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He turns. Whatever he sees on my face makes him cross the room without another word, his hands coming up to my face before he’s fully in front of me, his palms warm against my jaw, his thumbs pressing into my cheekbones.

“I need you in that bathroom,” he says. “I can’t do what I need to do out there if I’m thinking about you being in this room with an unlocked door.”

“Then come back fast,” I say. My voice comes out steadier than I have any right to.

His jaw tightens. Three more shots outside, closer now. His hands press harder against my face for half a second like the sound pulled at him, and I’m what he’s holding onto instead of letting it.

“Go,” he says.

“Promise me first.”

He goes still.

“Say it,” I say. “Promise me you’re coming back.”

His jaw tightens at the corners, his mouth pressing flat, working through something he didn’t expect to be asked. He’s looking at me like the question got somewhere under his ribs before he had a chance to close the door on it.

“Volkov.” I bring my hands up and wrap them around his wrists, holding his hands against my face. My fingers find his pulse point and his heart is already running fast. “I know what you can do. I know you’ve walked out of worse than whatever is happening on the other side of that door. I’m not asking you to lie to me, I’m asking you to mean it, so say it.”

He tilts my face up. The alarm is still going, there are men with guns somewhere in this house, but he leans closer and kisses me.

Not the way it usually starts between us, not running on heat or argument or the friction of two people who want each other and won’t say so. This is his mouth on mine and his hands holding my face and the full weight of everything neither of us has said yet or is even willing to admit it, pressed into one kiss in a dark bedroom while Brooklyn comes apart outside the window. I grip his wrists and kiss him back. The sheet slips off one shoulder, but I don’t move to fix it.

He pulls back a fraction. His forehead comes down to mine.

“I’m coming back,” he promises. “I’m coming back to you. That’s a promise.”

“Okay,” I breathe.

His thumbs drag across my cheekbones, then he steps back, and the warmth of his hands leaves my face. He’s through the door before I’ve pulled my next breath in.

I lock the bathroom door.

The tile is cold under my feet, and I sit down against the tub with the sheet pulled tight around my shoulders because standing feels like it requires more than I currently have. The alarm is still going, that low relentless pulse through the walls. I press my back against the porcelain, pull my knees up to my chest, and listen.

The shots come in clusters. Three, then a gap, then four, then two more somewhere further away. Men shouting in Russian, Marka’s voice in there somewhere cutting through the rest, and then a crash from the east side of the house that sends a vibration through the floor under me. I press my back harder against the tub and count, the way my father taught me to count anything that was trying to frighten me. One through ten, start again, keep going until the fear has something to measure itself against.

I count the shots now. Six. A gap. Three. A longer gap. Two.

Then nothing.

The alarm keeps going. I count seconds instead, one through sixty, then again, my back cold from the tub, the tile hard under me. I’m sitting naked under a bedsheet in a locked bathroom, but the thing running loudest through my head isn’t the shots or the shouting or the crash from the east wall. It’s his forehead against mine and the two words he put at the end of the promise.

To you.

I press my palms against the tile, breathe through my nose, and think about what I know. Eight men on the perimeter. Two on the stairs. They know this house, its blind spots, its weak points, better than anyone who just broke into it. Volkov’s been in worse rooms than this one, walked out of all of them, has the scars to prove which ones came close. I run through all of that, and my pulse stays off anyway because none of it addresses the crash from the east wall or whether it was one of ours.

I’ve been a lawyer for three years. I’ve built cases out of nothing, argued in front of judges who’d already made up their minds, talked my way through rooms full of men who thought my presence was decorative. I have never once sat on a bathroom floor afraid for someone else the way I’m afraid right now, and I don’t know what to do with it.

More shots. Further away now, two in quick succession, then one more, and then a sound that might be a door going in somewhere on the ground floor, wood splintering, and then voices again, faster and louder than before. I grip the sheet with both fists, press my back harder against the tub, and breathe.

My father used to say that the only thing fear is useful for is information. Feel it, read it, use what it’s telling you, then put it down. He said it across a chess board, across legal briefs, across every difficult thing he ever prepared me for, and he was right about most things, so I try it now.

I feel it. My hands are shaking, and my pulse is in my ears, and I’m cold all the way through despite the sheet. That’s the fear. What it’s telling me is that I care whether he comes back, that I care in a way that has nothing to do with the drive or the name or any of the reasons I walked through his gate in the first place, and that information is the most frightening thing in this room by a considerable distance.

Another crash, closer. Footsteps running, heavy and fast, and then two more shots that hit somewhere directly below me. I flinch hard against the tub, my knees drawing up tighter, the sheet twisting in my fists.

Then shouting, one voice I know, and the shots stop.