Irina’s POV

The scream cut through everything.

My feet were moving before I’d made a decision.

I crossed the park in the dark, following the sound to the tree line on the far side, where the path curved and the light from the street barely reached. I could see them before I heard anything else — a loose circle of figures, four or five of them, and in the middle, smaller, a girl.

She wasn’t screaming anymore. She’d gone quiet in the worse way.

I cleared my throat.

I wasn’t sure what I was going to say. My voice came out rough and hoarse — the cold had been working on my throat all day — but I made it loud enough to carry.

"Hey."

They turned.

Four of them. Young, probably early twenties, with the specific kind of loose-limbed confidence that came from traveling in a group and never once having to account for it. One of them had a bottle. The others just had their hands.

The girl in the middle looked at me.

Her face was tear-streaked. Her jacket was ripped at the shoulder. She was pressed against one of the trees with nowhere to go, and the moment she saw me, her expression did something complicated — relief and panic at the same time, like help had arrived and might also make things worse.

I walked toward them.

My feet hurt. My back hurt. Every step on the left side scraped the blister against the seam of my flat, and the cold had worked its way into my fingers until I couldn’t feel the tips anymore. My nose was running again and I was pretty sure I was running a fever.

None of that mattered.

I planted myself ten feet from the nearest one and looked directly at the guy who seemed to be in charge. He was the tallest. He was also grinning at me.

"Let her go," I said.

Silence for half a second.

And then they laughed.

The tall one in the front turned all the way around to face me, hands spreading wide like he was presenting himself.

"Look at this." He glanced back at his friends, then back at me. "Another one showed up."

"Let her go," I said again.

"Did you hear that?" He was still talking to his friends like I wasn’t there. "She wants us to let her go." He tilted his head, looking me up and down with the kind of unhurried examination that was designed to make a person feel like a thing being appraised. "What do you want, sweetheart? Didn’t want to be left out?"

He took two steps toward me.

"You want to join us? Room for one more. We’re very welcoming."

I didn’t move.

He stopped right in front of me. Close enough that I could smell the alcohol, the cheap cologne underneath it, the specific warmth of someone who had never once thought something bad was going to happen to him.

"What, you’re going to stare at me?" He grinned. "That’s it? That’s your move?"

"Walk away," I said. "All of you. Right now."

One of the others laughed behind him. "I love this one."

The tall one reached out and touched my cheek.

I stepped back.

His hand followed. The grin on his face spread wider.

"Don’t be like that." His fingers curled around my jaw, tilting my face up — not violently, just casually, the way you’d redirect something that didn’t have opinions of its own. "We’re just having fun. You should relax."

I turned my face away.

He let me. The point, I understood, wasn’t to hold on. The point was that he could.

"Walk away," I said again. My voice came out flat. I hated how flat it sounded, how controlled. Like I’d had too much practice at this. "I’m not going to say it again."

"Or what?" He leaned in. "Seriously, I’m asking. What are you going to do?"

Behind him, one of the others had moved. I heard it before I saw it — the shuffle of feet, a change in position — and then I turned and saw that the girl had been grabbed again. A different guy this time, arm around her from behind, and she made a sound that went straight into my chest like a splinter.

I was already turning back to the tall one when his friend appeared at my side.

A hand closed around my wrist.

My skin crawled.

"Look, she’s shaking," he said, to no one in particular. He sounded delighted. "You cold, sweetheart? We can warm you up."

His thumb moved again.

Something shifted in my chest.

I was so tired of standing still.

I looked down at his hand on my wrist.

Then I shoved him.

One hand, palm to the center of his chest — not a coordinated movement, not a trained strike, just a shove. The kind that came from somewhere below conscious thought.

He flew backward.

Not just a stumble. Not just a step back to catch his balance. He went *back* — five, six feet, hitting the ground with a sound that knocked the air out of him, and then he just sat there in the dirt, blinking.

For a second, nobody moved.

I stared at my hand.

The tall one next to me had gone very still.

"What the—" The guy on the ground pushed himself up slowly. He was shaking his head like he’d been hit harder than he understood. He looked at me. Then at his friends. Then back at me. "How did you—"

"I don’t know what you think just happened," the tall one said. His voice had changed. Some of the amusement had drained out of it. "But that was a lucky—"

"Run," I said.

He didn’t run.

He grabbed my arm.

And that was when whatever had cracked open finished coming apart.

I wasn’t thinking anymore. I couldn’t tell you what I thought, because there was no thought — there was just movement, just the specific immediate wrongness of a hand on my arm, of being grabbed, of being held still while someone else decided what happened next. Years of being held still. Years of having no answer to that.

My elbow came up first.

I caught him in the jaw. His head snapped back. His grip broke.

I didn’t stop.

The guy from the ground had gotten back up — he came at me from the side, and I turned into it, and whatever had happened to my arms was happening in full now because when my fist connected with his ribs the sound it made was not the sound a normal person’s fist makes. He folded.

The third one grabbed my shoulder from behind.

I grabbed his wrist, turned, pulled — something went *pop* and he let go very fast, swearing.

The fourth one didn’t come at me.

He just looked at his friends — on the ground, backing away, holding their various pieces of themselves — and then he looked at me, and whatever he was seeing on my face made him take one step backward. Then another.

"We’re—" He held up his hands. "We’re good. Okay? We’re done."

I looked at the tall one. He was on one knee in the dirt, hand pressed to his jaw, staring at me with something that had stopped being amusement entirely and turned into something much simpler. Something I recognized.

Fear.

They left fast after that. No drawn-out exit, no parting words, no performance. The four of them went and the park went quiet and the only sound was my own breathing — ragged, too loud.

I was shaking.

My hands were shaking. My knees were shaking. The cold that had been sitting in my fingers turned into something I could feel again — pins and needles, rush of blood coming back — and the blister on my heel chose this exact moment to make itself loudly known.

I pressed one hand to the nearest tree and stood there for a second.

Just one second.

Just long enough to breathe in, breathe out, confirm that my legs were still holding me up and that the park was empty and that nothing was about to happen from any direction.

The cold was back. The headache was back. The exhaustion settled over me again like something heavy being dropped on top of thin shoulders, and my stomach churned with the particular complaint it had been making all day, and the ache in my lower back had not gone anywhere.

Everything was exactly the same as it had been two minutes ago.

Except my knuckles hurt.

I looked at them. Split across two of them — not bad, just the skin having given way against impact, beads of blood welling up slow and dark in the low light. I stared at them like they belonged to someone else. Like I was trying to figure out if they were real.

I exhaled a breath that shook on the way out.

Then I turned around.

The girl was still against the tree.

She hadn’t moved — not during the fight, not after. She was still pressed against the bark, arms wrapped tight around herself, and she was staring at me with enormous eyes. Young. Maybe eighteen, maybe a little older. Her jacket was still ripped. There was a red mark on her wrist where someone had grabbed her.

Her mouth was slightly open.

I cleared my throat. It scraped on the way through, rough and sore and raw.

"Are you okay?"