Page 48

HARPER

The café smells like actual coffee instead of whatever substitute I’ve been drinking for months, and I sit there letting that alone feel like enough of a gift for one afternoon.

The chair’s a little wobbly, the table sticky near one corner from someone else’s spilled drink, and I don’t care about any of it right now. It’s ordinary in a way I haven’t gotten to touch in months, and that alone matters more than the sticky table ever could.

Marek’s at the table by the window, close enough to reach me fast, but far enough that I don’t feel watched every second.

Another guard stands near the door, relaxed in that deliberate way trained men manage, like standing still is its own kind of work. I order something with too much whipped cream on top and don’t feel guilty about a single bite.

For twenty minutes, it’s just an ordinary afternoon. Sunlight through the window. A stranger’s laugh from the next table over. My own reflection in the glass looking like a person who has a normal life, the kind where a woman gets pregnant and goes to a café and worries about nothing bigger than whether she should order a second pastry.

I let myself sink into that fantasy completely, forgetting for whole stretches of minutes that any of this was ever supposed to be dangerous at all.

I don’t notice at first that the shop next door has gone quiet.

It registers slowly, the way small wrongness always does, a gap where the usual bell over their door should be chiming, no customers drifting past the window in either direction for longer than feels normal.

I try to place why it bothers me, running through the same kind of pattern recognition that’s kept me documenting exits and rotations for months now, and I don’t get far enough to name it properly before someone is already moving without waiting on my read of the situation.

I glance toward Marek, and he’s already noticed too, his posture shifting a fraction, hand drifting toward his jacket in a way that isn’t casual anymore. His eyes track the street outside with a focus that wasn’t there five minutes ago.

“We should go,” he says, already standing.

I don’t argue. I’ve learned better than to argue when someone with his training says those words in that tone.

I gather my bag, moving faster than the moment seems to call for on the surface, some old instinct of my own picking up on his urgency before my conscious mind fully catches up to any of it.

We’re barely to the door when it happens.

A van pulls up too fast, tires screeching hard against the curb in a way that shouldn’t be possible on a street this quiet, and before I can fully process the sound, hands are on me.

Someone’s arm locking around my waist from behind while another hand clamps hard over my mouth.

My whole body goes rigid with shock for half a second, everything happening faster than my mind can sort into any order that makes sense of it at all.

I don’t think. My body reacts the way it’s been trained to, elbow driving back hard into whoever’s behind me, a solid hit that earns a grunt of pain and a half second of loosened grip.

I twist, going for the arm across my chest the way I would in the dojo, and I land one more hit, a heel driven down onto someone’s foot, before more hands close around me than I can fight off at once.

There are more of them than I first registered, three at least, maybe four, closing in from angles I can’t track fast enough, each one wearing dark clothes that blend together into a single mass of resistance I can’t fight my way through.

Marek’s shouting somewhere close, a scuffle breaking out that I only catch in fragments, sound without shape, everything happening too fast for my mind to arrange into a clear picture.

I hear something that might be a gunshot. I hear Marek’s voice cut off mid-word, and the absence of it afterward is somehow louder than the shout was, a silence that scares me more than anything else happening around me right now, worse even than the hands still holding onto my own body.

I fight harder, twisting against arms that outnumber mine, screaming for help that doesn’t come fast enough, and someone’s forearm locks tight across my throat from behind, cutting the sound off before it can carry any real distance.

“Careful with her,” a voice says, close to my ear, calm in a way that terrifies me more than shouting would. “She’s carrying. Viktor wants her handled gently.”

The words land somewhere far away, distant enough that I can’t process the full weight of them, my whole focus narrowed down to the fight still happening in my own body, legs kicking, hands clawing at the arm across my throat.

A cloth presses over my nose and mouth, sudden, the sweet chemical smell hitting me before I even register what it is, and my body knows this feeling, has known it since the very first night in that penthouse, and some part of me starts fighting even harder because I know exactly what comes next if I stop.

My lungs already remember this fight even before my mind fully catches up to what’s happening again.

I don’t stop. I fight it the way I never got the chance to fight it that first time, thrashing against arms holding me too tight to break free of, my lungs burning with the effort of holding my breath as long as I can manage.

I count in my head without meaning to, the same counting my old instructor taught me for entirely different reasons, useless against this but automatic anyway, a habit my body reaches for even when it can’t help me the way it’s supposed to.