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My throat had closed. My eyes had gone hot. I was about to press the little green icon, about to call, about to say something, I didn’t know what. I’m sorry. I’m scared. Come and get me.

Behind me, gravel crunched.

I turned.

There were four of them. Big men in dark clothes, moving in a line across the lot, silent, unhurried. Their faces were shadows. The nearest one had a hood. The next had a long, flat case in one hand. And behind them, at the edge of the light, a black van with no plates sat idling with its lights off.

“Lex Pendleton?” said the first, pleasantly.

“Who’s asking?”

“A friend of a friend.”

I felt the old thing in me lift its head. The thing with teeth. It was so glad to see them. Finally, it said. Someone we can hit.

“You’ve got the wrong guy,” I said, and put my phone in my pocket.

“I don’t think so.”

I hit him.

I want you to know I hit him well. A clean short right, straight into the mouth. He went down like a sack. The second man came at me from the left, and I ducked and drove a shoulder into his gut and heard the air whoosh out of him. I turned to the third, and something struck the back of my neck, hard, an electric crackle that lit the whole night white.

My legs went out.

I hit the gravel on my hands and knees. The stars rolled. My phone skittered across the lot, glowing, and lay there face-up in the gravel, its screen blazing in the dark.

A boot came down on it. The light went out.

“Easy,” said the man with the hood. His voice was calm and kind, a stranger’s voice, almost apologetic. “Easy, son. Nobody’s going to hurt you. Not yet.”

They put a bag over my head. They dragged me toward the van. I fought all the way, and I’ll be damned if I didn’t get in two more good hits, but a second jolt found the base of my spine and the world went thin and far and gray.

The last thing I heard was the van door slide shut, and a man’s voice, quiet, from a long way off.

“Get the bait to the warehouse. He’ll be along shortly.”

And then the dark.

Chapter 28

MAKSIM

Cold Storage

Ifound his phone in the gravel.

It lay face-down, ten feet from the wall, under the dead white light of a lamp. The screen was a spiderweb of cracks. The case had been split in two by the heel of a boot. I knelt and picked it up, and it was cold, and it smelled of him, of his skin and his sweat and, faintly, the honey-and-snow that I had begun to think of as the smell of my own name.

Beside it, in the gravel, were three dark spots.

I put a fingertip to the nearest spot, and it was blood, not his, a human stranger’s, still faintly warm. Beyond it the gravel was scraped in long ragged furrows where a heavy body had been dragged, and at the end of the furrows was the print of a wide tire, a van’s.

“Maksim.”

Sabine’s hand was on my shoulder. She had come out of the car behind me, silent as a cat, and I had not heard her.

“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t do the thing.”