Page 53 of The Hitman's Secret Baby
He tosses me mine.
"We change. Then we walk. There's a safe house ten kilometers north. A man there owes me his life. He'll get us across the next border with new names. After that, we vanish. Just like you wanted."
I don't thank him.
It feels like a betrayal of everything I lost to need this.
Instead, I strip behind a thicket of brush, pulling on the worn jeans and frayed flannel shirt, boots that feel like they've already walked a hundred miles.
My coat, scarf, gloves—everything from the Lombardi world—gets shoved into the trunk with the dead.
When I return to the car, Yarik has begun pouring gasoline over the interior.
He does not look at me when he lights the match.
He tosses it in, and the car erupts.
Heat rushes up in a sudden, howling bloom.
It screams through the morning stillness, and for a moment I see it, as though outside myself—a fire eating everything I was, until all that remains is a silhouette against the smoke.
The flames claw fast and high, and soon, Yarik sends the car rolling, slow at first, then careening down the ravine.
It hits the bottom in a spray of sparks, catching on rock.
The second explosion is louder.
Final.
He turns to me. "We walk."
And we do.
Through lowland brush and narrow tracks where no car could follow.
Through shadows that deepen before they recede.
As the sun climbs, we move deeper into isolation, no longer two people fleeing, but something else entirely.
By midday, we reach the safe house.
A squat structure built into the hillside, hidden behind a thicket of cypress and blackthorn.
The man who opens the door is older than I expected, with a scar that cuts through one eyebrow and a limp in his right leg.
He says nothing when Yarik introduces me under a different name.
He simply steps aside and lets us in.
Inside, it smells of cedar and old stone.
There is no television, no phone, no connection to anything beyond the hills.
There is food, water, a bed in the corner.
A fireplace is already lit against the chill.
I collapse onto the couch, not from exhaustion but from the sheer strangeness of being still.
