Then I stepped closer to the blood.
It wasn’t a single drop. It was a trail.
Uneven. Dragged. Leading from the darkness beyond the lot straight to my car.
My gaze lifted to the door handle.
A handprint—full palm, fingers wrapped around the chrome. Bloody. Sloppy. The mark of someone who’d barely stayed upright long enough to reach it.
Someone badly hurt.
“Vanya. Back up. Now.”
He didn’t argue. Took five steps back exactly, eyes still wide but face composed. He trusted me. That trust was a responsibility I never forgot.
I angled my body to keep him shielded, left hand hovering over the handle, right steady on the pistol.
Partnership with the Albanians did not equal trust. It never had.
A car bomb would have been crude for them—but crude still killed. Or this could be bait. A provocation. A corpse meant to send a message.
I twisted the handle.
The door opened smoothly.
No resistance.
No blast.
The interior light snapped on, harsh and unforgiving.
And for a fraction of a second, my brain refused to process what I was seeing.
A woman.
Curled on her side across the backseat, body folded inward as if trying to make herself smaller.
Bare skin everywhere the light touched—pale beneath layers of grime, streaked with drying blood.
What little clothing remained was barely more than a torn strip knotted around her waist, soaked through, clinging darkly to her hips.
She was breathing.
Shallow. Uneven. But unmistakably alive.
The injuries were immediate and impossible to ignore.
Cuts and bruises mapped her body in brutal detail—old and new overlapping in a way that made my jaw tighten. The worst was a long, vicious slash running vertically between her chest, the edges ragged, swollen, still seeping sluggishly despite how much blood she’d already lost.
Her dark hair was matted against her cheek.
Her lips were parted, breath catching faintly on the exhale, like her body was struggling to remember how to keep going.
This wasn’t a message.
This was a survivor.
Something cold and dangerous shifted in my chest.