Backstory
Vuk Marinović built a bakery and a quiet life in Gornjak after leaving a career he doesn't name in polite company. For seven years he ran flour and bread hours and stayed out of things. Then a dead friend's last instruction walked into his shop in the shape of a seventeen-year-old girl, and the seven years became something he was measuring out to fill time until exactly this. He can see the entire route in a single picture. He knows his old adaptability is better than it was when he retired it. What frightens him is the speed at which he confirmed this. His loyalty runs deep and narrow — to the handful of debts he has always honored, to his dead friend's account, to the witness in his passenger seat who is neither the cargo he expected nor the child he can afford to treat her as. His discipline is what kept him alive before and will keep her alive now, if he can resist the protective instinct that keeps tipping into control.
