Running

Chapter 1

The March wind came off the Atlantic like a blade, cutting between the low brick buildings on Brighton 4th Street. Ofelia Harris had her hood up, her headphones in, but the music was low enough that she could still hear the scrape of her own boots against the cracked sidewalk.

She was thinking about Dostoevsky.

More specifically, she was thinking about how Professor Aldridge had completely misread the ending of The Idiot, and how she should have said something in class but didn't. The thought sat in her chest like a swallowed stone. Twenty-two years old, and she still couldn't raise her hand without her voice wobbling.

The light at the corner turned red. She stopped.

That was when she heard it.

Not music. Not the wind. A sound like firecrackers, but wrong: sharper, angrier. The sound of compressed air and metal and something final.

Ofelia pulled out one earbud.

The black sedan was already moving past her, not speeding, not swerving. Just rolling through the intersection like it had somewhere to be. The rear window was down. She saw the barrel first, then the hand, then the glimpse of a face she would not remember clearly because her eyes had already dropped to the sidewalk.

A man was on the ground.

He was trying to stand, one hand pressed flat against the concrete, the other clamped over his ribs. The blood was coming through his fingers in pulses, dark against the pale gray of his shirt. It pooled in the cracks and ran in thin lines toward the curb.

People were walking around him.

Not running. Not screaming. Walking. One woman glanced down and stepped over the spreading stain like it was a puddle of rainwater. A guy in a delivery uniform checked his phone. Someone else took a photograph.

Ofelia stood frozen for exactly three seconds.

Then she ran.

She didn't think about it. Her legs moved before her brain caught up, and by the time she reached him, she was already pulling her gray hoodie over her head, already dropping to her knees on the wet concrete, already pressing the wad of fabric hard against the hole in his side.

He made a sound, not quite a grunt, not quite a word. It was the sound of a man who had been hurt before and knew exactly how bad this was.

"Don't," he said.

His voice surprised her. Low and even, with an accent that wrapped around the single syllable and pulled it into something longer, darker. She looked up.

He was watching her with brown eyes that had gone glassy at the edges but not soft. There was no panic in him. Only a strange, angry clarity, as if her presence was a problem he was trying to solve through the shock.

"Don't call anyone," he said.

"I wasn't—" She swallowed. Her hands were shaking. She pressed harder. "I have the plates. I saw the car. I got the plate number."

His expression shifted. His eyes sharpened, cutting through the pain.

"You remember."

"I remember."

"Tell me."

"Not yet. You're bleeding too much. If I tell you and you pass out, it's gone."

For a second, she thought he might smile. He didn't. But his jaw unwound a fraction, and his hand came up to close over hers where she pressed the hoodie against his wound. His palm was sticky, hot.

"You are strange," he said quietly.

Before she could respond, the black Escalade hit the curb.

It came in fast, too fast, jumping the sidewalk and skidding to a stop six feet away. Doors opened before the vehicle had fully settled. Three men poured out, all of them big, all of them moving with the kind of coordinated urgency that said they had done this before.

The first one reached them, his shadow falling over Ofelia like a wave.

"Boss."

The wounded man tilted his head toward Ofelia. He was someone's boss, then. "She comes."

"Boss—"

"She comes."

The big man didn't argue. Instead, he looked at Ofelia and took in the blood on her hands, the gray hoodie bunched under his boss's ribs, the way her chin was lifting like she was trying to convince herself she wasn't afraid.

"Up," he said. "Both of you."

Hands under her arms. She was lifted like she weighed nothing, her sneakers scraping against the concrete, and then she was in the back of the Escalade, the leather seat cold against the backs of her thighs. The wounded man was beside her, then lying across the seat, his head on her lap.

"I need you to keep pressure," he said.

His voice had thinned. The color was draining from his mouth.

Ofelia planted both hands on the hoodie and pushed.

"Drive," snapped the man in the passenger seat.

The Escalade lurched. Outside the tinted windows, the street tilted and blurred. Sirens were starting somewhere far off, a thin wail that faded as they turned hard onto Neptune Avenue and headed for the parkway.

"Your name," the man in her lap said.

"Ofelia."

"Ofelia." He repeated it like he was tasting it, checking the weight. "Alexei."

"I know who you are."

That got his attention. His eyes sharpened, suspended between pain and calculation. "You know me."

"Of Alexei Volkov. I study Russian literature. At NYU. There's a—" She stopped, feeling foolish. "There was a chapter in a book about the old groups in Brighton Beach. Your family was mentioned. Your structure was mentioned."

Alexei's lips peeled back from his teeth in what might have been a grin or a snarl. "You read."

"I read."

The man in the passenger seat turned around. He was older than Alexei, gray at the temples, with a face like a slab of concrete and eyes that did not blink. He was holding Ofelia's messenger bag.

"You got cameras in this building," he said. "An address. A student ID."

It wasn't a question. He had already gone through it. In his other hand was a phone, Ofelia's phone, with her own face on the screen: her NYU portrait, the one where her hair was down and she looked surprised.

"I need the plate," Alexei said. Again not a question.

