Chapter 1 #2
My hips caught on the fence. For one horrible second, I was stuck, half in and half out, completely vulnerable. One of the men was close enough that I could smell his cologne—something expensive and sharp, like pine trees and acid citrus.
I twisted hard, felt skin tear, and popped through.
The man's hand grabbed for my ankle, fingers brushing my sneaker.
I kicked back, connected with something solid—his face, from the sound of his cursing.
Then I was running again, across the loading dock, between the trucks, into the maze of back alleys I knew better than any mob muscle ever could.
Every dumpster, every fire escape, every loose board and hidden gap—I knew them like other people knew their childhood bedrooms. But Chenkov's men had phones, coordination, and they were learning fast.
I cut left behind the Korean grocery, vaulted the milk crates they always left stacked by the delivery door.
A voice crackled from somewhere ahead—not shouting, but talking steadily into a phone.
They were boxing me in, one moving to cut off my escape routes while others herded me forward.
Professional. Organized. Everything I wasn't.
My infected palm was definitely bleeding now, leaving smears on everything I touched. The new cut from the fence burned along my ribs. But adrenaline was better than any antibiotic, keeping me moving when my body wanted to collapse.
Right turn. Left. Through the gap between two buildings so narrow I had to turn sideways again. Behind me, foreign cursing as one of them tried to follow and got stuck. Small victories.
I was calculating my next move when I heard it—a sound so faint I almost missed it under my own ragged breathing. Whimpering. High-pitched, desperate, coming from the dumpster behind the abandoned Thai restaurant.
No.
Keep running.
Whatever it was, it wasn't my problem. I had my own survival to worry about.
The whimpering came again, weaker this time. Like something giving up.
I knew that sound. Had made it myself, too many nights to count.
Shit.
I lifted the dumpster lid just enough to peer inside.
A cardboard box, Colombia Bananas printed on the side, soggy from garbage juice.
Inside, a puppy that might have been a pit bull mix, maybe three months old, nothing but bones wrapped in patchy fur.
One eye was swollen shut. The other eye looked at me with that particular exhaustion that came from understanding nobody was coming to help.
"Fuck," I whispered.
Voices getting closer. They were closing the net. The smart move was to run. Leave the puppy to whatever fate awaited things nobody wanted. It was probably dying anyway. Even if it survived, who'd want a one-eyed pit bull?
Nobody. Just like nobody wanted foster kids who aged out with sticky fingers and trust issues.
The puppy tried to lift its head, failed, let out another whimper that was barely more than air.
Someone had thrown it away. Literally tossed it in the garbage like it was nothing. Like it was disposable. Trash.
I knew how that felt.
"This is so fucking stupid," I told the puppy as I scooped it up. It weighed nothing, all sharp bones under matted fur. It tried to lick my hand with a dry tongue, grateful for even this doomed gesture of kindness.
I tucked it inside my jacket, zipping it up enough to hold the puppy against my chest. It made me bulkier, slower. The added weight—minimal as it was—would affect my balance. This was suicide.
But I was running anyway, the puppy's rapid heartbeat joining mine in a rhythm of shared desperation.
The Mens' voices converged ahead of me. They'd figured out where I was heading, moved to cut me off. The construction site to my left was fenced off—no good. The dead-end behind the dentist's office to my right led nowhere. That left up.
The fire escape on the old Murphy building was rusted through in places, missing the bottom ladder.
But there was a dumpster underneath it, and if you knew exactly where to jump, you could grab the second-floor platform.
I'd done it before, but never carrying something, never with a bloody hand that might slip.
No choice.
I ran at the dumpster full speed, leaped onto the closed lid, and jumped for the platform. My infected palm screamed when I grabbed the rusted metal, but I held on, hauling myself up with my other arm. The puppy stayed silent against my chest, somehow understanding that quiet meant survival.
Up the fire escape, trying not to think about the bolts groaning under my weight, the rust flakes raining down that would show them exactly where I'd gone.
Third floor. Fourth. They reached the dumpster below, one trying to boost another up.
But they were too heavy, too bulky. The rusted metal would never hold them.
At the roof, I ran to the edge. Six feet of empty space between this building and the next, but someone had laid a plank across it. Probably teenagers using it to drink where cops wouldn't find them. The wood was weathered, grey, maybe two feet wide. Four stories down to the alley.
The puppy shifted against my chest.
"Don't move," I whispered. "Please don't move."
The plank bounced with each step. Halfway across, I heard it crack. Not breaking, not yet, but warning me.
Three more steps. Two. One.
I collapsed on the other roof, gasping. The puppy squirmed, needing air. I unzipped my jacket enough for its head to peek out. That one good eye looked around with mild interest, like being carried across sketchy planks by a bleeding girl while being chased by mobsters was just another Tuesday.
My stomach cramped hard enough to double me over. When was the last time I'd eaten? Yesterday? The day before? Now I had a puppy to feed, too.
