When I told my dad I’d blown every miserable cent I’d earned serving bitter coffee to even bitterer people on a wheezing ’83 Chevette, I expected a hurricane. Screaming. The classic "financial responsibility" lecture I knew by heart.

  Instead, I got a nostalgic look—almost a sad smile.

  "Your grandfather had one just like it," he murmured, eyes lost in some dusty memory. "Except… Well, his started on the first try. And didn’t sound like it’d disintegrate past sixty."

  The paternal fury came, as it always did, late and from the financial flank. It hit when—tail between my legs, pride in shambles—I had to beg him for a loan to cover the black hole of bills the Chevvie left in its wake. Rent. Tuition. The fucking carburetor repair.

  We fought. Same battle as always: his steel-clad logic vs. my ability to twist reality until it almost sounded reasonable. He wielded bank statements; I wielded creative excuses. As usual, his logic won. I paid back the loan… with interest in guilt.

  After Clara dumped me, my first instinct was to torch the Chevvie. Toss it off a cliff. Anything to erase the symbol of my stupidity. But my dad, in a rare moment of automotive intervention, convinced me otherwise.

  "A car’s not just an expense, kid. It’s a tool. Use it."

  Through one of his countless "friend-of-a-friend’s-coworker" connections, he landed me a gig as an independent courier. Desperately acceptable—especially since the café was about to fire me for "lack of customer rapport" (translation: I couldn’t fake smiles while my life imploded).

  The job was zero glamour. Point A to Point B. Boxes. Warehouses. Loading, unloading, driving. Not fun. Not exciting. But the Chevvie’s rattling on backroads and the air—sometimes fresh, sometimes reeking of industrial zones—kept me busy. Let me practice gear shifts without Clara judging every move. Sometimes, it even drowned out the memory of her condescending smirk.

  The hard part was life-Tetris: cramming deliveries between thermodynamics classes (still incomprehensible) and caffeine-fueled study nights.

  The gunfire’s echo faded in the alley, leaving a silence so sudden it was deafening.

  At my feet, wedged between my worn sneakers and the gearshift, was the box.

  Brown industrial cardboard. Sealed with metallic tape that looked impossible to tear. Surprisingly heavy for its size—just bigger than a shoebox. No sender. No recipient. Just a barcode and a red label with blocky letters: XJ-7B-ALFA.

  The box I was supposed to deliver to Warehouse Sigma at Pier 7B.

  A routine job. Or it had been, before it turned into a fucking action movie.

  Movement behind me.

  "Aha! Lilia! There’s my girl!"

  The girl—Lilia?—was walking back to the car, but wrong. Too slow. Too calm. Like the alley wasn’t a graveyard and the van’s windshield wasn’t a windshield webbed with bullet holes.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  The rear door creaked open. She slid in, her boot nudging the bloody guy’s ribs. Not gently.

  Then she grabbed his face—palmed it—like she owned him.

  Their mouths crashed together. Not a kiss. A claim.

  Her teeth scraped his lip. His fingers dug into her waist hard enough to bruise. It was violence pretending to be affection, or maybe the other way around. The kind of thing that made my skin crawl because it wasn’t about love—it was about winning.

  "Lilia," he growled against her mouth, voice thick with something between pride and pain.

  She bit him. Drew blood. Laughed when he cursed.

  And the whole time, her free hand never stopped gripping the gun.

  Right there. In my backseat. Amid the stench of blood and gunpowder. They were fucking making out.

  Something about the rawness of it churned my stomach.

  A bitter knot formed inside of me.

  I cleared my throat. Nothing.

  I faked a dry, noisy cough, which only managed to send a sharp pain through my head where I had hit it earlier.

  They remained in their bubble of pheromones and desperation. Finally, I lost my patience. I raised my hand and pressed the horn with all the force of my pent-up frustration.

  The Chevette’s shrill and pathetic honk bounced off the alley walls, a ridiculous screech in the middle of the carnage.

  They broke apart. The guy glared murder.

  "What the hell, brat?!"

  Lilia, though, looked amused. She wiped her mouth with her wrist, slid into the passenger seat, and—like an old habit—pressed her gun to my temple.

  "If this hunk of junk still runs, drive," she ordered. "We need to move."

  I stared. Her switch from feral lover to efficient kidnapper was dizzying.

  The gun nudged my skin.

  Message received.

  The engine coughed, wheezed, groaned like an old man waking from a nap… and started. A rusty miracle.

  "Where to?" My voice was a whisper.

  "You drive. I’ll navigate. Now get us the hell out."

  I looked in the rearview mirror as I shifted into reverse. The image was surreal: four bodies sprawled at odd angles on the oil-stained asphalt.

  The black van, riddled with bullet holes—especially on the driver’s side—hinted at a fifth occupant who hadn’t come out to say hello.

  I maneuvered carefully through the debris and remnants of the shootout, the tires softly squealing over shattered glass. The Chevette felt more fragile than ever.

  We left the alley—and its corpses—behind like changing channels.

  Lilia laughed, a sound like a safety clicking off. She used her gun’s barrel to sweep glass off the dashboard. A weirdly domestic gesture.

  We drove. Her directions were clipped: "Left here." "Straight three blocks." "Avoid the main avenue."

  The sun dipped.

  Streetlights flickered.

  On.

  The Chevvie’s rattling and the wounded guy’s breathing were the only sounds.

  The empty radio slot gaped at me. For once, I wished it worked—I’d take ads for dick pills over this silence.

  And then, the recurring thought—the root of all this absurd chaos—pierced my brain once again: If I hadn’t gotten the damn license… If I hadn’t bought this damn car…

  The girl interrupted my spiral of self-pity:

  "Next right. And kill the headlights."

  I obeyed. The darkness swallowed us whole.

  The Chevette crept forward, blind. Just like me. Into a night thick with the scent of gunpowder and bad decisions.

  Same old, same old. My head cleared just as Clara’s face blurred into Lilias’, their identical eyes looking down at me.

  Damn it all.