Irina’s POV

My nose was running. My throat was raw. Every time I swallowed, something scraped. The cold I’d been building all night had settled in with the kind of grim determination that told me it wasn’t going anywhere fast.

I ignored it and started walking.

---

The first place I found was a handwritten sign taped to a laundromat bulletin board. *Room for rent. Quiet building. Call or knock — 4B.*

Fourth floor. No elevator. By the time I reached the top landing, my legs were trembling and I had to stop and press one hand flat against the wall until the dizziness passed. A slow breath in. A slow breath out. The baby didn’t like stairs, apparently. Or maybe that was just me. Hard to tell anymore where my body ended and the pregnancy began.

I knocked.

The man who opened the door looked me up and down in about two seconds, and his whole face did the thing — that slow, sliding recalibration — where you could see the exact moment a person decided you weren’t worth their time.

"How much you got?" he said. No hello. No *are you the one who called?* Just that.

I told him what I had.

He laughed. Not a funny laugh. The kind of laugh that’s really just a sound for *you’re an idiot*.

"That’s not even half the deposit." He started closing the door. "I need first month, last month, and two months security. Come back when you’ve got money."

"I can have the rest by the end of the week—"

The door clicked shut.

I stood there for a second, staring at the peeling paint on the door frame. Then I turned around and went back down the four flights of stairs.

---

The second place was cheaper. Much cheaper. Which should have been the first warning.

It was a basement unit on a street that smelled like exhaust and something else I couldn’t identify. The landlord — a woman with a cigarette tucked behind her ear and zero interest in making eye contact — led me down a narrow stairwell that got darker with every step.

She pushed open the door and said, "It’s cozy."

The smell hit me first. Mold. Underneath that, something worse — old food, or maybe something had died in the walls, I genuinely couldn’t tell. The carpet was the color of a bruise and felt spongy underfoot. The ceiling had a brown stain spreading from one corner like a slow tide. The window, a single narrow rectangle up near the ceiling, let in approximately no light.

My stomach lurched.

Lately everything made my stomach lurch. But this was a different kind — not the pregnancy nausea, just plain ordinary *this is disgusting* and my body staging a protest.

"The bathroom’s through there," the woman said, pointing to a door that was slightly ajar. I could see, from where I was standing, that the toilet had a ring around it that no amount of cleaning would fix.

"Thank you," I said. "I’ll think about it."

I thought about it for approximately the length of time it took me to get back up the stairs and onto the sidewalk.

No.

---

The third place had a sign outside that said *Clean, Affordable, Available NOW* in cheerful red marker, which should have told me something.

The landlord was a man, maybe fifty, with small eyes and a smile that stayed on his face a beat too long. He shook my hand when I arrived and held it a second longer than necessary.

"Great timing," he said. "I just had a unit open up. Let me show you."

The unit was on the third floor. He insisted on walking behind me up the stairs. I told myself it was nothing. Lots of people walked behind other people up stairs. It was just how stairs worked.

He unlocked the door and stepped inside, and then he was everywhere — showing me the kitchen, showing me the closet, showing me the bathroom, always one step too close, his hand landing on my shoulder to steer me, then the small of my back, then—

I stepped sideways.

"I’ve seen enough," I said.

"You haven’t seen the bedroom." His voice had gone lower. That was the only warning.

"I’ve seen enough," I said again, and I kept my voice level and my face still because I had spent years learning how to keep my voice level and my face still, and I walked out the door and down the stairs and out onto the street without looking back.

My skin was crawling.

I kept walking.

*Don’t think about it. Keep moving.*

---

By noon I’d given up on housing and switched to jobs.

The first restaurant I walked into — a diner with sticky menus and a hand-lettered *Help Wanted* sign — the manager took one look at me and asked for my work authorization papers.

I didn’t have work authorization papers.

"Can’t help you," he said. Already turning away. "Next."

The second place was a grocery store. The assistant manager who interviewed me — if you could call it an interview, it was more like being inspected — spent most of the time looking at somewhere south of my face. Not at my chest, exactly. Just. Nearby.

"You got references?" he asked.

I said I’d just moved to the city.

"Prior work history?"

