My knees hit the ground.
I put my face in my hands and just fall to pieces.
Shaking, gasping, ugly and total, the kind of crying that doesn’t have any dignity to it at all.
Papa on the floor.
The sound his body makes.
One shot.
The way the room goes quiet after.
When I finally lift my head, my eyes are swollen and nearly shut.
I open my fist.
The drive sits in my palm. A crack runs along the bottom left corner where I’ve held it too tight.
My father died for whatever is on this. The man with the serpent on his wrist killed him for it.
I close my fingers around it again and push myself up off the ground, legs barely holding, and start moving north.
Three blocks later a woman outside a pharmacy takes one look at me and stops walking.
“Do you need help?”
“A phone,” I say. My voice doesn’t sound like my voice. “Please. Just a phone.”
Just then, it dawns on me that I had my phone in my pocket all the time.
She stretchs out her phone to me and I try to smile and I’m sure I looked like a dying puppy. “Thank you, don’t worry about it.”
I walk ahead quickly, happy to feel the weight of my phone in my pocket.
Without another word, I bring out my phone and I dial Nadia’s number, standing on the frozen pavement, waiting.
Second ring.
“Lena? It’s late, what?—”
“N-Nadia.” The word cracks down the middle. “I need you. I need you to come get me, I need—” Everything collapses at once, the closet and the shot and his face and the serpent and the running and all of it, crushing inward. “He’s gone. He’s gone, Nadia, they killed him, they?—”
“Where are you?” Her voice sharpens immediately, all sleep gone. “Lena. Where are you right now?”
I look up at the street sign. I tell her.
I stand there on the pavement with the cracked drive in one hand and my phone pressed to my cheek, and the serpent tattoo burns behind my eyes every time I blink, and Nadia is apologizing, she’s not in town, but she’ll find someone to get me, and I am not okay, I am not going to be okay for a very long time.
But I am alive.
And I have the drive.
And I have the tattoo burned so deep it will never leave me.
2
RAZVAN
