11. Sofiya
SOFIYA
Budapest is burned the moment I see the watcher and read Maks’s note, and after that everything in me shifts from shock to time.
I go inside, lock the door, and pull the curtains before I do anything else. Then I put Maks’s note on the table, take out a pen, and start writing on the back of an old receipt.
Leave in twenty-four hours.
No flight if I can avoid it.
No straight line.
No calls unless absolutely necessary.
I stop, look at the list, then add one more.
Don’t waste what I have.
That’s the part that complicates everything.
If I were only trying to survive, I could stuff the cash into my coat, take the forged passport, grab the gun, and vanish by morning.
Budapest gave me enough time to prepare for that.
In the first week here, before I found the office job and before my body started betraying me in new ways, I spent every spare hour mapping exits.
I walked Keleti at rush hour and again close to midnight to see which departures swallowed people whole.
I stood on platforms with a paper cup of coffee and watched who got checked and who didn’t.
I rode trams out toward districts nobody romanticizes and checked short-term rentals that asked for cash and very few questions.
I walked the riverfront, the bus terminal, and two separate coach depots to learn which routes ran south fast and which clerks cared more about their cigarettes than passports.
I built escape lines before I needed them. I just didn’t expect to need them this soon.
Now I need more than an exit. I need contingencies.
I kneel beside the bed, drag the suitcase out, and open it.
Documents first. Real passport. Forged passport.
Work papers for Katalin. Cash from all three places, split again into smaller bundles.
I count it twice and tuck it into different pockets of the bag and coat.
Then I take out the drive and set it on the bed.
I stare at it long enough to get angry.
“You nearly got me killed,” I mutter, then pick it up again.
That isn’t fair, and I know it. The drive didn’t do anything. Maks did. Still, it sits there in my palm like a small, dense piece of every bad decision I’ve made since Moscow.
I cross to the desk and pull out a sheet of paper. If I carry only the drive, I can lose everything in one bad stop, one search, one wrong man deciding my bag interests him. If I leave it all here, I deserve what happens next. So I start splitting it up.
On one page, I write what I know from memory.
Baltic routes. Finnish transfers. Closed series reopened under secondary codes.
Two shell entities. Three names. One old intermediary link.
Not enough to destroy Maks, but enough to sting if it lands somewhere that matters.
I fold that page and slide it into a plain envelope.
On another, I write a shorter version with only the pieces that would force questions if they surfaced suddenly. I seal that too.
Then I look at my second phone.
For the last ten days, I’ve been trying to reach one person from my father’s old world without being obvious about it.
A retired bookkeeper named László Varga, who used to reconcile freight books so quietly, most men forgot he existed.
My father never forgot. He once told me men like Varga keep empires alive longer than gunmen do, then he laughed when I repeated it back to him at dinner and my uncle looked annoyed.
If Varga still has what he used to keep, he may have records that connect the corridor, the money, and the old killing in one place.
Originals. Copies. Something. I haven’t reached him yet, but I’ve come close twice through side questions and old names.
If I can get to him before I leave, I might still be able to do more than survive this.
I press a hand to my stomach and close my eyes for a second.
If I spend the rest of my life only running from Maks, then he wins whether he catches me or not.
My father did not raise me to be moved around like excess cargo.
He taught me that information matters only if it can still hurt the right person after you’re gone.
I can hear him saying it now, dry and patient while I got irritated and told him he made everything sound like a ledger entry.
He’d only smile and say that was because ledgers outlasted grief.
“Fine,” I say to the empty room. “I was listening.”
I put one envelope in the lining of my coat and the other inside a book on the shelf near the radiator.
Then I pick up the drive again, hide it under the false bottom of the suitcase, change my mind, pull it out, and pace once across the room with it in my fist. Too obvious.
Too easy to find if someone tears the suitcase apart.
I crouch by the wardrobe, pull out a boot, then stop. Still not good enough.
In the end, I take a seam ripper from my sewing tin, slit the inner hem of my thick winter scarf, and slide the drive flat inside. I stitch it closed with clumsy, fast hands, test the weight, then wrap the scarf around my neck and look in the mirror.
Better.
If I need to run, it comes with me. If someone searches the room, they won’t start with the scarf on my body.
By the time I finish, I’m sweating and tired in a way that feels deeper than effort.
I sit on the edge of the bed for a minute and hate that I need the minute.
The baby changes the math of everything.
Every route is farther. Every risk is heavier.
There is no version of this now where I’m the only one paying for a mistake, and that truth follows me even when I try to lock it outside the room.
I get up anyway.
The pharmacy near the tram line is still open, and I need vitamins, water, and something plain enough to eat without gagging.
I take the long way, watch reflections in shop windows, and stop twice to let crowds pass me before I cross.
No repeat faces. No obvious tail. That means very little now, but I take it.
Inside the pharmacy, I move quickly. Prenatal vitamins. Iron. Crackers. The woman at the register doesn’t spare a glance my way.
“Anything else?” she asks.
I almost laugh.
That’s the ugly part. I am standing there planning escape routes from the family who might have helped kill my father, and what I’m buying are vitamins in a cheap plastic bag.
The ordinariness of it lands harder than panic.
My life has narrowed into tasks so small and brutal, they’d be funny if they weren’t mine.
“No,” I say and hand over cash.
When I step back outside, I don’t go straight home.
I cut toward the station instead and do one last sweep of the route I’m most likely to use.
Tram first. Off at Blaha. Walk to Keleti through the side entrance.
Locker hall on the left. Ticket windows farther in.
If I leave at first light, I can buy close to departure and keep moving.
If the station feels wrong, I can cross back out and head for the coach depot instead.
South is still best, but not directly. Transitional first. Somewhere that looks like a stop, not a destination.
I walk the first stretch, then turn back.
The city is dimmer now, and the people on the street are down to commuters, couples, and men smoking outside bars. My bag feels light, which means I packed correctly. My shoulders ache anyway. I tell myself that’s tension. I don’t fully believe it.
By the time I reach my building, I’m wound tight enough that the quiet hits me before the hallway does.
The front entrance opens too easily. No voices.
No television through the walls. No footsteps overhead.
The stairwell light buzzes faintly and then steadies.
I climb one floor, then another, and slow before the landing.
The door to my apartment looks normal, but my whole gut is screaming telling me there’s some kind of an emergency going on. I stand there with the pharmacy bag in one hand and the keys in the other, listening hard enough to hear my own pulse.
Nothing.
I set the bag down quietly, reach into my coat, and wrap my fingers around the grip of the gun. Then I fit the key into the lock and turn it one slow click at a time.
The door opens.
I step inside, close it softly behind me, and get two steps into the dark before a man’s voice says, low and calm, “Put the gun down, Sofiya.”
I know that voice.
My whole body goes still.
Anton is sitting in the chair by the window like he belongs in it, one ankle over the opposite knee, coat open, sleeves rolled, and his face half lost in shadow until the streetlight catches the line of it when he leans forward.
His gaze moves over me once and settles on the gun in my hand. Then he looks at my face and smiles very slightly. “You’re even prettier when you’re about to do something stupid.”