I couldn't have done anything. Even if I'd known what to do. Even if I'd had anything but my own hands and a phone I couldn't make myself pull out of my clutch.
"I left," I finish. "I closed the front door and I walked. I don't know how long for or what time it even is now. But I ended up here because I am supposed to meet Sasha."
The room is very quiet.
I can hear the music through the walls, that low muffled thrum, too far away to make out. Everyone else's Friday night proceeding entirely without me.
I look at him.
He's still watching me with that unreadable expression, and for a long, suspended moment I can't tell what he's thinking or what he's going to do.
"I know what it sounds like," I say. "I know you don't know me, and I know how it sounds." My throat tightens but I push through it. "I'm not asking you to believe me. I need to know where Sasha is. She was supposed to be here, and she sent me to his house, and she doesn't know—"
I stop.
Because I've just arrived at the thought I've been carefully walking around all night. The thing that's been there at the edge of my vision, too big to look at directly.
Sasha doesn't know what happened in that kitchen. Sasha is going to find out. Sasha is going to find out that her uncle is dead and that I was there and that I walked here in a torn dress with blood on my hands instead of calling for help.
Something breaks open in my chest. A sudden, terrible pressure, like something's been held together with the wrong kind of tension all night and it's starting to give.
"Sasha didn't set me up," I say, and I don't know who I'm saying it for. "She didn't know. Whatever he is… whatever he was… she didn't know."
"I know," Iosif says.
Two words. Quiet, but not to reassure me. He doesn't say it the way people say things when they're trying to comfort you, with that softness that feels slightly wrong.
I look at him.
"How do you know?" I ask.
"Because if Sasha Vinzlee wanted something done to you," he says, "she wouldn't have left it to chance."
I stare at him.
It is, objectively, an awful thing to say. It is also, somehow, the most comforting thing anyone has said to me all night.
I laugh.
It comes out wrong. Short and fractured and completely without humor. It startles both of us, I think, because something shifts in his face. Not much. A fractional loosening. Like a mechanism releasing one notch.
"Okay," I say, when the laugh has finished happening to me. "Okay."
He leans back slightly. He looks at me for a long, quiet moment, and I get the impression he's reorganising something. Running new information behind those dark eyes.
"You need to clean up," he says. "And then we need to talk about what happens next."
I blink. "Next?"
"Markus Vinzlee was the head of his family." He says it carefully. Precisely. Like he's handing me something fragile and wants me to have a chance to take hold of it before he lets go. "His death won’t go unnoticed for long. By morning there will be questions. People asking where he is. People asking who was at his house."
The cold comes back. Spreading out from the center of my chest.
"People," I repeat slowly. "What kind of people?"
He meets my eyes.
"My kind," he says.
