"I'll be careful," I say.
"You don't know how to be careful. That's why I'm telling you."
I leave before he can say anything else. The corridor is cold and the alarm is still screaming and somewhere above me, on thesecond floor of the east wing, a woman with an unlit cigarette and a spine she checks like a rosary is sitting in the dark, waiting for someone to open the door.
I take the stairs two at a time.
Chapter Four: Charlotte
Thefirstshotwakesme at 2:17 AM.
I know the time because I've been staring at the digital clock on the nightstand since midnight, watching the minutes change and hating every one of them. Sleep doesn't come easy in locked rooms. It never has. Three years ago, I trained myself to sleep in four-hour blocks with one ear open and my shoes next to the bed, and that training is the only reason I'm awake now, sitting up in the dark with my heart hammering and my brain already running the math.
Gunshot. Suppressed, but not silent. A suppressor takes thebangout of a round, not thethud. I know what gunfire sounds like through walls. I know what it sounds like through doors, through floors, through the thin drywall of a shitty apartment where the man you live with keeps a .38 in the bedside drawer and likes to remind you it's there.
I know what gunfire sounds like.
Two more shots. Close together. Same corridor, maybe one floor down. Then a burst of something automatic, followed by silence, followed by two more suppressed rounds.
I'm already moving.
The shoes go on first. Always the shoes. That was the rule I made three years ago, the night I left. Shoes first, because you can run in bare feet, but you can't run far, and far is the only distance that matters when someone is trying to kill you. I pull on the slacks I draped over the chair before bed. Button the blouse with fingers that aren't shaking, because Charlotte Richardson's fingers don't shake. The woman before Charlotte, her fingers shook all the time. Charlotte's don't.
You're not her. You're not her anymore.
I grab the jacket. Fold it over my arm. Check myself in the bathroom mirror for half a second. Pale face, tight jaw, dark hair pulled back because loose hair is a liability, something to grab, something to drag you by. I learned that lesson the hard way. Once.
The alarm goes off. Thirty seconds after the last gunshot, which means the security system is delayed, which means someone tampered with it, which means this isn't random violence. This is planned. Coordinated. Targeted.
Targeted at you, Charlotte. Don't be stupid. You know it's you.
I press my fingers to the back of my neck. The vertebrae are there. Hard ridges under skin, stacked in a line. Still standing. Still intact.
The room is dark except for the red glow of the clock and the thin bleed of emergency lighting under the door. I can hear boots in the corridor now, running, the compound's guards scrambling. Shouting. Radio chatter, tinny and frantic through the walls. Someone yells a name I don't recognize. Someone else yellsclear.
I stand by the window and wait.
There's nothing else to do. The door is locked from the outside. The window doesn't open more than four inches, which I tested my first night because I test every window in every room I sleep in, a habit I'll carry until the day I die. The walls are solid concrete. I am a woman in a box, and the box is the only thing between me and whatever is happening in that corridor.
If the lock just disengages…
I pull the crushed cigarette from the pack on the nightstand. Three left. Two, now. I put it between my lips and taste the filter. Tobacco and paper. The taste of the first morning I was Charlotte Richardson, standing outside a bus station in a city I'd never visited, smoking a cigarette I'd bummed from a stranger because I didn't have enough money for a pack and a meal, and I chose the meal because surviving has always been about deciding which hunger to feed first.
I close my eyes and count.
The shots have stopped. The alarm is still screaming. I can hear the guards reorganizing, their boots finding rhythm, the chaos settling into protocol. Whatever happened in that corridor is over.
I count the seconds since the last shot. Sixty. Ninety. One-twenty. At two minutes, the adrenaline starts to ebb, and the shaking starts. Not my hands. My hands are fine. My knees. A tremor that runs through my thighs and into my calves and makes my feet buzz inside my shoes. I lock my legs and clench my jaw and breathe through it because I have been here before, in a different room, in a different life, listening to violent sounds through walls and waiting to find out if the violence was going to come through the door.
It didn't come then. He'd put his fist through the drywall instead, and in the morning I'd covered the hole with a picture frame and told the landlord I'd handle the repairs myself.
It didn't come then.
It might come now.
I stand at the window with my unlit cigarette and my jacket over my arm and my shoes on and my spine counted and I wait. I am very good at waiting. It's the one skill that crosses over between my old life and my new one. The ability to stand still in a room and breathe and not panic while the world outside that room does things I can't control.
Minutes pass. Five. Ten. The alarm cuts off. The silence after it is worse than the noise, thick and heavy and full of things I can't see. I hear footsteps in the corridor. Not running anymore. Walking. One set, coming this way.
