9. Lena #2
“Which direction?” My voice doesn’t sound like mine. It sounds like something being operated by someone else entirely. “The car. Which direction did it go?”
She points.
I’m already turning, already moving. She’s shouting about the police, the precinct on Váci Street, but I’m already in my car. I sit behind the wheel for three seconds, staring at the dashboard.
Breathe. I press both palms flat against my thighs. In through the nose. Out through the mouth.
My hands are shaking so violently I can feel it in my elbows, a rhythmic vibrating of pure, unadulterated terror. Stop it. Stop shaking. I grip the wheel until my knuckles turn white, forcing the tremor down by sheer will.
I pick up my phone. I call Nadia.
It rings twice.
“Hey, did you make it in time or did you do the sprint again because I keep telling you if you just left ten minutes ear—”
“They took him.” My voice cracks completely down the middle. “Nadia. Someone took Theo.”
Silence.
“I’m calling you back in two minutes,” she says, and she is suddenly a completely different person, all the warmth is gone. She sounds like a whetted blade. “Drive to the precinct. Don’t stop anywhere. Go right now.”
She hangs up.
I drive.
The precinct is a low building on a corner, the kind of architecture that communicates authority without spending too much on it.
I push through the front door and the air in the precinct smells like floor wax and old coffee. I am still shaking, a fine, high-frequency vibration in my jaw, my hands, a seizing in my chest that feels like a physical hand squeezing my heart dry.
“My name is Mara Kovacs,” I tell the officer at the front desk. My voice sounds like it’s coming from the bottom of a well. “My son. He was taken from his school. I need help right now. Please. Someone has to help me.”
I’m pleading. I’m a mother, falling apart and breaking. I don’t care about anything right now but my son.
I am leaning into his desk like he’s the only thing keeping me upright.
He looks at me with a flat, heavy stillness that makes the hair on my arms stand up.
He picks up the phone and presses one single button. One button, his eyes kept on me while it connects like he’s making sure I don’t move.
“She’s here,” he says. His eyes never leave mine.
She’s here? What the hell?
“She’s here,” he says into the receiver.
The ice that starts in my stomach doesn’t just chill me; it turns my blood to slush. My vision clears with a violent, agonizing snap.
You idiot, my mind hissed. You soft, desperate fool.
I scan the room. I should have done this the second I stepped over the threshold. I see it now. Two officers. One by the door I just entered. One by the corridor to my left. They aren’t looking at me, but they are angled toward me, their weight shifted onto the balls of their feet.
This isn’t a precinct waiting room. It’s a kill box.
“Mrs. Kovacs.” The desk officer sets the phone down with a small careful click. “If you’ll just come through to the back, the captain would like to take your statement personally. Just through there—” He gestures to his right, toward a door marked PRIVATE, and starts to rise from his seat.
The officer near the front door takes one step to his left.
Just one step. Casual. Like he’s stretching.
It puts him directly in front of the exit.
Cut off the retreat. Box her in. The panic for Theo is still there, a screaming animal in the back of my brain, but it’s being overridden by a cold, predatory calculation.
If I go through that door, I never come out.
If I stay here, they’ve got me. And if they have me, there is no one left to find my son.
Run.
I don’t hesitate. I don’t give them the satisfaction of seeing me look at the exit.
I turn left, walking toward the corridor like a submissive victim following a different set of invisible orders.
I can feel the desk officer’s confusion—a half-second of static while he wonders if I just misunderstood him.
That half-second is my life.
The moment I hit the corridor and break his line of sight, I bolt. My boots thud against the linoleum.
Theo. I’m coming, baby. I just have to get out. I have to get out. Doors on both sides. Storage. Office. I grab the third handle on the right and it gives. A break room. Table, chairs, a half-eaten sandwich on a plate. And a window.
Ground floor.
I grab a chair, two steps, and I put it through the window.
