Tina left the warehouse at the end of her shift with rain still dripping from the eaves and the sky the color of wet concrete. She didn't go straight back to the motel. Instead she walked the opposite direction, toward the river where the streets narrowed into a maze of old brick row houses and boarded-up storefronts. The necklace—the silver fox—bounced lightly against her collarbone with every step, a cool little reminder she couldn't ignore. She touched it once, then forced her hand away. No sentiment. No weakness.
She found the new place on a side street called Callowhill, a narrow three-story walk-up with peeling green paint and a For Rent sign crooked in the window. The landlord was a wiry woman in her sixties named Dolores who smoked menthols and asked for cash upfront. No lease. No background check. Just a key and a warning not to flush anything weird down the toilet.
"Third floor," Dolores rasped, handing over the key. "Don't make noise after ten. I sleep with a bat beside the bed."
"Understood," Tina said, counting out two hundred dollars for the first month. The rest she'd scrape together somehow. She climbed the stairs—steep, creaky, smelling faintly of mothballs and old carpet—and pushed open the door to apartment 3B.
One room. One window. One mattress on the floor that looked like it had seen better decades. A tiny kitchenette with a hot plate and a sink that dripped. A bathroom the size of a closet. It was perfect. Ugly, anonymous, hers.
She dropped her backpack and stood in the middle of the empty space, arms out like she was measuring freedom. The rain tapped the window in soft applause. She laughed—quiet, triumphant—and started unpacking. Clothes folded into neat piles on the floor. Burner phone on the windowsill. The white rose from Victor's gift, now slightly wilted, placed on the sill beside it like a dare.
She swept the room for cameras or bugs out of pure paranoia, found nothing but dust and a dead cockroach under the radiator. Good enough. She wedged a chair under the doorknob anyway. Old habits died hard.
Night fell fast. She cooked instant noodles on the hot plate, ate them straight from the pot while sitting cross-legged on the mattress. The fox pendant caught the light from the single bulb overhead, glinting like it was watching her. She traced its outline with one finger, feeling the sharp little ears, the clever snout. A runner. A survivor. She liked that.
Her real phone buzzed once—still powered on from Jack's call, still a tether she couldn't quite cut. She glanced at the screen. A text from an unknown number.
**"New address looks cozy. Third floor suits you—high enough to see trouble coming. Sleep well. —V"**
Tina's spoon froze halfway to her mouth. Noodles slipped back into the pot with a soft plop.
She stood, crossed to the window, yanked the thin curtain aside. The street below was empty except for a single streetlamp haloed by mist. No black SUV. No figure in a coat. Just rain and shadows.
She typed back with shaking fingers.
**"How long are you going to keep this up?"**
The reply came almost instantly.
**"Until you stop running. Or until you run to me. Whichever comes first."**
She stared at the words until they blurred. Then she powered the phone off completely, removed the battery, and buried it in the bottom of her backpack under a sock. No more tethers. No more midnight texts that made her heart do stupid flips.
She finished her noodles in silence, rinsed the pot, and lay down on the mattress. The springs groaned under her weight. She pulled the thin blanket up to her chin and stared at the ceiling cracks that looked like lightning frozen in plaster.
The necklace rested warm against her skin now, heated by her body. She closed her eyes and tried to picture life without it—without the gifts, without the notes, without the man who seemed to know her better than she knew herself sometimes.
The image wouldn't hold.
She rolled onto her side, hugged her knees, and whispered into the dark.
"I'm not running to you, Victor."
The rain answered with a steady drum against the glass.
She wasn't sure who she was trying to convince.
The room stayed quiet except for the drip of the kitchen faucet and the soft tick of her pulse.
Somewhere across the city, in a penthouse that felt too big and too empty, Victor Kane read her last message, smiled into the dark, and poured himself a glass of whiskey.
He didn't reply.
He didn't need to.
The board was set.
The pieces were moving.
And the girl with the fox around her neck was playing right into his hands—whether she admitted it or not.