MasukPOV: Selina “Nothing behind us,” she said.“Keep watching.”“I am.”Three miles. Five. The road gave us nothing but itself and we took it gratefully, both hands on the wheel, eyes forward. I thought about Dara standing in the building we had left behind, managing her own face, performing whatever she needed to perform to give us the time we needed. I hoped she would be alright. I had no way of knowing whether she would be and hoping was all I had to offer her from seventeen miles of straight road.“Lina,” Amaya said.“I see it.” Lights behind us. Still distant, still possibly nothing, a vehicle going east for its own unrelated reasons in the early evening, but my hands tightened on the wheel and I pressed down incrementally on the accelerator.“How far?” I looked at the odometer. “Maybe nine miles.”“They’re gaining.”“I know.”I drove faster. The Land Cruiser pushed back against the speed briefly and then settled into it, the engine finding a register that felt sustainable. The cra
POV: SelinaThe hours between afternoon and six o’clock were the longest of my life. Amaya and I returned to our separate rooms after leaving Dara, because appearing together for too long would eventually register with someone, and the one advantage we had was that nobody in this building was watching us with any urgency yet.To Martin, we were settled. Grateful. Safe in the way that people are safe when they have nowhere else to go and believe, sincerely, that the person who brought them here is the safest option available. We needed him to keep believing that for approximately four more hours.I lay on my cot and stared at the ceiling and ran through everything systematically, the way I had taught myself to think through problems when I was younger and the problems were smaller... break it into parts, address each part separately, don’t look at the whole shape of it or the whole shape will overwhelm you. The whole shape of this particular situation was genuinely overwhelming. So
POV: Selina "I've been carrying it since the first week," she said, with the particular tone of someone who is both sheepish and entirely unapologetic. "My cousin's number is on it. I thought..." She paused. "I thought if things ever got bad enough that we needed an exit that nobody else knew about, I wanted an option.""Amaya.""I know. I should have told you.""You absolutely should have told me." I closed her fingers back around it. "But I'm extraordinarily glad you have it. Do not lose it. Do not use it yet."She nodded and put the earring back.We sat side by side on the cot in the small room with the high window and the muffled voices down the hall and I tried to map what I actually knew about the layout of this place... how many people, where they moved, which direction the access road ran, how far we were from anything."There's something else," Amaya said.I looked at her."Last night. On the plane." She hesitated in the way that meant she was deciding how to frame
POV: Selina"Where did they end up?" I asked her. The kettle began to boil. Dara looked at it for a moment, then back at me, and the calculation in her expression was almost identical to the one I had seen cross Martin's face on the plane.That same brief, visible arithmetic. How much truth, how much was useful. The difference was that Dara's arithmetic resolved differently. She reached over and turned the kettle off."You should ask Martin that question," she said quietly. "And you should watch his face very carefully when you do." She added, like an afterthought. She set both cups back in the cabinet and walked out of the kitchen without her tea, and I stood in the silence she left behind with the cold knowledge settling into me that I had made a terrible mistakeNot by leaving Felix, but by assuming that leaving Felix meant I was safe. I had run from one man's prison, and I felt I had run directly into another's.And this one had no gilded cage to show me. This one had offered me s
POV: SelinaThe plane was small, that was the first thing I noticed when Martin led me across the wet grass toward the airstrip.How small it was, how thin the metal looked against the dark sky, how the whole thing seemed held together by confidence rather than engineering. I had never been afraid of flying before. But I had never boarded a private plane in the middle of the night on a rain-soaked airstrip in the middle of nowhere while a man I used to trust was bleeding on a highway four miles behind us, either. Context, I was learning, changed everything."Get in," Martin said, and his voice had shifted somewhere in the last thirty minutes into something I didn't fully recognize. Still controlled, still precise. But the warmth that had made me trust him, the careful, patient quality he had that Felix never possessed, had pulled back like a tide, revealing something harder underneath.I got in...The interior smelled like leather and recirculated air and something faintly chemical
POV: Felix I called Dante from the car when I noticed a signal that gave been off all this while. I thought he was probably blocking every signal around her, I even thought he may have found it and probably got rid of it before he took off with her.But no...It came up just now and I couldn’t be more surprised. This doesn’t just mean that we are close, it means that Martin is on the run, and desperately trying to put more distance between us. He is desperate now, and he’s getting sloppy, beginning to make mistakes that might be the end of him pretty soon.“Dante!Check your device, Selinas tracker, did you notice the signal?” I asked him, but he looks confused because he obviously wasn’t paying attention to that direction, nobody was actually. “Check sll her device and his as eell. He’s getting sloppy, he’s bound to make a mistake pretty soon. Check her current status.” I demanded. He tapped on his keyboard relentlessly before looking up at me.“Last confirmed signal was four hours
POV: Serena I kept replaying the incident in my head, trying to recall when and how I’d implicated myself without my knowledge. I’d caught her s couple of times, and our conversation is always on the same page always. It’s starts with me being shocked at her actions and ends with her offering me a
Selina.I felt shivers run down my spine as I trailed behind Chloe to her office. She entered before me, slamming the door after her loudly, causing me to tremble.'What was going on, why was I having a bad feeling about this?' I pondered, taking in a deep breath and trying to calm myself down.I f
POV: Selina“What’s going on, why is everyone so quiet, what happened here?” I asked the interns as I reviewed their new projects. They shrugged their shoulders at me, refusing to say anything to me. Some of them even rolled their eyes at me, eyeing me as if I did something wrong. I felt angry, I did
POV: Selina “You don’t have to do this, Lina. You heard the doctor, didn’t you? You need rest, that’s what he said, in case you forgot.” Amara yelled at me as I paced the room, waiting for the cops to pick me up. She wasn’t there in his office when he said I had an anxiety attack. If she was there,







