Page 49

“I’ll bore them to death before they reach the lobby.”
I tried to smile. It refused to hold.
Egret turned to me, his face shadowed in the dim light. He didn’t say, “Don’t go.” That wasn’t us—it wasn’t allowed—but his jaw clenched, just slightly, like he had to hold words back.
“You’ll stick to the north approach?” he asked. “Avoid the market street with the broken lampposts?”
“I’m not walking into a trap, Egret.”
“No,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean one won’t find you.”
The taxi pulled to the curb. I moved toward it and reached for the handle.
“Sparrow.”
I turned.
He whispered, “Sarah.”
He wasn’t smiling anymore.
His usual armor—wit, sarcasm, bravado—had slipped, just for a moment. The man underneath was worried, and not simply for our mission.
He was worried for me.
“If something feels wrong—if even the air breathes differently—leave it. Walk away. Don’t wait to be right.” His tone teetered between giving an order and pleading. It made my breath catch far more than the biting breeze ever could.
I nodded.
And then, because it felt like we’d break if we didn’t touch, I reached out and pressed my gloved fingers against his chest, just above his heart.
“I’ll be back before midnight,” I said.
“I’ll be waiting.”
I slipped into the cab and shut the door before either of us could say anything else.
The driver was middle-aged, lean, and unreadable through the rearview mirror. His hands were pale and twitchy on the wheel. He didn’t ask where I was going—he already knew. The restaurant staff had informed him when they’d called for the cab.
I gave the cross street anyway. He nodded once and pulled away from the curb with a jerk and a low groan from the engine.
Outside, the city passed in smudged glimpses. The taxi’s windows were streaked with rain residue and grime, so the world outside looked like it had been painted in charcoal blurred by some unseen hand. Lights were fewer here—flickering sconces above doors, half-lit apartment windows, occasional lanterns hung outside state buildings. The farther we got from the restaurant, the darker it grew.
And I loved it. God help me, I loved it.
Not for what the city had become—broken, watched, exhausted—but for what it refused to forget. Its architecture still stood tall and proud, Gothic shoulders squared against history. Its bridges still arched with elegance across the Danube, even if they now carried Soviet trucks instead of lovers.
I pressed my gloved fingers to the window and watched the streets roll by like a secret.
But even as I admired it, I couldn’t relax.
I wasn’t that kind of fool.
The driver’s eyes flicked to me in the mirror.
I counted the red lights he slowed too early for, tracked the shadow of every car that passed.
He didn’t speak. Which was both comforting and unnerving.