6. Isla
ISLA
I stood in the middle of my own living room and could not remember how a duffel bag worked.
Not the zipper or the straps. Those I knew.
I could not remember why I owned one duffel bag and three tote bags, and why not one of them looked like the right size for whatever this was.
There was no packing list for this. Nobody handed you a pamphlet titled What To Bring When Someone Breaks Into Your Apartment On A Fake Work Order And You Don't Know How Long You'll Be Gone.
I pulled scrubs off their hangers instead, because scrubs were a decision I already knew how to make. Three sets, folded the way I folded them for a double shift.
My hands did the folding without me telling them to, which helped more than I expected it to.
I had spent three years learning what other people's fear looked like up close, the particular way it sat in a jaw or a set of shoulders or a grip that would not loosen even in sleep. I knew fear from the outside better than almost anyone I had ever met.
This was the first time it had my own name on it.
I refused to let my hands shake where he could see them. I folded the same shirt twice, smoothing it flatter than it needed to be, just to keep my fingers busy while I decided what mattered enough to bring.
Toothbrush. Phone charger. The photo of my mother from the one summer she had let someone else hold the camera.
My laptop went in last, in case whatever this turned into still left me time to be a person with a job.
I left the rest. Whatever the apartment wanted to keep for itself, it could keep.
I checked the window locks twice before I let myself stop moving, the same locks I had checked every night for three years without ever really believing anyone would test them.
I texted Renee from the hallway, one hand on the strap of the duffel, thumb moving faster than I meant it to. Something came up.
I'm covering my shifts this week. I owe you forever. I'll explain when I can.
Her reply came back before I'd even locked the door. Are you okay?
No jokes, no exclamation points, nothing extra. From Renee, that plain a message meant she was actually worried.
I typed back fine, then deleted it, because it wasn't true and she would know that anyway. I settled on safe instead, and left it there.
The knock came exactly on time, three raps, evenly spaced, the kind of knock that told you everything about the person doing it before they said a word.
"It's open," I called, zipping the duffel closed on the second try.
Nikolai stepped inside and did the thing he always did, a fast sweep of the room that took in every window and every door before he looked at me directly.
"You are ready?" he asked.
"Give me one bag's worth of ready. That's what you're getting."
He took the duffel from my hand before I finished the sentence, testing the weight of it like a man checking whether a thing could be trusted. "This is light."
"I'm efficient."
"You are optimistic." He slung it over one shoulder, already turning back toward the door. "We should go."
I grabbed my coat and took one last look at the only apartment I had ever lived in on my own. I followed him out without letting myself linger on the door long enough to make it mean something.
The car was parked at the curb, engine already ticking with warmth, like he had started it before he even knocked. I noticed that and decided not to ask about it.
We pulled away from the curb into a morning that looked exactly like every other morning, which felt insulting somehow. The city owed me at least a little visible chaos to match how the last day had gone.
The silence in the car lasted about four blocks before I could not stand it anymore.
"So," I said. "Do you always drive this fast, or is today special?"
"I drive the speed that gets us there."
"That's not an answer, that's a mission statement."
"It is accurate."
"Everything with you is accurate. Has anyone ever told you that you'd make a terrible fortune cookie?"
"I have not heard that one."
"Well, now someone has." I watched a bakery slide past the window, then a laundromat, then another bakery, the whole city arranged in the same tired rerun. "Do you know where we're going, or is that classified too?"
"You will know when we arrive."
"That's the least reassuring sentence a person can say to someone in a moving car."
"I did not intend it to reassure you."
"Great. Excellent." I let my head fall back against the seat.
"Very comforting bedside manner. Remind me never to hire you for an actual hospital."
That got nothing out of him, not even the almost-smile I had started keeping a private count of. He kept his eyes moving between the road and the mirrors, checking them in a rhythm I was starting to recognize, three seconds ahead, one behind, over and over like a metronome nobody else could hear.
"How's Reyes doing without both of us hovering?" I asked, mostly to fill the quiet.
"Ortiz has a man on the door. Reyes will survive one shift without either of us."
"You say that like you're not worried."
"I am always worried. Worry does not require an audience."
"You could've fooled me. You worry like a man reading a grocery list."
He did not answer that one, which I decided counted as a small victory.
"Whose place are we going to?" I asked.
"Yours? Or is this a safe house that isn't actually safe, and you're just testing me?" I pressed, only half joking.
"It will do the job."
"That's not an answer either."
"I am aware."
