"Is he dangerous?"
The honest answer is yes. The honest answer is that he is the most dangerous thing that has come near us in three years, more dangerous than the Koshkins looking for us, because at least I know what the Koshkins want from us — we are property, we are something that was taken, they want us back out of pride rather than anything that resembles feeling. Nikita, however, is a different category entirely, and the note in my pocket with my real name on it is evidence that he is a category I don't have a protocol for.
"I'm handling it," I say.
She looks at me for a long, serious moment. Then she nods, the small nod of someone who has decided to trust a decision they can't see the whole of yet. "Okay," she says.
I lean down and kiss her forehead. She doesn't pull away, which means she needed it, which means she's more worried than she's letting on, which means we are two people sitting in this small apartment managing our fear quietly so the other one doesn't have to carry it, and if there's a more accurate description of us than that, I haven't found it.
"I love you," I say.
"Love you too," she says. "Both locks tonight."
"Both locks," I confirm.
I stand up. Move to the door. Turn the light off.
"Alex." Her voice is quiet in the dark.
"Yeah?"
"Whatever it is." A pause. "We've gotten through worse."
I stand in her doorway for a moment and look at the shape of her in the dark, twelve years old, not mine by blood or paperwork or any measure the world would accept, mine by three years of bus routes and shelter rooms and copied keys and promises kept against uncertain futures.
"Yeah," I say. "We have."
I pull her door almost closed, stand in the hallway, put my hand in my jacket pocket, and feel the folded note between my fingers.
Moya Sasha.
He knows my name. He knows my door. He knows about Evie, or knows enough, which is the same thing, and I am standing in my hallway at eight forty-five in the evening trying to decide if the most dangerous man I've met in three years is a threat I needto run from or a complication I need to manage, and the problem — the real problem, the one I've been not-thinking about since an alley behind a café this afternoon — is that some part of me doesn't want to do either.
Some part of me wants to open the door across the hall and tell him he knows my name wrong.
It's Yarina, I would say. Not Alexandra. Yarina Koshkin, twenty-seven years old, formerly of a world not so different from yours, currently of apartment 4C with a child who isn't mine and a life built from nothing and a promise I intend to keep.
I pull up the camera feeds on my phone instead. Front door, hallway, Evie's room. I check them in that order, the way I always do, the same ritual, the same sequence, and then I get to the hallway feed, and I stop.
The door to 4D is open.
Not wide — just an inch, maybe two, the specific amount that a door is open when someone on the other side of it is standing close and not bothering to hide that they are. The hallway is dark, and the gap in the door is darker, and I cannot see anything through it, but I don't need to see anything through it because I can feel it the same way I could feel eyes on me in the grocery store this morning and the morning before that.
He's there.
He's been there this whole time, on the other side of that door, and he knows I'm looking at the feed right now, and he knows I can see the door, and he left it open anyway — not by accident, not through carelessness, because this man does not do anything by accident or through carelessness. He left it open because he wanted me to know.
My phone screen goes dark in my hand.
I stand in my hallway in the dark, and I look at my front door, and I think about what is six feet away from it, and I think aboutMoya Sashain precise unhurried handwriting, and I think about an alley and a hand at my waist and a mouth on my neck and the specific thing he said when he pulled back.
It makes it very difficult to resist ruining you completely.
I check both locks. Then the doorknob. Then I go to bed and lie in the dark and stare at the ceiling and listen, without meaning to, for any sound from across the hall.
I don't hear anything.
That's almost worse.
