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I find I don’t hate it.

“The dogs,” I scramble to add, because it’s been sitting on my chest for an hour at this point. “Div was shot. Your vet has him, someone said. And someone should—I think he was defending Leonid when—”

“We know,” Trifon says, and it threatens to make my legs buckle, how gently he speaks. It’s a total and absolute turn around from the last time our paths crossed. It leaves me reeling. “He’s in surgery, Meera. The prognosis is good.”

Darya’s heels click-clack as she rounds the table, appraising me with overt and relentless curiosity. “How did they find the penthouse?” is what she chooses to ask, cool as a cucumber. Whatever I could’ve guessed was about to come out of her mouth, this isn’t it.

I balk. “I don’t know?”

Her gaze slides over to her brother. Trifon looks back at her. There’s a wordless conversation occurring between them—and I understand it. I understand it perfectly. That’s how Neil and I’ve always been.

“They also caught up to them at Meera’s school,” Valentin adds.

It makes me bristle, to be spoken about as if I’m not right here. His stare threatens to bore through my skull when he demands, “How?”

And there it is—the old cold, the chair and the silk ties, guilty until proven otherwise—rising up through the floor of me. My hands curl into fists. My every instinct tells me to fly at him and scratch his eyes out.

Except Darya steps neatly in my path instead. Gentle, as if she’s handling a wounded bird, her hands frame my face. “I’m going to test a theory, Meera,” she says calmly, as if we’re old acquaintances instead of strangers. “Can you lift up your hair, please?”

“What—”

“They had you for more than a day, I’ve heard,” she says. “You were unconscious. Catered to and handled with care. Being trafficked doesn’t typically necessitate that. And nobody goes through the hassle of grabbing a fighting victim and erasing all camera footage of the area. There’s something special about you. So, I’d like you to lift up your hair.”

My hands obey before my brain can catch up to where this strange, mercurial woman could possibly be going with this. I shiver as her cool fingers walk the back of my skull. Down. Pressing. Clinical and cool.

They stop at the nape of my neck. A spot I hadn’t registered as sore until the pressure she applies makes it so.

I’ve spent my childhood doing homework in my mother’s clinic. I have held kittens, and greyhounds, and even an extremely indignant ferret at one point, while she ran a scanner over their shoulder blades. I know exactly what a microchip feels like under skin.

I just never thought to check myself for one.

“And now we know how,” Darya murmurs, with something that is horribly close to admiration.

The room explodes into a flurry of brusque Russian—Trifon’s voice, Valentin’s, sharply clashing against one another. On the outside looking in, I stand very still in a stranger’s war room understanding everything at once, the way you do when the last data point loads. They always knew. The church. The school. The clinic. The penthouse. My mother’s dining table with the biryani. The pier, the Ferris wheel, every soft golden hour of the past three weeks—all of it broadcast, all of it watched. I was never hidden and protected, though that’s how Leonid has made me feel. I’ve never been safe at all.

I’m just bait. That’s all I’ve been. From the very first night. Not even bait that someone had to mind—bait that reported its own position. Convenient, stupid, useful in the worst way.

The wave of nausea that roils through my system is encompassing and unforgiving. I try to ride it out. My mouth is sour as I gasp out, “Cut it out of me. Destroy it!”

Darya’s eyebrows lift, and I swear she looks legitimately impressed.

“You heard me,” I double down. I’m already pulling my hair over one shoulder, already dipping my chin to my chest. I don’t let my voice shake. “It’s likely subdermal. It’ll be shallow; the scruff of the neck is mostly fascia and I’d rather lose a half-inch of skin than carry their eyes inside my body for one more minute. Cut it out of me.”

What happens next happens is a product of the efficiency of people who have done terrible things and handled the consequences.

A chair, turned backward; my arms folded on its spine. A bottle of vodka older than my car, sacrificed without ceremony. A blade—one that Darya produces it from somewhere on her person that I choose not to question further, slim and glossy and sharp, and passes it through a lighter’s flame like she’s done it on lovelier evenings. The sting of alcohol. Then the sting of steel, brief and white-hot, and I breathe through it the way I told Priya to breathe through her exam—in for four, out for six—and stare at my own reflection in the dark window and do not make one single sound.

“Got it,” Darya says.

It lands in a crystal tumbler with a clink. Such a costly weapon, and it’s the size of a grain of rice.

“Burn it,” I say. “Crush it. I want it—”

“No.” Trifon picks up the tumbler, holds it to the light. The look on his face is the first thing since I’ve burst in here that truly frightens me, because it’s pleased. “They’ve spent a month listening to this little thing tell the truth. Now it can tell some lies for us.” He sets it down with terrible care. “Nothing transmits from this room. We decide where it speaks from next.”

Behind me, Valentin crouches with a suture kit, and his hands at my nape are unexpectedly tender. This brute of a man who once gripped my jaw like he wouldn’t think twice about snapping my neck. Those same hands stitch my skin back together, smoothing a bandage over the spot when he’s done. I can’t even find the words to ask him how he’s so good at that, since he’s had no medical training whatsoever.

He doesn’t have any problem talking.