“Come back,” she says.
Notbe careful.Notplease don’t.Just:come back.Like it’s an instruction. Like she’s telling me what she expects. I want to grab her, kiss her, take her one more time. I can't.
“Stay inside,” I say.
I close the door and wait until the lock engages.
I turn toward the hallway, and the man who washed her curls and told her the truth in the dark steps aside for the monster.
7
Laura
The panic room is ten paces wide and twelve paces long. I mark my footsteps like a tiger desperately caught in a cage. It smells like concrete, recycled air, and my nervous perspiration. When walking wears on my frayed control, I sit on the narrow bed along the wall and wait. The phone is on the shelf where he said it would be. Single button.Rafail. I don’t touch it. I put my hands in my lap, breathe, and listen. Maxim told me to stay, and I am still, at my absolute core, a woman who keeps her word.
The first sound comes seven minutes in.
I know it’s seven minutes because I’m counting. Seconds, then groups of ten, then minutes. It’s something to do with my hands. The first sound is muffled — the thick walls doing their job — but I know what it is. I’ve watched enough films, I’ve grown up in a world with news and history and the basic vocabulary of violence. I know what a gunshot sounds like through eight inches of reinforced concrete.
One.
Then silence.
Then sounds that are harder to name. Harder to count. The rhythm of a man who is very good at something terrible, working methodically, without urgency. It goes on longer than I expect. Longer than one sound requires. By the time the quiet comes — the full, complete, total quiet that is different from the silence between sounds — my hands are locked together in my lap and I am breathing through my nose in the deliberate, careful way of someone managing a body that wants to do something else.
I count the quiet.
Four minutes. Five.
Six.
The lock disengages.
He fills the doorway.
He’s not injured — I clock that first, the animal priority of it, the relief that comes before anything else. He’s upright. He’s whole. He’s looking at me with those dark, steady eyes and the composure that has never once wavered in my presence—
He’s covered in blood.
His hands. His forearms where his sleeves are rolled. A streak across his jaw. The front of his shirt, dark and wet in a way my mind names before I let it.
It’s not his. He is completely, composedly, efficiently fine, and the blood is not his.
“You’re okay,” he says. Not a question. Reading me.
“Yes.” My voice comes out steady. I’m proud of that. “Are you—”
“Fine.” He steps aside from the door. “It’s handled.”
I stand. My legs are steady. I am steady. I am a woman who has spent forty-five minutes in a concrete room listening to the sounds of a man I—
I make it to the hallway bathroom.
I don’t make it further than that.
The tile is cold against my knees. My hands grip the edge of the bowl and I am thoroughly, completely sick, and the humiliation of it would be worse except I don’t have the capacity for humiliation right now. My body has made a decision the same way it made the decision in a hotel corridor a year ago — without consulting me, past the point where consulting is useful.
He’s behind me in the doorway. I don’t turn around. I can’t turn around yet. I press my forehead to the cool porcelain edge and breathe and tell myself this will pass, and it does — it does pass, the way things always pass, and I rinse my mouth and sit back on my heels and finally look up.