I was on a roof next to a bunch of storage warehouse units. I knew this place well—in fact I’d stayed in one of the units a few times. That might be the best thing to do right now. I could still hear the frantic calls of the men—I didn’t have time to waste.
I headed down another fire escape, then headed to unit 39B.
It looked like all the others—orange door, heavy padlock, number stenciled in peeling white paint.
But I knew better. Some drunk had backed into this door with a U-Haul two winters ago, bent the hasp just enough that the padlock looked secure but would pull free if you knew the exact angle.
Emergency shelter when I needed it, which was more often than I wanted to admit.
The padlock came free with a metallic scrape that sounded like a scream.
I froze, listened. Nothing but the distant hum of traffic and the skitter of rats in the walls.
The door rolled up on protesting tracks, revealing darkness that smelled like dust and something else—machine oil, ozone, that particular scent of electronics that had never been used.
I pulled the door down behind me, sealing us into the dark. My phone's screen threw harsh shadows as I turned on the flashlight, the battery icon showing 3%. Three percent between me and total darkness.
The puppy stirred against my chest, whimpering. "Shh, it's okay. We're safe now. Kind of."
Safe was relative when you were hiding in what looked increasingly like someone's criminal stash house. It had never been full before, but now it was practically bursting.
Boxes. Dozens of them, labeled in Cyrillic.
Some had been opened and resealed, revealing glimpses of electronics—laptops, phones, tablets, all high-end.
Designer handbags still in their dust bags, worth a fortune.
A stack of cases that looked military, metal and locked, with warnings stenciled in multiple languages.
"What the fuck did I walk into?" I whispered to the puppy.
First things first. The puppy needed water and somewhere to relieve itself.
I found a stack of newspapers—The Moscow Times, which answered some questions while raising others—and spread them in a corner.
The puppy wobbled when I set it down, squatted immediately, then looked at me with that one good eye like it was apologizing for existing.
"You're fine, baby. Everybody's gotta pee."
There was a case of bottled water against one wall, the expensive kind with labels in multiple languages.
I cracked one open, poured some into a hubcap I found near the door.
The puppy drank desperately, front paws sliding until it was basically lying down while drinking.
When it finished, it crawled back to me, curling against my leg with a sigh that seemed too big for such a small body.
My phone battery blinked: 2%.
The USB drive felt heavier than before as I pulled it out. Whatever was on here was worth more than the guns and stolen goods in this unit. Worth enough to mobilize Chenkov's men immediately, to coordinate a hunt through Manhattan in broad daylight.
I plugged it into my phone's charging port, praying it would work. A generic file manager opened, showing folders with names in English, thank God. Financial Records. Routes. Personnel. Contracts.
I opened Financial Records first. Spreadsheets filled with numbers that made my head spin. Transfers of hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes millions. Account numbers at banks I'd never heard of. Shell companies with generic names like BlueSky Holdings and Atlas Unlimited.
Routes was exactly what it sounded like—addresses across the city with dates and times. Delivery schedules, maybe, or... I recognized some of the addresses. NYPD First Precinct. The Eighth. The Midtown North. Police stations, all of them.
My throat went dry.
Personnel was password protected, but Contracts wasn't. I opened it to find scanned documents, some in Russian, some in English. One caught my eye: Agreement for Services between Chenkov Imports and someone whose name was blacked out, but the letterhead was visible. City of New York, Department of—
My phone died.
The darkness was absolute. Not even a sliver of light from under the door. Just me, a starving puppy, and evidence of what looked like massive police corruption sitting useless in my dead phone.
The puppy whimpered, sensing my fear. I pulled it back against my chest, feeling its tiny heart racing against mine. "It's okay," I lied. "We're okay."
But we weren't. I'd stolen evidence of something huge, hidden in a storage unit that clearly belonged to a another criminal gang.
Maybe the same gang? Chenkov knew what I looked like, knew I had his USB.
It was only a matter of time before they tracked me here, whether through cameras, witnesses, or pure systematic searching.
The darkness pressed in, making the unit feel smaller.
Somewhere in those military cases might be weapons.
Somewhere in these boxes was enough stolen merchandise to put someone away for years.
And somewhere out there, Chenkov's men were hunting for a girl with mismatched eyes who'd taken the wrong wallet at the wrong time.
The puppy's breathing evened out—sleeping or unconscious, I couldn't tell in the dark.
I stroked its matted fur, feeling the bones underneath, the fever from the infection.
We were both dying in our own ways. Maybe it was fitting we'd die together, two pieces of breathing trash that nobody would miss.
But first, I needed to rest. Just for a few minutes.
Just until I could think straight, figure out my next move.
The corner with the moving blankets was still there, muscle memory guiding me in the dark.
I built a nest, tucking the puppy against my chest, wrapping us both in dusty fabric that smelled like other people's abandoned lives.
My eyes closed despite the danger. Exhaustion was another kind of darkness, and I sank into it gratefully. The last thing I heard was the puppy's labored breathing, and somewhere far away, the sound of car engines getting closer.