She taps on your helmat covered head ..says .. keep this tightly strapped .. im going like nuclear now .

Lina reaches down with one crystalline hand and taps the top of the lead helmet still sitting on your head. The sound is sharp — diamond on lead, a clean metallic ring that reverberates through your skull.

"Keep that strapped on tight," she says. Her voice is the diamond form's — lower, smoother, vibrating with harmonics that a human larynx shouldn't produce — but there's something warmer beneath it now, something that wasn't there when she was tearing through hideouts. "I'm going nuclear out there. Don't want to accidentally mash your brain too. Stay here. I'll be quick."

She pauses. Her glowing blue eyes hold yours through the helmet's narrow visor slit.

"I have a lot to talk to you about," she says, quieter. "And a lot to share. So don't go anywhere."

The van's sliding door screeches open. The fluorescent strip light of the garage floods in, and you catch a glimpse of her crystalline body stepping out — six feet of prismatic, voluptuous diamond catching the light like a chandelier dropped into a concrete bunker — before the door bangs shut behind her.

You press your palms flat against the cold metal floor of the van. Your heart is hammering so hard you can feel it in your teeth. The helmet is heavy on your head, the lead lining warm from your body heat, the visor slit giving you a narrow rectangle of the van's interior — the rumpled blanket, the snapped zip ties, the dark smear where her body lay.

Then you hear Razor.

"SHIT — the diamond bitch is FREE! She's — oh fuck, oh fuck, she's out, she's —"

His voice cuts off. Not fading. Not trailing away. It simply stops, replaced by a wet, dense sound — like someone upending a thick smoothie onto concrete. A heavy thud follows. Something clatters — metal on stone. His razor, you think. Dropped from fingers that no longer have a brain telling them to grip.

Petro screams. One syllable — half a word, maybe half a prayer in Ukrainian — and then the same sound. Wetter this time. Closer. You hear the splatter hit the side of the van, a soft patter like rain against the metal panel inches from your ear.

Dima doesn't scream at all. There's a single, strangled gasp, a sound like a ripe melon dropped from a rooftop, and then nothing.

Silence. The fluorescent light buzzes. Water drips from the overhead pipe. Something thick and warm trickles under the van's sliding door, pooling against the rubber seal — dark, viscous, catching the light in a way that liquid shouldn't.

You don't move. You don't breathe. The helmet sits on your head like a second skull, and you are grateful for every ounce of its weight.

Minutes pass. Three. Five. You lose count. Then the sliding door wrenches open again, and Lina stands in the frame. The garage behind her is — you **** yourself not to look. You catch shapes in your peripheral vision through the visor slit. Shapes that used to be people. You keep your eyes on her.

"Hey," she says. Casual. Almost gentle. Like she's picking you up from a late shift. "Let's go. Come on."

You climb out of the van on unsteady legs, keeping the helmet firmly on your head. Your shoes touch wet concrete and you don't look down.

"Where am I supposed to go?" Your voice comes out muffled, echoing inside the lead casing. "Marco's men will find me. The moment they realize I'm gone, the moment Viktor doesn't get his check-in — I'm dead. I can't just —"

Lina steps forward. Her diamond arms wrap around you. The embrace is strange — her body is hard and smooth and warm, not cold like you'd expect, radiating a subtle heat that seeps through your wrinkled button-up and into your chest. Her crystalline breasts press against you, impossibly firm, the prismatic surface catching light in fractured rainbows across the concrete walls. She is taller than you in this form, and your helmeted head tucks against her diamond collarbone.

"No, they won't," she murmurs into the top of the helmet.

A white light detonates behind your eyes. Not painful — more like staring into the sun's afterimage, a total saturation of your visual field that obliterates the garage, the van, the wet concrete, everything. Your stomach drops as though you've missed a step on a staircase, and for one vertiginous instant you are nowhere at all — suspended in pure luminescence, Lina's arms the only solid thing in existence.

Then the light collapses.

Your feet are on carpet. Soft, worn carpet — the kind that's been walked on thousands of times in bare feet, the pile compressed into familiar paths between rooms. The air smells different. Not concrete and blood and chemical residue. This air smells like lavender fabric softener and old books and something faintly sweet — vanilla, maybe. Vanilla shampoo.

Your chest constricts so hard you nearly buckle.

You pull the helmet off with shaking hands and blink in the warm light of a floor lamp. You're standing in a living room. Small, cluttered, lived-in. A sagging couch draped with a knitted throw. Bookshelves overflowing with paperbacks and framed photographs. A kitchen visible through an archway, dishes stacked in the drying rack. Plants on the windowsill — some thriving, some in **** need of water. Curtains drawn against the night.

Lina releases you from the embrace and steps back. The diamond recedes — flowing off her like water running in reverse, the crystalline lattice dissolving, her frame shrinking, her proportions shifting back to human. Her platinum hair darkens to its natural brown, falling in messy waves past her shoulders. Her glowing blue eyes warm back to brown — Jane's brown, that specific shade of brown that you used to lose yourself in across library tables and diner booths and the narrow dorm bed that smelled like both of you.

She's naked. Human again. Smaller. The girl from the van floor, but standing now, unbound, sovereign in her own space. She reaches for an oversized t-shirt draped over the arm of the couch — faded grey, some band logo cracked and peeling — and pulls it over her head in one fluid motion. It falls to mid-thigh, the neckline slipping off one bare shoulder.

"Welcome to my home," she says. Her voice is her own again — young, a little hoarse, stripped of the diamond form's seductive undertones. She tucks a strand of dark hair behind her ear and looks at you with those devastating brown eyes. A small, complicated smile touches her lips.

"Well. Jane's home, too."