Page 47 of Mafia King

Whatever the source, everything is different now.

And worst of all, the man he has been falling for, the man who sang him to sleep and chose stuffies with him and called himself Daddy, may already be moving to close the distance and take his revenge.

Heartbreak follows the fear so quickly Theo can barely separate them. He never wanted Nikolai to find out like this. In the softest, most reckless corners of his mind he had begun to imagine telling him himself: explaining the contract, the money, the way the job had stopped being only a job.

Theo had started to believe there might be a way to make it right. That possibility is gone. Theo’s hands shake as he pulls a small notepad and pen from the inner pocket of his bag. He writes quickly, the words coming out raw and uneven…

Daddy,

It’s not how it sounds. I was going to make it right, I truly was. Everything we shared was real. But I understand it’s over.

Goodbye,

Theo.

A single tear drops onto the paper, blurring the ink of his name.

Theo leaves the note tucked inside the front cover of the Winnie-the-Pooh book, exactly where he will see it if he comes looking in the place he once told him was his favorite.

And Nikolai being Nikolai, Theo knows that he will find it.

Then without further pause, he moves. The fire-escape door at the end of the top-floor corridor is alarmed only after hours. Theo pushes it open, slips through, and pulls it shut behind him.

The metal stairs clang softly under his feet as he descends the back of the building, heart hammering, every sense stretched tight for the sound of pursuit.

Theo hits the alley at ground level, turns up his collar, and walks fast toward the nearest cross street without running.

Theo needs his apartment. Triple-quick. There isn’t a moment to waste.

The emergency go-bag, the secondary identities, the cash, the route to the first underground safe point he has kept ready for exactly this kind of collapse.

After that he will have to disappear properly: new city, new name, the whole machinery of vanishing he has rehearsed but never wanted to use against a man who made him hot milk and listened to him laugh over coloring books.

The afternoon light feels too bright. The ordinary traffic and pedestrians feel like obstacles.

Theo keeps his head down and his pace steady, the burner phone already wiped and dropped into the first deep trash bin he passes.

Behind him, four floors up, a vintage copy of Winnie-the-Pooh sits open in a quiet nook with a tear-stained note inside it, waiting for the man who is almost certainly already on his way, and with all the worst intentions in the world…

“Okay, okay, keep it together,” Theo says, his panicky voice betraying him.

Theo’s apartment feels smaller than it ever has. He moves through it with tight, efficient speed, opening drawers and the hidden compartment behind the wardrobe where the real essentials live.

The go-bag is already half-prepared: spare identification, several fake IDs, cash in three currencies, a clean phone still in its factory seal, basic toiletries, one change of dark clothing. He adds the laptop, the external drives, and, last of all…

Maximus.

Theo’s darling stuffie is the only non-essential he refuses to leave behind. Everything else—clothes, books, the small comforts he has collected over three years—stays.

Sentiment is a liability now.

Theo might have gotten himself in this mess because of his feelings, but all those feelings needed to be put away now. Perhaps forever…

The plan is simple and already tested. A diner on the far edge of the city, the kind of place that stays open all night and asks no questions. Beside it sits a small, anonymous motel he has used once before when a previous job turned complicated.

One night to breathe, to think, to decide the next true disappearance.

But first Theo has to get out of the city cleanly. He is at the door, bag over one shoulder, when the platinum bracelet catches the light from the hallway. It lies on the small dish near the keys where he left it the last time he slept here.