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That was when I put my fist straight through the front of a cabinet. It came apart beautifully. Glass went across that room in every direction. The frame tore off two of its four screws and hung there swinging. The whole of it went out of me in one movement the way it always does, then it was over. That fast, unfiltered rage that exploded and left me standing in a wrecked little room with my chest pounding and my hand inside a broken cabinet up to the wrist.

I took it out slowly and looked at it. Four pieces in the back of the hand and one long one down the outside of the forearm, which had gone in deep and was standing out of me like a fin. Well, at least I had been standing in the right place when I started bleeding, but even I could see it was nothing arterial. Nothing that would need more than a needle and somebody with steady hands.

There had been one of those in the building only yesterday.

My little nurse.

I walked out of the office then, trailing blood along the floor, and went straight into one of the treatment rooms. Then I called Yakov’s number and held the phone to my ear with my shoulder as I picked the glass out over the sink. Because glass left in a hand gets infected, and my father had taught me at seven years old to take my own splinters out with a knife point making no fuss about it.

So, I stood there with my hand under the faucet and thought about what she would have made of it. She would have taken my wrist and turned it over under the light and then she would have sewn me up with gentle hands.

But my little nurse was gone.

I wrapped it myself, and nowhere near as well as she would have done it. For starters, it was still coming through the gauze when Yakov finally answered to tell me her phone was moving north on the interstate. Something in me wouldn’t allow me to hope this time. Because a woman who had just walked out of a store under the nose of my own man doesn’t then go up an interstate carrying a phone she has left switched on. Which was why some part of me knew that long before the rest of me caught up. So, I wasn’t surprised when my men waited for that truck to pull in and got in behind it only to find nothing but a shocked middle-aged man behind the wheel… and no nurse.

She had dropped it in the bed of his truck.

I put my forehead against the cold glass of that window and started to laugh. Granted, it wasn’t much of a laugh. Not when it came out of me sounding more sinister than anything else. Thirteen minutes. That was all it cost me in the end, and thirteen minutes was more time than she needed to disappear.

Not that I knew it at the time. No, at the time all I had was a truck going north and a single vehicle to put behind it. There was no decision to make. You send the only men you have after the only thing that is moving, and you don’t get to wonder about it until later.

Which is precisely what she had counted on.

After that, it took the rest of that day and most of the next to buy the tapes from the man who managed that store so I could discover how she had done it. So, I could watch it all play out and honestly, I have lost count of how many times I have gone over that footage. In fact, I have watched it like a man obsessed and every time I have, two emotions hit… rage and pride.

But it was the pride that was the hardest to face, as it was the bitter kind. Because yes, there was rage, and there always will be. But it was never the first thing I felt. As right from the opening minute of that tape something underneath it sat up and paid attention.

She was good.

Not lucky, not desperate, but fucking good.

My level of good, and I had no idea she possessed such a skill. I had stood at that window like a fool, believing I had won. That she was on her way back to me.

That had been my mistake and not one that I would let happen again. Because I had learned a great deal when watching that footage.

Like the way she never once looked directly at my man, yet she knew exactly who he was inside of a minute. Then she spent time filling a basket with nothing at all and boring him half to death. And she was counting the whole time. Counting the three or four seconds she was out of his sight every time she turned a corner. Which was all the time anybody needs, and I had taught that exact thing to grown men who never truly got it.

Then she used those seconds and went through a curtain into a fitting room, which was the one place on this earth a man following a woman cannot put his eyes on. In fact, he didn’t even see her go in. And she had counted on it and was more than ready to become invisible. She took the coveralls in with her, the ones that had come out of her own trunk, and not once had anyone questioned the shopping bag she carried them in. A bag that held everything she needed to become indistinguishable.

Oversized men’s coveralls that she had obviously taken the length off, both the legs and the sleeves, and no doubt long before that morning. Then she had kept the disguise at the ready for God knows how long before that day. She had even gone so far as to dirty her face and hands.

Jesus… she was a fucking master at planning; I had to give her that.

Which meant that she went into that fitting room as a small, frightened woman and she came out a short, stocky, unremarkable man. But the clothes were the least of it as she even changed the way she moved, putting weight back in the heels. Putting her shoulders forward and letting her arms hang down. Just like a man at the end of a night shift with somewhere better to be.

And then she went shopping.

That… fuck me, but that was the part that really got me. Not the coveralls, not even the walk. A woman evading a man following her with everything she owns in one bag, and she stops at the deli counter on her way to the doors. She picks up a sandwich, a soda and a bag of chips, then casually stands in a line to pay cash for them.

Unbelievable.

Because a man walks out of a store like that carrying something. That was what she understood and my men did not. Empty hands would have been a red flag, along with a man rushing out of the door.

So, she did neither.

Then she calmly walked fifteen minutes east to a gas station and bought a coffee she no doubt didn’t want but bought it to give a man in coveralls a reason to be standing there with no car. After that she stood there with a paper cup in her hand and said goodbye to me.

I knew that because I also acquired camera footage on those pumps that showed her tossing her phone in the pickup bed before getting on a bus on her way to her new life. And that footage offered me fucking nothing. A line that stopped in nine places, and every one of those nine had other buses that went somewhere else.