His arm shifts. Just slightly. The sleeve of his jacket rides up at the wrist.
Black ink. Heavy lines. Two serpent heads on one coiled body, facing outward in opposite directions.
What is that?—
Three words to the room. Low and unhurried.
Kill the girl.
I run.
I am crying and running at the same time, not clean running, not adrenaline-sharp the way it is in films, just hysterical and stumbling and sobbing so hard I can barely see the kitchen doorway in front of me.
A lamp crashes behind me.
Someone shouts.
I hit the kitchen wall with my shoulder and bounce off it and find the service door by memory alone because my vision is completely gone—tears and dark and panic.
The bolt.
The bolt that always sticks.
“No, no no no—” I wrench it with both hands, sobbing hard when it doesn’t move.
I wrench again and it gives so suddenly I nearly fall through the door into the stairwell.
Cold air.
Concrete.
Down.
I scream on the second floor landing.
Just once, just a broken, involuntary thing that tears itself out of me when I hear the door slam open above and boots hit the top stair, and then I swallow it and keep going—out into the alley.
January’s air hits me like a wall.
I run anyway.
No coat.
No shoes, just soaked socks slapping against wet concrete, still crying, still making these sounds I can’t control, wailing and running through the narrow alley behind the building with the cold tearing into my lungs and my legs burning and the drive locked so tight in my fist that the casing cracks slightly at the corner.
Behind me, shouts. Footsteps.
Closer than I need them to be.
I cut left off the alley, then right into the smaller streets, the ones that knot up through the old district.
Papa walks me through these streets on Sunday mornings.
Look where you’re going, Lenochka. Not at your feet. Always at where you’re going.
I look where I am going.
I run, weeping because that’s all I could do, and somewhere in the third block the footsteps behind me fall away and I don’t let myself slow down until I hit the underpass beneath the rail bridge and throw myself behind the first concrete column and fold completely in half.
