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I didn’t know.

That became the answer to nearly every question the following weeks presented.

We left the rooms above the tailor shop after a dark sedan passed the building three times in one afternoon. The driver never stopped, and the license plate belonged to a vehicle reported stolen in Pennsylvania. Perhaps the car had nothing to do with us. Rurik didn’t consider possibility a sufficient reason to remain.

We departed after midnight through the tailor shop’s rear entrance. I carried Salvatore’s files and one change of clothes. Rurik carried everything required to kill anyone who attempted to follow.

The next house stood behind a Russian bakery in Brighton Beach. Our bedroom windows faced a brick wall less than six feet away, and the scent of bread entered through the vents before dawn. Customers laughed downstairs while buying coffee and pastries, unaware armed men watched the alley from a room above the ovens.

We remained there for eleven days.

I stopped unpacking.

Clothes remained folded inside the bag because placing them in a drawer began to feel like tempting whatever forced us to leave. My shoes stayed beside the bed. Salvatore’s files never left my reach, and the letters I had written traveled with them from one borrowed room to another.

Rurik developed a system that required no discussion. He entered every new location first, checked the doors and windows, then returned for me. He showed me the exits, placed a weapon within reach, and told me which floorboards complained beneath a person’s weight.

I memorized each house, then abandoned it before it became familiar.

The Society didn’t need to find us to control how we lived. Every unknown vehicle became a warning. Every dropped call meant someone had compromised the connection. When a guard failed to check in at the expected time, Rurik moved us again before learning the man had broken his phone while changing a tire.

By the middle of November, I had slept in five different beds and couldn’t remember which kitchen contained the coffee cups without opening the wrong cabinet first.

No attack came.

The absence exhausted us more efficiently than violence.

Rurik slept in shifts measured between calls. Some nights, I found him sitting beside a window with his pistol resting against his thigh, watching streets belonging to people who could return to the same home every evening without wondering whether routine would kill them.

He never complained. He didn’t remind me how much easier his life had been before Salvatore placed my name inside it. He treated every relocation as another task, every sleepless night as a debt he had already decided to pay.

I began to understand how protection could consume the person offering it.

Salvatore’s fear had been part of us before we ever had a home. It lived in the secluded tables he chose, the hotel curtains he closed before turning on a light, and the way his attention lingered on any car that remained behind us too long. Even in Montana, with the mountains standing between us and everyone we feared, he checked the locks after I went to bed and went still whenever tires disturbed the gravel road. Each precaution had felt like love when held alone.

Together, they had formed the walls of a prison I hadn’t known we occupied.

Thanksgiving passed inside a farmhouse north of the city. The property belonged to someone Maxim trusted, though Rurik refused to give me the man’s name. Bare trees surrounded the house, and frost silvered the fields before sunrise. No neighboring roof was visible from the windows.

Mom called shortly after noon. She and Dad had gone to Arkansas because no one wanted her alone. Uncle Sal, Duncan, Freyja, Maureen, Colleen, and several people whose voices I couldn’t distinguish filled the rooms behind them.

Mom carried the phone into the kitchen while Uncle Sal argued that a turkey couldn’t possibly require seven hours to cook. Duncan shouted that no one had asked his opinion, and Dad laughed somewhere close enough for the sound to reach me.

For several minutes, I listened to my family continuing without me.

The grief wasn’t clean enough to call homesickness. Home had become a collection of people instead of a place, and approaching any of them could place a target upon their door. I wanted Mom’s kitchen, Dad’s arms, and Uncle Sal complaining about food he would eat twice before the evening ended. I wanted to sit beside Colleen and hear Duncan tell everyone to leave the turkey alone.

Wanting them was why I remained hidden.

“Next year,” Mom whispered once she had closed herself away from the others. “We’ll all be together next year.”

“You don’t know that.”

“No.” Tears gathered in her eyes. “But I have to believe something, Maddie.”

I looked through the farmhouse window at the empty fields. “Then believe it for both of us.”

After the call ended, Rurik prepared dinner from food Vladmir had delivered the night before. The turkey came already cooked and sliced, but he burned the potatoes while answering a call from Maxim and dropped half the rolls when the baking sheet tilted in his hand.