The glass goes outward and I don’t wait for it to finish falling, I’m up on the sill and through, one hand catching the frame. I cut my palm and I don’t feel it, dropping the six feet to the concrete below. My knees absorb it badly and something flares in my right ankle, but I don’t stop.
Shouting behind me. Muffled voices inside the precinct. I round the corner of the building, my lungs burning, and skid into the car park.
I see them before they see me.
Three men. My stomach drops. They aren’t wearing blue. They aren’t standing with the bored posture of beat cops. They’re standing with the predatory geometry I recognize from Vienna—shoulders squared, eyes scanning in sectors, hands near their waistbands.
Professionals. The word is a death sentence.
One of them has a phone to his ear. Our eyes lock. He drops the phone and his hand vanishes into his jacket.
Move or die. I sprint for the gap between two parked cars.
He’s fast…faster than a local cop should be.
He lunges to cut me off, and for a heartbeat, I’m back in the training pits, sensing the weight of his reach.
I feint left, a hard, sharp jerk of my shoulders, then pivot right.
His fingers snag my jacket sleeve, a terrifying, momentary anchor.
I twist, the sound of tearing fabric loud in the quiet lot, and I’m through.
The wall is head-height. Brick. Unyielding. I hit it at full speed, using the momentum to drive my palms into the grit. I jam my foot onto a car bumper, heave myself up, and go over headfirst. I tuck, praying my neck doesn’t snap, and hit the pavement on the other side.
Pain. white, blinding, and absolute flashes through my shoulder.
I can almost hear the joint grinding. Get up.
If you stay down, Theo dies. Get up. I scramble into an alley, my vision swimming.
Behind me, the heavy thud of someone hitting the bricks and failing to clear them.
Cursing in Hungarian. Footsteps pounding toward the long way around.
I hit the main street and force myself to slow down. Blend. Disappear. Be nobody. My hand is slick with blood; I tuck it inside my torn sleeve, leaning into the crowd. I pass a fruit seller, a woman pushing a stroller—God, a stroller. I have to look away before I lose my mind.
I weave through the covered market, the smell of smoked paprika and aged cheese that is usually so comforting is now suffocating.
“Mara! You forgot your—” the cheese vendor starts to call out.
I don’t look back. I can’t. If I look at a friendly face, I’ll shatter.
I duck into a narrow passage between two residential buildings and press my spine against the cold brick.
My ankle is throbbing. My hand is bleeding into my sleeve.
My shoulder feels like something has been rearranged in it, and I am breathing in these terrible shallow gasps that aren’t giving me enough air.
I slide down, my legs finally giving up the ghost, until I’m crouching in the shadows. I press my bleeding hand against my mouth to stifle the jagged, shallow gasps for air.
They’re in the police. My chest heaves as the thoughts settle, tears threatening to pour down my eyes.
Whoever has Theo, they’re already in the police, which means there is no system here that will help me, there is no authority I can walk through a door and reach, and there is nothing in this city with enough power to get my son back.
Nothing here. I have nothing.
I close my eyes, and for a second, I see the library. I see Nadia’s cinnamon tea steaming in the morning light. I see Theo’s dinosaur books scattered on the rug.
It was a lie. The realization is a bitter, cold stone in my throat. Five years of pretending I could be Mara Kovacs. Five years of thinking I could hide a wolf in a sheep’s pasture. It was never a new life. It was just a stay of execution. And the clock just hit zero.
The pain in my shoulder throbs, a steady, rhythmic reminder that I’m still alive. And if I’m alive, I’m dangerous.
I can be anything, as long as Theo is safe.
I open my eyes. The “Mara” who cried in the courtyard is gone.
I stand up.
There is one option. There has always been only one option and I have spent five years refusing to look directly at it. I am looking at it now. One person in this world with enough reach, enough power, enough men and enough fear in his name to go up against whoever has my son.
I start walking.
My hands are still shaking. My ankle makes every step a negotiation. Somewhere across the city my son is in a car with dangerous men and I am walking and there is only one direction that makes any sense.
His father.