“Uh. Friend of yours?”
Rose didn’t answer.
She forced herself to breathe.
To stand straight.
Tomove.
She turned on her heel and walked back to the nurse’s station, heart pounding, vision tunneling a little at the edges. She stripped off her gloves with deliberate precision, dumped them in the bin.
Then she grabbed her coat.
She didn’t say goodbye.
Twenty minutes later she was back behind the wheel, hands shaking harder than they had that morning.
The sky was clearing in ragged patches, but the clouds still hung low and mean on the horizon, smearing the sun into a dull smear of silver.
She drove too fast, tires spitting gravel on the shoulder.
Victor’s rental came into view like something out of a nightmare.
She didn’t even bother killing the engine fully. She slammed the truck door behind her so hard the window rattled in its frame.
She was halfway up the porch steps when the door yanked open.
Victor was there.
He looked like he hadn’t sat down all morning.
His eyes raked her face, scanning every twitch, every tremor, reading her like a language only he spoke.
“You saw someone,” he said.
His voice was dead calm. Which was worse than yelling.
She swallowed.
“At the clinic,” she managed. Her voice broke and she didn’t care. “A man asking for you. Said his name was Nikolai. Told me to tell you—”
She closed her eyes, repeating it exactly.
“The past is tired of being forgotten.”
Victor swore under his breath in Russian.
It sounded like a prayer you didn’t want answered.
She watched every muscle in his body lock up. His fingers curled into fists at his sides.
“I know him?” she asked, voice brittle.
He nodded once. Sharp.
“Not well,” he said. His jaw flexed hard. “But he knows me. And if he’s here—others will follow.”
She took one shaky step forward.
