Chapter 34 – The Girl Who Ran

• The coastal town was the kind of place where people came to disappear.
• Alina, now going by the name “Siena,” arrived on a bus that wheezed into the old terminal at the edge of the cliffs. The sea air hit her like a cleansing slap—sharp, salty, unrelenting. It made her feel cleaner than she was. The kind of clean that couldn’t be measured by soap or showers, but by distance. And she’d put hundreds of miles between herself and him.
• She checked into a hostel tucked between a fish market and a shuttered bookshop, paying in cash. The woman behind the desk didn’t ask many questions, just handed her a key and muttered something about the pipes being moody. Alina nodded and kept her head down, grateful for the anonymity of transience. Everyone in that hostel had a story they weren’t telling.