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“I’ll try.”

She hugs me before I leave, holding on a little longer than usual. “I mean it, Dav. Take care of yourself.”

“I will.”

I watch her walk to her car before heading to my own. The parking lot is quiet, the streetlights casting pools of yellow on the pavement. I unlock my door, slide into the driver’s seat, and start the engine.

The drive home takes about twenty minutes. I take my usual route through the city, past the monuments glowing white in the darkness, through the neighborhoods that gradually thin out as I get closer to my apartment. The radio is on, playing something soft and forgettable, and I let my mind drift.

It’s been a strange week. The job was unlike anything I’ve done before—more complex, more intense, more unsettling. The aftermath has been even stranger. Ethan’s debrief felt like he was looking for something specific, something I couldn’t quite identify.

I should have asked more questions. I should have pushed Ethan on the system’s behavior, on the money laundering, on why the government needed someone like me to access something they could have investigated themselves.

I didn’t, because I was too caught up in the challenge, too fascinated by the architecture, too curious about what I would find next.

That curiosity might have been a mistake.

I’m about ten minutes from home when I notice I’m being followed.

There’s a black SUV two cars behind me that’s been there since I left the restaurant. A silver sedan on my left that matched my lane change three blocks ago. A pickup truck that’s been hovering just ahead of me, never quite getting far enough ahead to disappear.

I tell myself I’m being paranoid. I tell myself that after a week of intense work and too little sleep, my brain is inventing threats that don’t exist. I tell myself that traffic patterns are just traffic patterns, and sometimes cars end up going the same direction.

I can’t shake the feeling.

I make a turn I don’t need to make, left instead of right, toward a neighborhood I don’t usually drive through. The SUV follows. The sedan follows. The pickup truck adjusts its position.

My heart rate kicks up.

I consider my options. I could call 911, but I don’t have an emergency to report yet. Only a feeling, a pattern, a suspicion. I could drive to a police station, but the nearest one is fifteen minutes away, and I’m not sure I have fifteen minutes. I could try to lose them, but I’m not a trained driver, and these people clearly are.

These people.

I don’t know who they are. I don’t know if they’re connected to the job or something else entirely. All I know is that they’re coordinated, they’re professional, and they’re not going away.

I make another turn, this time toward a busier street. More traffic, more witnesses, more chances for something to interrupt whatever’s happening. But as I round the corner, I see that the road ahead is nearly empty. The cars that were there a moment ago have somehow cleared, leaving a straight stretch of pavement with nowhere to hide.

The realization hits me like ice water.

They’ve been herding me. I don’t have time to react.

The SUV accelerates suddenly, pulling alongside my car on the driver’s side. The sedan slides in from the right. The pickup truck appears behind me, close enough that I can see the grill in my rearview mirror.

I’m boxed in.

My hands tighten on the steering wheel. I could try to brake, try to force a collision, try to create enough chaos to escape on foot. But before I can make a decision, the SUV in front of me slows to a stop, and I have no choice but to stop too.

The doors open.

Men step out of the vehicles. Four of them, maybe five—it’s hard to count when my heart is pounding this hard and my vision is narrowing at the edges. They move with a precision that confirms everything I’ve already guessed. These aren’t random criminals. These aren’t opportunists. These are professionals.

One of them approaches my car. He’s tall, broad-shouldered, wearing dark clothes that blend into the night. His face is calm, expressionless, like he’s done this a hundred times before.

He taps on my window, but I don’t roll it down. He taps again, harder this time. Then he reaches for the door handle.

I lock the doors. It’s a futile gesture but it’s instinct, the desperate action of someone who has run out of options. The man doesn’t seem surprised. He steps back and says something into a radio I can’t hear.

The next few seconds happen in fragments.