He didn’t want me.
Fine. I don’t want him either.
The sour lie sticks on my tongue.
I swallow down the taste. Out of sight, out of mind. I blow my breath out through my nose, raise my arms, and stretch toward the ceiling. Crown chakra to the skies. Mountain pose. Beneath the calm exterior, my muscles scream, still bruised from that night at my mother’s house.
Running. Fighting. Everything that came after.
And the wonderful things that came before. In the hotel…
My core perks up at those memories, but that thrill is far from useful at the moment.
I wobble, my breath shaking.
I’m trying to tell that spark to go back to sleep, that there’s nothing to be excited about, when a sound registers in the hall outside.
Slow, certain footsteps. A rhythm I’ve memorized.
My pulse doesn’t just skip. It stops.
Cold spreads like a toxin, freezing every nerve ending.
No. Not possible.
Then tiny clinks and scrapes, the metallic staccato of someone picking my lock. I could reach for my phone. Run, scream, do anything useful.
But I wait.
I know that cadence like I know the beat of my own heart.
My door swings open.
Kirill fills the frame like he’s staking a claim on the threshold. He wears a black coat over his dress shirt, and a dribble of blood stains the white fabric.
Instead of entering, he looms, haloed by the light he’s blocking. His eyes calculate and weigh everything in cold silence.
My heart knots up, the way muscle tenses before a blow.
I won’t let him get close enough to hurt me again.
I scramble to my feet, the bare soles whispering against the hardwood. I need space. Space is how I breathe and think.
“How did you find me?” The question comes out sharp as broken glass, every edge of my hurt on display.
“This is your apartment. I just came back to where I found you the first time rather than the nice place where I left you.” He glances at my face, then the floor, then back at me. His eyes narrow. “Are you an idiot? That room was nine hundred dollars a night. Why are you here?”
It’s such a Kirill answer that, for a split second, I want to laugh. No greeting or apology. Just irritation because I won’t stay where he puts me.
As if I’m a soulless metal statue in one of the houses he trapped me in.
“I don’t do half-lives anymore.” I carve the words out of ice so he’ll understand them better. Strip away the wellness-guru veneer and expose the steel beneath. “I live fully, or I don’t live at all. And stop breaking into my apartment. It’s rude. Learn to knock like a human. Just curl your fin up and…” I mimic knocking, in case he’s still not sure. “Or are you here to kill me?”
He rolls his eyes—actually rolls them—like I’m the difficult one.
For a second, he reminds me of that night in the hotel when he let the mask slip. Then he tries to barge in.
I block his path, refusing to let him bulldoze through me the way he bulldozed through my life.
