Chapter 7: Forty-Eight Hours

Ethan’s car sat across the street for almost ten minutes after I cut the intercom, his silhouette unmoving behind the windshield, and the not-knowing pressed harder against my chest than any fight we’d ever had in the first life.

“He’ll come back,” Damian said, not looking away from the window. “Men like him don’t take closed doors well. Especially from a woman who used to open every one of them without question.”

I didn’t answer. The version of me who used to soften every conflict was dead. The man downstairs hadn’t figured that out yet.

Then the headlights across the street cut off.

Damian’s whole body changed — shoulders dropping into something coiled and ready, hand already moving toward the weapon under his jacket. “That’s not him leaving.”

“What—”

“Get down.” He said it low and hard, already pulling me sideways away from the window as the glass starred and cracked, a single round punching through the curtain and burying itself in the wall a foot from where I’d been standing. I hit the floor with him on top of me, my pulse a scream in my own ears.

“Sniper,” he said against my ear. “Roof line, across the street. That was a warning shot, not a miss — they want me to know they’re there.”

“You said no one knew I was alive.”

“They don’t. That shot wasn’t for you.” His jaw was tight. “It was for me. Someone doesn’t want me in this apartment.”

He moved fast, dragging me along the floor below the sightline, killing the lamp with a flick of his hand so we went dark. Two more rounds hit the wall in quick succession, closer together, and plaster rained down on my shoulders. I pressed my palm flat against the floor to stop it from shaking and failed.

“Bedroom. Now.” He hauled me up by the arm and we ran low across the hallway as a fourth shot took out the mirror by the door, glass exploding across the floor behind us. In the bedroom he shoved the dresser in front of the window in one motion, breathing hard, rifle already back in his hands and trained on the door.

“They know you’re here,” I said. “Why not just take you out on the street?”

“Because a body on the street gets noticed. A body in an apartment gets cleaned up before morning.” He didn’t look at me when he said it. “Sterling. Listen to me, because I don’t have time to say it twice.”

“Say what.”

“The trial didn’t end the way the official file says. You didn’t die — Vallis buried you because the side effects made you too valuable to explain. Your blood still carries markers from the original strain. The strain hitting in ninety days is a mutation of it, and it doesn’t fully override what’s already in you.” His eyes flicked to the door, back to me. “That’s why I’m here. That’s why they’re outside right now. If Vallis gets a living sample of you before the outbreak, they can stabilize the mutation before it finishes doing whatever it’s built to do. You are the only leverage that exists against them.”

It should have terrified me. Instead it slotted into place like a key turning, cold and clean. I hadn’t died in that first life because the universe was cruel. I’d died because I was worth something to someone, and no one had bothered to tell me.

A heavy thud hit the front door. Once. Then again, harder.

“They’re not shooting anymore,” I whispered.

“They’re switching to a door team. Means the sniper’s covering the exits, not us.” Damian pressed something small and hard into my palm — a black drive, barely the size of my thumb. “Everything I pulled before the system locked me out. Read it when you’re alone. Don’t trust anyone with it, including me, until you’ve read it yourself.”

“How do we get out of here?”

“Same way I got in.” He crossed to the closet, wrenched at the false wall I hadn’t finished concealing, and it came away to reveal a gap I hadn’t known was there — a maintenance shaft, narrow and dark, running down through the building’s bones. “You built a hiding place. I’m using it as an exit.”

The front door took a third hit, the wood beginning to splinter, and Damian shoved me toward the opening.

“Forty-eight hours,” he said. “I’ll find you. Until then, you trust no one — not Ethan, not Mia, no one you haven’t already watched die once.”

“And if I don’t make it forty-eight hours?”

For the first time since he’d stepped into my apartment, something raw crossed his face before he shut it back down. “Then I was wrong about everything, and you were never as hard to kill as they think.”

The door gave way behind us in a crash of splintering wood just as I dropped into the dark, and the last thing I heard before the shaft swallowed the sound was Damian’s rifle answering the men who’d come through my front door — and somewhere beyond both, still parked across the street in the place I’d stopped watching, Ethan’s car, headlights still off, engine still running.