I kept talking anyway, mostly because silence in that car felt like a hole I did not want to fall into. I told him about a coworker who microwaved fish in the break room.
I told him about the vending machine on four, which he already knew far too much about. I told him about a patient who had once tried to discharge himself by climbing out a first floor window, only to land directly in a hedge the hospital kept specifically for that purpose, or so the story went.
He answered in single words when he answered at all.
Fine. Understood. Unfortunate.
I decided his vocabulary probably had exactly enough range to order coffee and defuse a hostage situation, with nothing much in between. He would have made a terrible witness and an excellent alibi.
The radio was on low, tuned to some station he clearly had not chosen. A DJ with a voice built for used car commercials came on between songs, cracking a joke about a local pizza chain that had not been funny even by the low standard of local radio.
"That man," I said, "has never once made anyone laugh in his life."
"He is trying."
"That's the saddest defense I've ever heard for a human being."
The DJ launched into a second joke, somehow worse than the first, something about traffic and a chicken that made no sense even as I heard it happen. I groaned out loud, dropping my head back against the seat.
"He's going to do a whole bit. I can feel it building."
"Do not encourage him."
"I'm not encouraging him, I'm mourning him." I did my best impression of the DJ's voice, low and self-satisfied, delivering the punch line a full beat too slow the way he had.
Nikolai laughed.
It came out of him fast and unguarded, a real sound, rough at the edges like it had not been used in a long time and had forgotten its own shape.
It lasted maybe two seconds before he caught it, pressing his mouth shut like a man closing a door he had not meant to open.
I turned to look at him, too surprised to hide it. "Was that a laugh? Did I just hear an actual laugh?"
"It was nothing."
"It was absolutely not nothing. I have been trying to get a laugh out of you since the night you nearly lost your head to a fire extinguisher. That deserves a medal."
"It will not happen again."
"Don't threaten me with a good time." I was still grinning, and I did not bother hiding that either.
"For the record, it was a good laugh. Very rusty. Needs practice."
He did not answer that, but his hand settled differently on the wheel, fingers spread instead of gripped, like some of the tension in him had let go for a second before it remembered its job.
We drove another mile in a quieter kind of silence, the kind that did not need filling.
"Can I ask you something?" I said eventually.
"You are going to regardless."
"Fair." I turned in my seat to face him.
"Is this normal for you? Driving someone across the city because their apartment isn't safe anymore. Do you do this a lot?"
He was quiet long enough that I thought he might not answer at all. His eyes flicked to the mirror and back, that same rhythm, three seconds and one.
"No," he said finally. "Not like this."
"What's different about this one?"
Another pause, longer than the first. "I am not certain yet."
I let that sit between us instead of pushing for more. Something in his voice told me pushing would not get me anywhere honest.
The neighborhood changed slowly around us, the bakeries and laundromats giving way to warehouses converted into lofts, then to blocks of plain brick buildings that all looked like they had agreed years ago to stop trying to stand out.
He pulled to the curb outside one of them, a squat brick walk-up with a fire escape zigzagging up its face. A row of buzzers sat beside the door with no names next to any of them, only numbers.
He shut off the engine and sat there a moment before reaching for the door handle, like the last few feet of the drive needed more thought than the rest of it combined.
"This is it," he said.
Something in the way he said it caught on me wrong. The words landed softer than anything he had said all morning, almost apologetic, the way a person sounds when they are handing you something they wish were better than it was.
"Home sweet safehouse," I said, trying to make it light. "Should I be worried about the decor?"
"You should not expect much."
"Now that's the most honest thing you've said all day."
I did not understand it yet. I filed it away anyway, the same reflex I used on everything else about him, and followed him out of the car and up the front steps.
The lobby smelled like old paint and somebody's dinner from two floors up. A single bulb buzzed over a wall of mailboxes, half of them dented, none of them labeled.
The elevator groaned when he called it, the kind of groan that made you reconsider the stairs. It rattled us up past the first floor, then the second, in a silence that felt heavier than the one in the car.
He stood a half step in front of me, the way he always did in an unfamiliar space, one hand loose at his side and the other still holding the strap of my bag like he had forgotten it was there.
I watched the numbers light up over the door, one after another, and glanced at him once, trying to read whatever it was that had put that strange, careful note in his voice.
He was not looking at me. He was looking straight ahead at the doors, jaw set, like a man bracing for something he had already decided he could not avoid.
The elevator slowed, then stopped, and the doors began to open on the third floor.