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The wound is deep, I already know that, the kind of deep that means something vital could’ve gotten touched on the way through. Every breath pulls at it, a wet dragging wrongness underneath the ribs. My shirt is stuck to my side, and the floor is cold under my palms. I press harder against the wound and feel the blood push through my fingers.

I drag my hand across the floor, find the broken chair leg, and close my fist around it. Not a weapon from down here, and I know that. But I hold it anyway.

The stairs creak.

One. He’s not rushing.

I get my hand onto the baseboard, grip it, and pull. One knee comes up. The floor tilts hard, but I hold the knee there and breathe through my nose, feeling the blood running down into my waistband.

Two. Three.

Lavro used to say I didn’t know how to stay down. Said it after a brawl outside a bar in Coney Island, seventeen years old, blood in my mouth and somebody else’s tooth on the pavement. He was right then, and I’ve been proving him right ever since. I think about that now, kneeling on my own floor with a knife wound in my side. I get my foot flat against the hardwood again.

Four. Five.

My leg shakes as I try to push up. The wound screams. I push anyway, my hand white-knuckled on the baseboard. I get halfway up before the tearing sensation spreads across my whole left side and takes my leg out. I go back down onto one knee with my forehead nearly touching the wall.

Six. Seven. Eight.

My head drops forward. Both hands are coated now, the floor under me dark, my shirt soaked through and heavy. I breathe in through my nose, out through my teeth, and tell my legs to move. Lavro’s voice is in my head, saying, "You don’t know how to stay down." I need that to be true right now more than I’ve needed anything in a long time.

Nine.

The footsteps stop.

He’s at her door.

I get my foot under me, and push.

30

Evelina

The knob rattles, hard enough that the whole door shudders in its frame. Then silence.

“Volkov?” I press my ear against the door. “Volkov, if that’s you, say something.”

I’ve backed myself against the tub, which is the farthest point from the door in a room that isn’t large, and I’m holding the bathrobe I found hanging on the door closed at my chest with both hands because my hands need to be doing something or I’ll lose my mind. The knot I tied in the belt is the only thing standing between me and the cold air of this bathroom, so I check it twice and try to breathe.

He wouldn’t rattle the knob and say nothing. If it were him, he’d say something crude and self-satisfied, or he’d tell me to open the door. He wouldn’t stand in silence on the other side and rattle.

I push off the tub and cross to the towel rail bolted to the left wall. My fingers test the left bracket. It’s anchored in two points, thick steel, and I start working the screw loose with my thumb, pressing and rotating, feeling it shift in the plaster.

The door crashes.

The sound swallows the bathroom whole, a full-body impact that sends the frame jumping in the wall, and I cry out, which I immediately despise, because I am not someone who makes involuntary sounds when frightened and apparently that has a limit and I have just found it. My back finds the wall. I yank the rail, both hands, and feel the left bracket give another full turn.

Silence.

Then it crashes again, and this time I hear the wood telling me how much longer it has, a small splintering at the latch, a hairline giving up its integrity. I wrench the left bracket the rest of the way free and pull until the right bracket shears out of the plaster and the whole rail comes into my hands. Four feet of steel. I hold it across my body and face the door.

The third impact breaks it.

The latch gives, the door lists inward, the right hinge going last with a muffled crack, and the whole thing falls against the vanity cabinet and sits there at an angle, and through the gap is a man I’ve never seen.

He fills the doorframe. Not tall, but wide through the shoulders. His hands are dark with dried blood. He has a knife in his right fist, fixed blade, the edge catching the hallway light, and he’s breathing from the work of the door, but his face is at ease. He takes in the bathroom, the empty bracket on the wall, my bare feet on the tile, and then his eyes move over the robe slowly, and he smiles.

“Well.” He draws the word out long. “If I’d known you’d be waiting in that kind of get-up, I’d have knocked an hour ago.”