Lena
Don’t look back. Don’t look back. Don’t look back.
I look back.
The street behind me is empty and that should be a relief. It isn’t, because empty streets in Vienna at seven in the morning just mean I haven’t spotted them yet.
That’s what two days on the run does to you. It doesn’t make you paranoid. It makes you accurate.
I duck into the doorway of a closed pharmacy and press my back against the glass and breathe.
Two days.
Forty-eight hours of hostels that smell like mildew and other people’s misery, of sleeping in my clothes on mattresses I don’t look at too closely, of waking up at three and four and five in the morning with my father’s face on the backs of my eyelids and my own screaming in my throat and my stomach already heaving before I’m fully conscious.
I’ve thrown up every single morning.
My body has decided this is its process and nothing I do interrupts it—I wake, I remember, I vomit, I sit on the cold tile floor and shake until I can stand.
He cried once.
When I was nine and we found a bird with a broken wing in the courtyard and it died in his hands before we could get it to anyone.
He sat at the kitchen table and cried over a bird.
The man couldn’t kill an insect in his own home.
He used to catch spiders in a glass and put them outside, talking to them the whole time like they could hear him, like they understood they were being relocated rather than evicted.
He was an accountant.
He moved numbers.
He had soft hands and ink stains on his fingers and he wept over a bird.
They beat him to the floor in his own living room.
My stomach tries to turn over again and I press my fist against my mouth, breathing through my nose until it passes.
Not here. Not right now.
I am hungry.
That’s the immediate crisis I’m allowed to think about—the bone-deep, slightly nauseating hunger of someone who hasn’t eaten properly in two days because eating requires sitting still and sitting still feels like dying.
There’s a bakery three blocks up.
I saw it yesterday, clocked it the way I’ve started clocking everything now, exits, sightlines, how many people, whether any of them are watching the street instead of minding their own business.
You didn’t used to think like this.
No.
I used to think about translation deadlines and whether I’d remembered to buy coffee and whether Nadia wanted to get dinner on Friday.
I used to live in a world where bakeries were just bakeries.
My phone buzzes.
Nadia.
I answer it before the second vibration, ducking further into the doorway. “I’m here.”
“Oh thank god.” Her voice hits me like a physical thing—warm and sharp and so familiar I have to close my eyes for a second.
Nadia has been my best friend for six years and she has never once in that time sounded frightened.
She sounds frightened now, underneath the bossiness she uses to cover it. “I’ve been calling you since yesterday—”
“I know. I couldn’t—” I was on the bathroom floor at two in the morning. “I’m here now. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong on my end, I’m calling because I have a plan and you need to hear it.
” I can hear her moving around her apartment, that familiar shuffle-and-clank of Nadia doing three things at once.
“I’m in Budapest. I want you to come here.
I have a friend who does documentation—real documentation, not bad fakes—and I’ve already spoken to him.
New name, new papers, somewhere to stay that nobody will think to look.
You just need to get here, Lena. Can you get to Budapest? ”
I lean my head back against the glass. Budapest. Clean. Safe. Nadia’s apartment with its ridiculous amount of plants and her terrible taste in television and the way she makes tea like it’s a military operation.
“Yes,” I say. “I can get there. How fast does your friend need—”
“He’s already started. I sent him your photo from two years ago, I hope that’s okay, I didn’t know what else to—” She stops. “Are you eating? You sound hollow.”
“I’m going to eat right now, actually. There’s a bakery up the street.”
“Good. Lena.” Her voice sharpens. “The flash drive. Have you gotten into it yet?”
I look down at my hand.
The drive is in my jacket pocket, always, but I’ve had it out six times since Moscow trying everything—birthday dates, addresses, every number combination I can think of that my father might have used.
Nothing.
A password prompt that gives me nothing back.
“No. I can’t get in no matter what I try.
I don’t know what’s on it and I don’t know the code and I’m—” I stop because my voice is doing something I don’t want it to do.
“I’m so frustrated, Nadia, because he died for whatever is on this thing and I can’t even—”
“Okay. Okay, we’ll figure it out when you’re here. Yuri’s good with stuff like that.”
“Okay.”
“Good. Stay safe before then, okay? Don’t go—” She pauses. “Wait. Lena. What are you using to call me right now?”
“My phone.”
Silence.
Not a short silence. A long, horrible silence with a very specific shape.
“Your phone,” Nadia says. “Your actual phone. The one registered to your name. The one with your SIM card in it.”
The pharmacy doorway goes very cold.
“Lena.”
“I—” My mouth is dry. “I didn’t—I wasn’t thinking, I just… Nadia, I’ve been so—”
“How long have you been using it?”
Since Moscow. Since I called her.
“Since the beginning.” The words come out like a confession.
“Lena.” Her voice is so careful it’s terrifying. “That is literally the first rule. In every film. In every—”
“I know.” My throat is tight. “I know, I know, I—”
“You need to get off this call right now and you need to—”
Something moves in my peripheral vision.
