By now it’s very late, and adrenaline and neck pain have given way to mind-numbing exhaustion. Luka tells me to sleep, but he isn’t willing to stop. And though I’m moving through a fog, there’s no way I can attempt sleep with him sitting two feet away in the driver’s seat.

We drive until the city lights are within sight and my ear is practically deaf from the cold wind.

On the outskirts of Chicago he pulls into an all-night diner with free Internet and slides the cap carefully onto my head, pulling the bill down low. “Come on.”

It’s the kind of place a diner should be: greasy-looking, chrome on the counter stools, squiggly lines on the laminate tabletops with red pleather booths. I ask the waitress for a vat of coffee when she comes to drop off the menus. Luka, meanwhile, is tapping away at his phone.

“Let me see that driver’s license,” he says. I slide it over to him and he just stares at it for a moment.

“What are you doing?” I ask, as he returns his attention to the phone.

“Booking us tickets to Croatia.”

“Us?”

Suspicion and relief collide somewhere inside me.

“I’m going with you.”

“This isn’t your problem.”

His brows draw together. “Actually, it kind of is. Rolan knows you’re with me, which means the Historian sent him. They know I’m a traitor, and there’s probably a price on my head. And I told you I’d protect you.”

“Look, if you’re trying to make up for something, I’d say the fact you haven’t killed me yet makes us even. I release you. Okay?”

He lifts his gaze, eyes locked on mine. “You don’t get it,” he says. “There is no ‘yet.’ There will never be a ‘yet.’ I will never hurt you.” He looks for a moment as though he’s about to say more, but then seems to remember the phone in his hands.

Why this loyalty from him? Some need for absolution? To make amends? Was his mission to kill me such a great part of his life that he can’t function without a replacement cause?

My other theory is too uncomfortable to consider with him sitting across the table from me.

“Great. So we’re two targets instead of one,” I murmur.

He says nothing, ferociously tapping at the screen.

“By the way, I don’t know if you heard, but I don’t have a passport.”

“We’re going to fix that.”

“How? By heisting the passport agency on the way to the airport?”

I pour several ice cubes, two sugars, and half the tiny pitcher of cream into my coffee and drink it down. A minute later, Luka slides my license back and sets the phone aside.

“When she comes back for our orders,” he says, “ask her for a recommendation.”