I said it had been a while.

He tapped his pen against the clipboard. "What were you doing before?"

I couldn’t exactly say *I was a captive in a werewolf mafia compound for months*. I said I’d been dealing with a family situation.

He made a sound that was clearly *yeah, sure* disguised as a cough, and told me they’d keep my application on file. They would not be keeping my application on file.

I went back out into the street and sneezed three times in a row. A woman walking past gave me a wide berth. Fair.

---

The third attempt was a market stall — a man selling produce who’d stuck a handwritten note to his awning that said *casual help needed*. He seemed friendly enough at first. Nice smile. Asked me if I was new to the area.

Then he explained the job.

"It’s cash," he said. "But I’ll need a small deposit from you. Just to hold the position, you understand, while I check you out."

I looked at him.

He smiled wider.

"It’s standard," he said. "Everybody does it."

Everybody absolutely did not do it.

I said no thank you and walked away. He called something after me but I didn’t stop to hear what it was.

---

The coffee shop was the worst.

It had looked fine from outside. Nice, even. The kind of place with exposed brick and chalkboard menus and the smell of something actually good drifting out when someone opened the door. I went in and asked if they were hiring. The girl at the counter said yes, actually, and the manager was in the back, did I want to wait?

I said yes. I sat down at a small table near the window. The chair scraped the floor and the sound went through my head like a splinter, because at this point my head was congested and pounding and every noise was slightly too loud.

A man came out from the back — not the manager, just one of the staff — and came over to where I was sitting.

"You waiting for an interview?" he said.

I said yes.

He sat down across from me without being invited. Started talking. Asked where I was from, asked if I was new to the city, asked if I was alone. And then, very casually, while he was talking, his hand came across the table and closed over mine.

I pulled my hand back.

He looked surprised. Like he hadn’t expected that. Like it hadn’t even occurred to him that I might not want that.

"Just being friendly," he said.

I looked at him. I kept my face still. "The manager," I said. "Is she coming out?"

He shrugged and wandered back to where he’d come from.

The manager came out five minutes later. She was efficient and not unkind, but when she asked about experience and I told her the truth, she winced and said they needed someone who could start immediately and already knew the systems. They’d call me if something changed.

She wouldn’t call me.

I walked out into the afternoon light and just stood there for a second on the sidewalk, eyes closed, breathing through my mouth because my nose had given up entirely.

Everything hurt. My feet. My throat. My back. The low, persistent ache in my abdomen that hadn’t left since I’d woken up this morning, that dull reminder that there was someone else in here now, someone who needed me to have this figured out, someone who hadn’t asked for any of this.

I opened my eyes.

The sun was going down.

---

I made it back to the park just as the last light disappeared behind the buildings.

The bench was still there, same bench, like it had been waiting. I sat down and my body made the same sound it had made this morning — everything exhaling at once — and I just sat with my elbows on my knees and stared at the gravel.

My bag was between my feet. My money was less than it had been this morning. I had no housing. No job. No plan that had survived contact with reality.

I sneezed again. The sound echoed off the nearby building. No pigeon this time. Even the pigeons had given up on me.

I pressed my palms flat against my stomach.

It was quiet for a moment. Just the distant sound of traffic and somewhere, a dog.

"Okay," I said. Out loud, to no one. To the small thing that didn’t know yet how badly I was failing it. "Okay. I’m sorry. I know this isn’t—" My voice cracked. I swallowed and tried again. "Baby, I’m sorry. I promise I’m going to fix this. Just give me one more day. Tomorrow I’ll find us somewhere. I will. I just need one more day."

The gravel blurred. I pressed the back of my wrist against my eyes and held it there until the burning stopped.

Tomorrow. I’d figure it out tomorrow. Tonight I just had to get through tonight.

I lowered my hand.

And then, from somewhere across the park — distant, sharp, cutting through the quiet like a blade — a girl screamed.

I was on my feet before I’d decided to move. My eyes found the sound automatically, scanning across the dark stretch of grass and gravel paths, following the noise to its source.

There. Across the park, half-hidden by the shadow of the trees.

Several figures. Men. Standing in a loose, deliberate circle.

And in the middle of them, a girl.