Mina and Mark

chapter 8

Chapter 8: Trouble Always Follows

The trouble had a beginning, even if it no longer felt that way to Mark. It always started small.A favour.A lift.A conversation kept deliberately vague.Mark had not set out to be reckless. He had been tired. Injured. Short on money. The kind of tired that blurred judgement, that made risk feel theoretical and consequences feel negotiable. His boss had noticed. He always did. He had a talent for spotting weakness and dressing it up as opportunity.It was meant to be simple. Storage. Transport. Keep quiet. Get paid.Drugs. Mark had known that much. He told himself it was temporary. A bridge. One bad decision in an otherwise careful life. He did not imagine blood. He did not imagine knives. He did not imagine being hunted.The deal went wrong fast.One moment they were parked in an industrial estate that smelled of oil and wet concrete, engines idling, tension low enough to ignore. The next, everything fractured. Voices rose. Someone moved too quickly. His boss stepped back when he should have stepped in.That was when Mark understood.He had never been part of the plan.He had been part of the cover.The rule was simple. Fewer witnesses meant fewer problems.He remembered it with unsettling clarity. Not panic. Not chaos. Just a sharp stillness, the same kind his illness sometimes gave him, only this time it belonged to the world, not his mind. A blade flashed. Someone lunged. Mark moved without thinking.He fought because there was no other option.Hands. Weight. Impact. The wet heat of blood that did not register as his own until later. The knife found him low and hard, pain blooming seconds after the strike, deep and unmistakable. He went down once, then back up again, driven by instinct older than fear. Stay upright. Stay moving. Stay alive.By the time it was over, the estate was empty.His boss was gone.So were the drugs.So was any illusion of safety.Mark survived, but survival came with conditions. The kind that did not expire quietly.Now the gang wanted him dead.Not because he mattered. Because he didn’t. Because loose ends were dangerous, and he was still breathing.He understood how this worked. Pressure first. Then pursuit. The slow tightening of space. A sense of being watched that sharpened over time. He felt it already, humming beneath his skin, too close at times to the early stirrings of his psychosis.That overlap frightened him most.When real danger and altered perception occupied the same ground, it became harder to trust his instincts. Hypervigilance could save you. It could also destroy you. He worked hard now to separate threat from thought, reality from narrative, but the effort exhausted him.He had been stabbed. He had healed badly. Pain lingered, a constant reminder of how close he’d come to disappearing altogether. Sleep came in fragments. Fatigue crept in, loosening his grip on certainty. He knew the signs. He was not naïve about his own mind.Recovery had taught him awareness, not immunity.And trouble did not care that he was trying.He tried to keep Mina out of it. Truly. He told himself that involving her would only widen the blast radius. That she deserved distance, not danger. That loving someone sometimes meant handling your mess alone.But reality refused to cooperate.He was injured. Running out of options. Surrounded by people who would sell him out without blinking. The walls were closing in, externally and internally, and he could feel his hold on himself beginning to slip.Mina knew how to separate signal from noise.She knew how to anchor him when his thoughts began to spiral.She knew him.That was the problem.Even as he promised himself he would not reach for her, the truth pressed closer. She was not just someone he trusted. She was the only person who could see the danger clearly enough to help him navigate it.Outside his flat, footsteps passed too slowly to be coincidence. A car idled where it should not have. His phone lit up with unknown numbers that never left messages.The gang was close now.Closer than he wanted to admit.Mark sat in the half-light, breath shallow, forcing his mind to stay where his body was. Scotland hovered at the edge of his thoughts. Distance as strategy. Movement as survival.He did not want to drag Mina into this.But trouble had a way of bleeding outward.As the light died, he checked the map again.Ten miles.Only ten miles separated him from Mina now.Whatever he was running from was no longer behind him.It was moving with him.