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Another woman turns as if to speak to me, but whatever she sees on my face makes her close her mouth again.

I leave the dining room, pass the coats piled on the hallway bench, and head toward the front door. I tell myself I am checking on her because she left the party after a security breach, not because I want to apologize. That excuse lasts until I reach the steps outside.

Then I hear Elara’s voice from the side of the townhouse, low and strained.

Elara is backed against the brick wall, one hand twisted in a man’s grip while she tries to pull away from him. He’s standing too close, his body angled in a way that blocks her from the street, and whatever he has been saying stops the second he sees me.

For half a second, I take in the scene.

His hand on her wrist. Her face pale. The way she’s trying not to panic and failing.

Then I stop thinking.

I grab him by the back of his coat and rip him away from her.

He stumbles sideways, slamming into the opposite wall hard enough that his shoulder hits first and his head follows. He grunts, catches himself badly, then turns toward me with his mouth already open.

“What the fuck⁠—”

I hit him before he finishes.

His head snaps to the side. He drops to one knee, but I catch the front of his coat before he can fall properly and drive him back against the wall. The second punch lands against his mouth. The third catches his cheekbone. He tries to shove me off, and that makes something mean and simple move through me because now he is fighting back, now I don’t have to think about restraint, now I can give my hands something to do with all the rage that had nowhere to go five minutes ago.

“What the fuck!” he shouts again, voice breaking around the blood in his mouth.

I hit him in the stomach.

He folds forward with a choking sound, and I drive my knee up hard enough that his body jerks against me.

“Nikolai!” Elara screams.

I hear it the way I hear noise from another room. Present, but not enough to matter.

The man tries to swing. It’s clumsy. Desperate. I catch his arm, twist it behind him, and slam him face-first into the wall. His cheek scrapes against the brick. He curses, then cries out when I push his arm higher.

“You touch her again,” I say close to his ear, “and I break this off.”

“Nikolai, stop!”

This time, her voice comes closer.

I turn my head enough to see her.

She’s standing a few feet away with both arms wrapped around herself, her fingers pressed into the sleeves of her blouse, her eyes wide and fixed on the man in front of me. Her wrist is red where he grabbed her. Not bruised yet, but it will be.

I look at that mark, and my grip tightens.

The man screams.

Elara takes one step toward me. “Please,” she says. “Please, let him go.”

That stops me. Not his pain. Not the fact that we are outside a house full of children. Not the possibility of witnesses.

Her voice.

I release him.

He drops against the wall and slides halfway down before catching himself. For a few seconds, he stays bent over, coughing, one hand pressed to his mouth. Blood runs between his fingers and drips onto his shirt. His lip is split open, his nose is bleeding, and swelling is already rising under one eye. A dark bruise spreads along the side of his jaw where my first punch landed.