He slows. I watch his posture change. The shoulders roll forward. The chin drops. His eyes lock onto her with the dull, predatory focus of a man who's done this before and gotten away with it.
He follows her into the alley.
Stefania doesn't turn around. She keeps walking, slow, head down looking at her phone, the perfect image of a woman whodoesn't know she's being followed. He closes the distance. Ten feet. Eight. Six.
He reaches for her and I fight every primal instinct to lunge at him. I have to show Stefania I respect her, admire her, and that means letting her lead.
His hand barely touches her shoulder when she moves.
It happens so fast that if I blinked, I would have missed the pivot. One second she's walking away from him and the next she's facing him with his wrist locked in her grip and his arm twisted at an angle that puts him on his toes. He gasps. Starts to shout. Her other hand comes up and the blade presses into the soft tissue under his jaw and the shout dies in his throat.
"Don't," she says. That voice. Low. Flat. Stripped of everything human. "Don't scream. Don't move."
He stares at her. His mouth works but nothing comes out. The beer-brave confidence is gone. What's left is the raw recognition of a man who has just realized he is not the most dangerous thing in this alley.
"The woman at the bus stop on Maynard," Stefania says. "Two weeks ago. You remember her?"
His eyes widen.
"I'll take that as a yes." She adjusts her grip. The blade presses deeper. "Here's what's going to happen. Tomorrow morning, you're going to walk into the precinct on Fourth Street and you're going to confess. You're going to give them your name, your address, and a full account of what you did. If you don't, I'll come back. And I won't be this polite."
"You're crazy," he whispers. "You're fucking crazy."
"Maybe." She leans closer. I can see her eyes in the dim light and there is nothing in them. "But I'm also the reason eleven men in this city are in prison or in the ground right now. Sowhen I tell you to walk into that precinct tomorrow, you should believe me when I say the alternative is worse."
She releases him and steps back. He stumbles against the wall, hand on his throat, breathing like he's just been pulled from beneath water.
I watch his face…think back to the predatory expression he wore when he first saw Stefania, how it changed to fear when she pulled her knife, and now, how it turns to rage.
She lets him lunge at her, then twists and throws him over her shoulder. It all happens so quickly. One minute he is calling her a psycho bitch from his position on the floor, the next the knife in in his chest and he is sputtering and choking on his own blood.
I step out from the shadows. She's standing in the yellow light with her hands at her sides and her breathing even and she looks at me with an expression I can't fully read.
"He wasn’t going to confess," she says.
"I know."
I close the distance between us. She watches me come. For a moment I think she's going to say something clinical, something about the approach or the timing or the angle of the blade. Instead, she reaches up and puts her hands on either side of my face.
"Thank you," she says quietly. "For staying back. For trusting me."
"It was the hardest thing I've ever done." It’s true. But it was worth it.
She ducks down and feels over Jones, pulling his wallet from his pocket and making it look like a mugging gone wrong. Then she is facing me again with a smile that lights up my soul.
“Lets go home, husband,” she says. “I think I’d like a nice hot bath and a glass of wine.”
“You’ve earned it,” I say, leading her back to the SUV.
Stefania
The water is almost too hot and it's exactly what I need.
Yevgeny ran the bath while I stood in the kitchen and poured myself a glass of red wine from a bottle I found on the counter. I don't know if it was there before today or if he put it there this morning, anticipating this moment. With Yevgeny, it could be either. The man plans three moves ahead in everything.
I took the glass into the bathroom and found the tub full, steam curling off the surface, the overhead light dimmed to something soft. There’s no bubbles, just a milky wisp of oil threading through the water.
I sink in up to my shoulders and close my eyes before taking a long sip of wine and let myself feel it.
