Page 63 of Filthy Little Fix

"Tell me, what was the moment you were closest to death?"

My first instinct is to tell him to go to hell. Who does he think he is to demand a piece of my history, a moment of weakness? But then I look at him. The exhausted boy, illuminated by lines of code, who is becoming indispensable with each new service. The boy who looks at me as if I were much more than a captor. The curiosity, the necessity to understand what created him, whatdriveshim, is stronger than my pride.

The memory causes a dry heat in me, a metallic, burnt smell, and a ringing in my ears.

"Car bomb," I say. "In Moscow."

It's all I say out loud. I remember the impact throwing me against a brick wall in an alley, the shower of glass and debris, the delayed understanding that the only thing that saved me was bending down to shield the flame of my lighter, trying to light a fucking Dunhill in the rain. A second.

It cost three of my best men, and weeks with broken ribs, ruptured eardrums, and shrapnel everywhere.

Nyx remains silent. He looks at me with an intrusive understanding for a boy who lives locked inside a room.

"…Want to know mine?" he says softly.

The intimacy of that doesn't let me answer.Yes? I don't know. I shouldn't say that, shouldn'tadmitthat.

But my silence is the only permission he needs.

"It was on a highway overpass," he says. "On a Sunday dawn. It was starting to rain… and there were still many cars passing. I stood there for a while. Watching. The high-speed headlights leave a trail of light. The sound… turns into white noise."

He stares at some point on the wall. I await the conclusion of that story, the accident, what would threaten the life of a nobody looking at cars.

It doesn't come.

Only then do I understand.

He looks back at me with a melancholic smile. "I knew I could just wait. There would be a moment, in the future… my health isn't good. The future will come in one or two decades. But I wanted… I wanted to be faster than that."

The understanding bothers me. Thefeelingbothers me. He's showing me a part of him I didn't ask for and shouldn't have the right to see.

"What stopped you?" The question escapes me, quieter than usual.

He looks away and thinks. As if finding the only thing that kept him alive was difficult now. And maybe it is.

Svetlana's voice echoes in my mind.He doesn't seem crazy, he seems depressed.

"I was… afraid," he says.

It doesn't fit him.

"Of what?"

He shrugs. "…The possibility that the last thought, the last moment of my existence… would be as gray as all the others. That the end would just be… more silence." His eyes turn back to me. The melancholy suddenly is inherent to him. "I started studying that day. Systems. I didn't lie to you—it was with YouTube tutorials."

Thatconfession.Love. Was he telling me that I was the only thing thatpreventedhim from jumping?

The rage I brought into this room deflates. In its place, a vacuum.

The genius who brought down my systems, the worm who moans under my touch, the boy who almost threw himself off a bridge because he was bored. The pieces don't fit. They form a fractured image I can't categorize, can'tcontrol.

Threats die in my throat. Insults sound childish.

"All of this… the systems, the games, the pain… is it just so you don't have to go back to a fucking overpass?"

He sees humor in that. He smiles. "Something like that."

Fuck Svetlana and her concern. Fuck Dmitry and his logic. They think I'm dealing with a problem and they don't realize I'm holding a broken piece of glass that thinks the only way to prove it's not in a thousand pieces is by cutting itself on me.