The tire blew somewhere south of 9th Street, right after the ambush. Some trigger-happy bastards with twitchy fingers and bad intel. The sedan fish-tailed, coughed smoke, and died like everything else in this city eventually does—loud, ugly, and inconvenient.

You took a round in the arm, maybe two. Didn’t check. Didn’t matter. Pain was a luxury you couldn’t afford. Not when the suitcase was still in play. Steel case, handcuffed to your wrist like a promise you couldn’t break. Inside it? Something important enough for people to kill for and vague enough to scare the hell out of you.

You dragged myself through the city like a ghost looking for a grave. The skyline blurred in the rain, neon lights bleeding into puddles of oil and blood. Your blood. Every step was a negotiation with gravity. The streets whispered things behind my back—things about how someone ends up like you.

By the time you made it to the hideout, the place was crawling with ghosts of its own. Wounded men moaned in corners. The medics—greenhorns and old-timers with steady hands—worked under bare bulbs and cigarette smoke. You didn’t stop. Couldn’t. Their pain wasn’t mine to carry.

The hallway to his office felt longer than usual. Your boots left prints—wet, red, fading. You didn’t knock. Someone like you don’t knock. We barge in and deal with the fallout.

He was there, like always. Untouched. Calm. Talking into one of those sleek foldable phones like the future hadn’t already gone to hell.

He didn’t look up right away. Just finished his call with all the urgency of a man ordering lunch.

Then he looked at you—eyes sharp, cold, dissecting. Like he was measuring how close you were to falling apart.

“Ты опоздал, дорогой,” he said. Voice like a razor. Sentence like a verdict. “where have you been?”