Ofelia looked away from the man in front and down at Alexei. Blood had soaked through the hoodie now, running over her knuckles. She could smell it: copper and salt, layered over something else. His cologne. Cedar and smoke, and something dark beneath it.

"Five zero eight, V X, New York plates," she said slowly. "Black Acura. Tinted windows. The driver had a red cap."

Alexei's eyes closed for a fraction of a second. When they opened again, she saw the other thing that lived behind the shock. A promise. Black and certain.

"Five zero eight Victor X-ray," the man in front muttered, already on his own phone, thumb moving fast. "That's a Bay Ridge registration. Could be a private plate, but with that sequence…"

"Call Yuri," Alexei said. "The cop. Use the favor we have on the desk."

"Already doing the call."

The Escalade roared onto the Belt Parkway, the water black and flat beyond the guardrail.

Ofelia's arms were starting to ache. Her knees were wet, her jeans soaked through. The blood had reached her skin and was sticky between her fingers. She could feel his pulse, faint but steady, through the layers of blood and fabric.

"Don't stop," Alexei said.

She looked at him.

"Pressing," he said. "Don't stop pressing. We are fifteen minutes from the place."

"Okay."

"Okay," he repeated. His accent thickened, the word slurring at the end. His head rolled slightly against her thigh. "You will not call anyone. Not the police, not your roommate, not the nice Ukrainian man who owns the bakery where you buy your morning coffee."

"How do you—"

"You are not a secret, Ofelia from the Midwest. Not in this city."

That was the moment her body chose to react. Not to the blood, or the gunfire, or the fact that she was in the back of a blacked-out SUV with a man who had prison tattoos curling up from his collar. It chose to react to the fact that he had noticed the bakery.

Her breathing went shallow.

"Passing out," Alexei announced, almost casually, and then his hand slid from hers and fell against the leather seat.

"Alexei?" The name sounded wrong in her mouth, too familiar.

"She's pale," said the man in front. "Take a breath. Put your head down if you need."

"I'm fine."

"You are not fine. But you are doing the thing."

The Escalade slowed, then turned. Kept turning. The road went from smooth to rough to gravel. When Ofelia looked up, they were passing through a steel gate, the walls of a warehouse rising around them like the sides of a bowl. The windows here were boarded. The corners were dark.

A man in scrubs was waiting at the door.

Not scrubs, exactly. A white coat, blue sleeves, a table already set with steel instruments under a hanging lamp. A surgeon. A hired surgeon. He did not look surprised to see them.

"Get him on the table," the surgeon said. "I need clean towels and the shock kit from the red case."

The man from the passenger seat was already out of the car, already pulling open the rear door. "Petrov," one of the others called to him, and he answered with a single word in Russian. Alexei was lifted, carried between two of the men, and Ofelia was left standing in the gravel holding a red hoodie that had been gray when she'd put it on that morning.

The surgeon was already working as she stepped inside. Lamplight caught the edge of a blade. Someone had started an IV. There was a sound like paper tearing, and she realized it was the sound of Alexei's shirt being cut.

"This way."

A woman's voice. White hair pulled back, a gray coat buttoned to the throat. She was holding a towel and a pile of folded clothes.

"I'm not—" Ofelia didn't know how to finish the sentence.

"You are not staying? Fine. But you will wash the blood off first." The woman's accent was not Russian. It was something else, clipped and clean. Swiss, maybe. "And you will put on the shirt. His will go into the bin."

Ofelia let herself be led. Down a short hall, into a bathroom with a porcelain sink and a mirror that had gone foggy at the corners. She turned the water on and stood there watching it run pink, then clear.

When she looked at her reflection, someone else looked back.

She washed her hands twice. Washed her forearms. The front of her shirt was ruined, so she stripped it off and used the towel, then pulled on the shirt she'd been given. Black. Soft. Too big. It smelled clean.

When she came back out, the warehouse was quieter. The surgeon was hunched over the table. Alexei lay still, his chest wrapped, a line of dark hair disappearing under white bandages.

Petrov stood by the door with Ofelia's bag and phone.

"Your building," he said. "You live in the Weinstein dorm on University Place. I will take you."

He was already moving toward another car. Ofelia paused, looking once at Alexei on the table. The surgeon hadn't stopped moving. The IV was draining.

"Is he going to—"

"He has survived worse," Petrov said. "Come."

She followed him.

The drive back was silent. The city slid by, darker and colder than it had been that afternoon. When Petrov pulled up to the corner of 8th Street and University, he killed the engine and turned in his seat.

"Your phone. Your bag. You will not speak of this."

It wasn't a threat. It was a policy.

Ofelia reached for the door handle.

"One thing." Petrov's voice stopped her. "The plates. Who knows you have them?"

"Nobody. I haven't told anyone."

"Good. Then you are useful. And useful people receive things in return."

He reached into the glove box and took out a small black card. It had a number on it and nothing else. The paper was thick, the edges sharp.

"Do not call unless the god is already at the threshold."

She took the card.

Then she was standing on the sidewalk, watching the taillights retreat toward Broadway, the blood still dried under her fingernails.