Page 37 of Unbroken

Dusk has fallen by the time we pull down a long, quiet street. I check behind us carefully, making sure we’re not being followed.

No shadows. No headlights tailing us. Just the steady rumble of the engine beneath us and the way Ruthie exhales—slow, uncertain—as I ease the bike down a narrow back alley.

We don’t pull up to the front of anything. That’s suicide. I cut the engine behind an abandoned auto shop with rusted signage and boarded windows. The back lot is gravel and overgrown. Only the locals know the garage door still works.

It groans as it lifts.

We roll in silently. No interior lights. Just a single, motion-activated bulb that flickers when we pass under it. I kill the ignition.

Ruthie slides off behind me. She looks around, frowning.

“This can’t be the safe house,” she says.

“No.” I take her hand before she can wander. “It’s the entrance.”

We walk. Around the side of the garage, across a broken alley. The kind of place you don’t look too long at if you want to stay alive.

I stop outside the side door of a grimy dive bar—“Crescent,” the faded lettering above the awning reads. It used to be a jazz bar back in the '60s. Now, it’s mostly forgotten.

But not by us.

We step inside. The place is nearly empty—just an old bartender cleaning a glass and a silent man in the corner who doesn’t glance up. No music. Just the hum of an old fridge and the tick of a slow ceiling fan.

Ruthie gives me a sidelong look. “This where we drink or die?”

I almost smile. “Both, maybe. Come on. Let’s get a table.”

“I mean, I could definitely use a cheap beer,” she mutters.

God, me too.

I look at my phone and see a message from Rafail.

Rafail

Zoya is trying to get Luka to sleep. He’s almost there. If you come in now he’ll get all wound up, so can you kill some time?

I show Ruthie. “Bingo.”

We get drinks and sit alone in the back. She regales me with stories from her work at the bar—A fight that broke out over a spilled drink when some suit in a linen blazer shoved the wrong man and got his teeth kissed by a barstool. A guy who tried to flirt with her by sliding her a poetry book—dog-eared and underlined, as if his annotated Pablo Neruda was supposed to win her over.

And then there was the wannabe playboy who ordered a “non-alcoholic vodka” and declared he was “sober but fun,” to which she replied, “Then why are you trying so hard?”

She makes me laugh.Reallylaugh. The kind that slips past my ribs before I can cage it. I forget for a moment that thefucking Irish are on the move, that we’re about to lock down in a safe house so nobody gets hurt. That I’m supposed to be dead inside.

And somehow, here I am—I’m drinking cheap beer and laughing with my sister-in-law, hiding out like fugitives in a place no one knows exists.

Feels a little rebellious. But Rafail told me to take my time.

“I love shitty bars,” I mutter, leaning back as she finishes telling me a story.

She smiles. “Me too. No pretense. Drown your sorrows at a discount.”

I tilt my head. “So people hit on you at the bar?”

She snorts. “Not really. I’m not pretty enough for that.”

I stare at her. Blink. She means it. She actually believes that.