pieces I scramble to protect my eyes from.

I’d been certain the car had been tipped over. But the theory is disproven when the car surges forward. Leonid’s driver propels it forward at break-neck speed, tires screeching down the street.

Through the gap between the seats, I can see other vehicles now. They are in pursuit, unmistakably, of us. There’s two of them as far I can see; shiny black sedans gaining on us, trying to flank the SUV. Another one—grey, this one—tries to cut across our nose to box us in.

“Malakhov, left, left—” Leonid shouts orders down a phone I never saw him pull. There’s a gun in his hand I shouldn’t be shocked to see.

I’m so stunned, I don’t even notice it for a second.

The blood.

It’s blooming across his left shoulder, high, near his collarbone, soaking through the dark fabric of his henley in a stain that spreads as I watch. His face is white—from blood loss, or the pain, I can’t tell. My heart threatens to pound right out of my chest. There’s a sheen of sweat at Leonid’s temples. Yet his eyes, when they cut to me, are lucid and furious and completely, terrifyingly calm.

“You’ve been shot,” I shriek at him.

“Yes, Meera, very astute,” he grits out through clenched teeth.

“You’ve been shot, Leonid—”

“I’m fucking aware,” he hisses, as the car takes a corner hard and the motion jostles him. “Get the fuck back down before you join me, woman. Harvey! The tail. How fucking many?”

From the driver’s seat, the driver thunders, “There’s two on us, one’s peeled off. One of our cars is down, boss, they clipped him—”

“Fuck,” Leonid rasps, and shakes his head. “Okay, then we lose these two and do whatever we’ve got to not to lead them to the fucking safehouse.” His breath hitches as he presses his right hand flat against his shoulder. When he lifts it away to look, his palm comes away gleaming red.

“They’re gaining on us, boss,” Harvey says from the front. “I can lose ‘em on the service road if you just—”

The windshield blows inward with a flat, percussive sound. Fine red mist hangs in the air where Harvey’s head had been a millisecond prior. There’s a hole in his temple now.