Page 28 of Bratva Baby

8

SOFIYA

Budapest is busy enough to hide in if you do it right, and for three weeks, I do.

I rent rooms by the week, always cash, always different neighborhoods, and never anywhere that would remember my face if someone came asking later. The room I’m in now sits at the back of a narrow building with a green front door, a cracked sink, and one stubborn radiator that bangs every night like it has a grudge. The window faces a courtyard where old women smoke in slippers and slap sheets onto lines before breakfast.

I don’t bother with unpacking.

One suitcase stays latched under the bed, my documents stay in the same inside pocket, and cash stays split three ways. The gun reaches me through a courier Zhenya trusts, and once I have it back in my hand, I sleep better. Not well, but better.

After the first week, fear stops getting in the way of my life. You stop calling it panic. You call it routine, and then you build your days around it.

I take a job at a shipping office and call myself Katalin.

The man who hires me barely looks at my papers. He watches me correct a customs field his clerk missed, asks whether I can start Monday, and slides an envelope across the desk before lunch. The office is small, badly ventilated, and full of men who lie for a living and then act offended when paperwork calls them on it.

It suits me.

I get there early every morning because early gives me time to walk the block once, check the parked cars, and see whether the same faces show up twice. Then I go upstairs, boot the terminal, and fix whatever disaster was left behind the night before.

Usually, Ferenc comes in first. He smells like cigarettes and mint gum, and he flirts like a man who thinks wearing down a woman counts as charm.

He leans on my desk while I log in. “You’re wasted here, Katalin.”

I keep my eyes on the screen. “On this salary? Obviously.”

He grins. “No, I mean it. You fix things before anyone else even notices they’re broken.”

“I like it here,” I say, softening my voice on purpose. Men like Ferenc always mistake politeness for progress, and by tomorrow, he’ll be back at my desk acting like persistence is romantic and “later” is a prize.

He’s still smiling when our manager stomps in barking about fuel receipts, and the office starts moving all at once.

That becomes my life. Cash wages, bad coffee, freight lies, and a name that isn’t mine sliding into my mouth easily enough to answer to.

By the second week, I start feeling off.

At first, I blame the obvious things. Bad sleep, or maybe too much tension. Cheap bread, too much coffee, cigarette smoke that clings to the walls and comes home in my hair. Then the tiredness changes shape and gets harder to argue with. It sits behind my eyes by noon, it drags at my back, and it makes the office lights feel hostile.

Food turns on me next.

One morning, I buy eggs and nearly gag when I crack them into the pan. Another day, I’m hungry enough to shake, then I smell reheated sausage in the office kitchen and have to walk out before I disgrace myself in the stairwell sink. My breasts ache. My temper gets shorter. I start counting dates in my head, then I stop, because I already know where the counting leads.

I keep moving anyway.

After work, I switch routes home, step off trams early, double back twice, and buy groceries where the cameras face the street instead of the till. I learn which underpass always smells like piss after rain and which bridge fills up just after dusk. I tell myself all of that matters more than what my body is trying to tell me.

At night it gets worse, because there’s nothing to do but think.

And when I think, I think of Anton. Prague was the last time anything in my life happened because I chose it. He was dangerous, but he was danger with a face, a voice, and hands I walked into willingly.

That’s the part that stays with me.

One afternoon, I’m in a pharmacy buying toothpaste and painkillers when I see a man outside in a charcoal coat, broad through the shoulders, dark-haired, roughly Anton’s height. Heat hits me so fast, it scrambles my thoughts. I look up hard, my pulse jumps, and then the man turns and he’s nobody I know.

I leave angry with myself.

The next day, Ferenc says, “You look terrible,” and he means it flirtatiously, which should be impossible, but all I can think is that if Anton said it, it would sound like an order and a hand under my chin.