Page 64

My palms are sweating on the rail. I keep it between us.

He reaches down with his left hand and starts unbuckling his belt.

My stomach drops through the floor. Not nausea exactly, a cold targeted dread that starts behind my sternum and runs all the way down to my heels. My brain produces, very fast and very clearly, exactly what he intends to do to my body before he uses the knife, and my legs begin shaking before I’ve finished the thought. I press them together. They shake anyway, my knees knocking softly in the silence, and I hate that he can probably see it from where he’s standing.

“Please.” The word tears out of me. “Please, I’m not, I don’t, I don’t have anything you need. Please just go. I’m begging you.”

He gets the belt loose and lets it hang, the buckle swinging free against his hip.

“Please.” My eyes are burning, my throat is burning, and I have spent twenty-six years making sure neither of those things produces visible results, but right now I have no control over any of it. Tears run hot down my face, and I hate every single one. “I know you don’t have to do this. You can walk out right now. Nobody will know. Please. Please don’t do this.”

“Don’t cry,” he says, and his voice isn’t cruel, it’s almost patient, which is worse than cruelty would’ve been. He steps over the fallen door into the bathroom. “We’ll have a good time first, then we’re done. Nice and simple.”

His hand moves to his zipper.

The sound travels through me from my ears to my stomach, a lurch of revulsion so total that it floods my mouth with something bitter. I think about what I don’t know yet, what I’ve only understood in pieces over the past weeks, what I’ve only ever encountered with my own choices behind it. I think about the difference between that and this man’s hand on his zipper in a bathroom I can’t get out of. The thought doesn’t complete itself. My brain won’t let it complete itself. My vision goes very white at the edges.

“Stop.” I can hear myself shaking in my own voice. “Stop, please, please, I don’t want this, please stop.”

“That rail won’t help you,” he says, nodding at it. “Put it down.”

I swing it instead.

Both hands, full rotation, everything I have behind it, aiming for the side of his head. He gets his forearm up and takes it, the impact rattling back through my hands to my shoulders, his face going sharp with pain for one second. He steps back. I swing again, and he follows the arc this time, gets his fist around the rail as it passes and wrenches sideways, the torque tearing the metal through my grip, the skin of both palms dragging raw. The rail clangs off the tile behind him.

He takes one step forward.

I press my back into the wall and put both empty hands up though I know it makes no difference. He’s got the weight, the knife, and he’s not even breathing hard.

His hand closes around my wrist, and he yanks me forward.

The floor comes up fast, my hip catching the tub on the way down, pain cracking white through my left side. Then he’s dragging me across the tile by my leg and my hands grab at everything, the cabinet hinge, the corner of the rug, the smooth floor that gives nothing back. The robe twists under me, the belt knot I tied twice comes undone, and cold air reaches my skin, but the terror that hits me then is a different order of magnitude from every other fear I’ve felt in this house, sharper and more physical than anything I have a name for. My whole body understands what is about to happen to it and reacts before my brain has finished the sentence.

“Stop.” Wet, broken, and barely audible. “Stop, please, please, I don’t want this, please, please don’t.”

He flips me onto my back. Both knees bracket my hips, his hands close around my wrists, and he pins them above my head against the tile. His full weight settles over me. I buck my whole body, twist my wrists until the bones grind in his grip, and I get nothing. He outweighs me by more than I can overcome, and his grip is a locked thing. My shoulders are on the cold tile where the robe has fallen away, and I cannot fix any of it.

I close my eyes.

Not because I’ve stopped fighting. Because I can’t watch his face while this starts, and because behind my eyes I can go somewhere he can’t follow, a kitchen table in my father’s apartment, a chess board between us, my father’s hands flat on the wood, patient, waiting for me to move. I go there. I stay there as hard as I can.

The crying coming out of me isn’t the quiet kind I’ve allowed myself alone at three in the morning since my father died. It’s ugly and loud and full-body, coming from the same place as screaming. I can’t stop it, and I’ve stopped trying. It echoes off the tile, and it doesn’t matter, and I don’t care.

“Please,” I say, into the air above me where his face is and where I won’t look. “Please, somebody, please help me, please.”

His weight vanishes.

Not gradually. Everything at once, his grip releasing, his knees going, his whole mass dropping sideways off me as if every joint in his body gave out simultaneously. He hits the floor and stops moving.

I don’t understand it for a full second. I just lie there with my wrists free, cold air where his body was, and my chest heaving, waiting for it to make sense. Then I roll, yank the robe closed with shaking hands, and get my knees under me.

Volkov is on the floor next to me.

One palm flat against the tile, his arm trembling with the effort of holding his own weight. His other hand presses against his left side, and the shirt beneath it is soaked through, a dark, wet spread still moving outward, still growing, running into his waistband. The broken chair leg stands upright from the man’s back. Volkov’s face is the color of old concrete, and his jaw is locked so tight I can see the muscle working in his cheek.

He dragged himself up here with a knife in his side. He’s been on this floor since before I heard boots on the stairs. He put a chair leg through a man while bleeding out and couldn’t get back up.

I cross the tile on my knees and get both hands over his, pressing down hard on his side. His blood comes up through my fingers, and I push harder, locking my elbows, dropping my full weight into it.