I stop breathing.
Fuck.
The street that was empty isn’t empty anymore.
Two men are at the far end, moving with the specific quality of people who are not going anywhere, who are not on their way to something, who are simply positioned.
Dark clothes.
Hands loose at their sides.
One of them is looking at a phone but not at the phone, the way you look at something when you need to look like you’re not looking.
Then I see the third one.
Closer.
Between me and the bakery, leaning against the wall of the building across the street like he grew there.
They were already here.
They’ve been here.
“Nadia—” My voice comes out wrong. Thin.
“What? What’s happening?”
I can’t answer.
My throat has sealed itself.
There are three of them that I can see and my brain has developed a catastrophic blockage somewhere in the middle, and I am standing in a pharmacy doorway in Vienna in a jacket that isn’t warm enough and my legs will not work.
“Lena. LENA. What is happening right now—”
One of the men at the far end looks up from his non-phone.
Looks directly at me.
And starts moving.
Run.
My brain sends the message.
My legs receive it and do absolutely nothing with it.
The man across the street has straightened up.
The second far-end man is moving now too, cutting the angle, and I understand with horrible clarity that they have done this before, that this is a practiced geometry, that the positions they are in right now were chosen specifically to make running pointless.
“Lena! Run!”
Nadia’s voice through the phone cracks the paralysis open like a hammer through glass.
I run.
I make it half a block.
The one who’d been closest hits me from the side, not a tackle but a grab, fingers locking around my arm with a force that wrenches my shoulder, and I scream, twisting the way you twist when something has you and you have nothing to lose, dropping my weight suddenly so his grip slides.
I claw at his hand with my nails and get purchase on two of his fingers and bend, and he swears in Russian and his grip breaks for half a second.
Half a second is enough to get in one step but they close the gap in three.
The second man gets my other arm, the third is in front of me blocking the street, and I don’t stop.
I headbutt the one in front with everything I have, my forehead against his nose, and the crack and the howl he lets out sends something vicious and electric through my chest.
For approximately four seconds I am winning this in the way that someone who has never fought in their life can briefly win something by being completely unhinged about it.
Then the first man recovers and gets both arms around me from behind and lifts me entirely off the ground.
I go absolutely feral. I’m kicking and writhing and screaming, I bite down on the arm across my collarbone hard enough to taste fabric then skin, and he curses and squeezes tighter and I can’t breathe and the world is doing something strange at the edges—
“Enough.”
One word.
The men around me go still so fast they might have been switched off.
I am still struggling, still trying to get free, but the arms holding me have locked into something immovable and the street has gone quiet.
I look up, gasping, chest heaving, the man’s blood on my lip.
There is a man standing in the mouth of the narrow street.
My brain registers things in the wrong order. Tall. The kind of build that doesn’t come from a gym, that comes from actual use.
Oh, I’m fucked! Is this where I’m dying?
Dark coat, dark hair, a face that belongs on something carved rather than born, all sharp angles and a jaw like a closed door and eyes that are—I don’t finish the thought because finishing the thought is insane right now, I am being kidnapped, but my brain is briefly short-circuiting on the fact that death apparently sends its very best-looking men.
He walks toward me with the pace of someone who has never once needed to hurry.
He reaches out.
Pushes the sleeve of his coat up at the wrist.
Casual.
Almost like he’s checking the time.
Black ink.
Heavy lines.
Two serpent heads on one coiled body.
The world goes very, very still.
That’s the tattoo.
Not like it.
Not similar.
The exact same mark.
The same configuration, the same weight of line, the same two heads facing opposite directions on a coiled body.
He killed my father.
The grief and the terror and the two days of running and the vomiting and the nightmares and my father’s hands closing my fingers around the drive all collide into a single white-hot point and the thing that comes out of me is not fear.
“You.” The word tears itself out of my chest. “You—”
He stops walking. Looks at me.
“You killed him.” I am shaking so hard the man holding me probably feels it, but I cannot stop, I can’t stop any of this. “You killed my father, you killed him, he never did anything to you, he was just a—”
“Take her to the car.”
“I will kill you!” It rips out of me at a volume I didn’t know I had. “Do you hear me? I will kill you, I swear it, I swear on his grave I will—”
The man holding me starts moving and I fight him every step, screaming, twisting, and the man with the serpent tattoo watches all of it with an expression that doesn’t change by even a fraction.
He doesn’t look angry.
He doesn’t look impressed.
He just looks at me and that frightens the hell out of me, but I don’t think.
All I can feel is rage.
That is somehow the most terrifying thing that has happened today.
The car is dark and large and I’m dumped in the back between two of his men, and he gets in the front, and the door closes, and Vienna moves past the windows, and the drive back to Moscow begins in a silence so loaded it has actual weight.
The gun is at my back.
I stare at the serpent tattoo where it sits above his collar and I don’t look away and I don’t stop planning.
I will kill him.