"Among other things." He selects a bandage from the kit, the right size, and applies it with the same precision he applies to everything, smoothing the edges down. "Done."
Evie looks at her knee. Then she looks at him. "You're good at that."
"I've had practice," he says.
"On yourself or on other people?"
He looks at her, and the thing at the edge of his expression does it again — that almost-something that is warmer than what his face usually allows.
"Both," he says.
She nods, satisfied, in the way she nods when she's received an honest answer and has filed it accordingly. She leans back against her pillow, pulls the blanket up, and looks at me in the doorway with the specific eyes she has for when she's decided something about a situation that she's not going to say out loud.
"I'm actually pretty tired," she says. "From being at school this morning. It was exhausting."
"You were only there for three hours," I protested.
"Three very exhausting hours," she says. "I think I'm going to sleep for a while."
Victor closes the first aid kit and stands, and I can see in the deliberate unhurry of it that he is giving me the chance to say something to Evie, to do whatever the ritual is that happens when she goes to sleep, without making it a thing. He moves to the doorway and I move to her bed and I pull the blanket up the last inch and look at her face — the pale of it, the dark eyes, the specific quality of a twelve-year-old who is tired and slightly unwell and has found herself in a situation she is actively choosing not to ask questions about yet, because she has decided to trust me with it.
"Sleep," I say.
She closes her eyes, and I watch her for a moment. Then I turn off her lamp — the one on the other side of the bed — and pull her door most of the way closed and go back to the living room where Victor is standing with his hands in his pockets looking at the camera in the corner by the front door with an expression of someone now viewing an object from a different angle.
"She's fine," I say.
He turns. "You aren’t."
"I'm fine now."
"You were shaking in the bathroom," he says. Not an accusation. Just a fact, stated the way he states everything, because he has been paying attention, and he doesn't pretend he hasn't.
"I know," I say. "That's what happens after — the shaking comes after."
I look at the kitchen, look around my apartment. My small, old, insufficient apartment with its radiator that complains about winter, its bathroom window tape that I replace every two weeks, and its camera feeds.
"I've been operating on high alert for a long time," I say. " When it gets tripped, my nervous system has opinions."
"It's allowed to," he says.
I look at him. He is leaning against my bookshelf with his arms folded and his jacket on and the first aid kit on the counter behind him, where he set it when he came out, and he looks — he looks like someone who belongs in the room, which has always been the thing that unsettles me most about him.
Not the danger, not the organization, not the gun I know he carries and has never produced in my presence. The way he fits into the space around me like he was designed for it, like the apartment and Evie and the first aid kit and the lamp on the floor are all simply circumstances he has assessed and adapted to with the same total competence he brings to everything else.
His violence has never scared me. I grew up around violence. I know what it looks like and how it moves and what it costs, and Victor's version of it is particular and controlled and in the time I have known him, has never once been pointed anywhere near Evie or me. But this — the way he sat on the edge of her bed and told her it would sting and smoothed the bandage down with those hands — this is the thing that gets in under my defenses and stays there, and I don't know what to do with it.
"You should go," I say.
He doesn't move. "I'm going to tell you something first."
"Victor—"
"The man in the blue coat," he says. "He was Koshkin's. Someone pointed them at you, and I know who, I am handling it. You don't need to know the details right now. What you need to know is that I am between you and whatever is coming, and I am going to stay between you and it, and you are not running again."
He looks at me steadily. "Both of you. I am telling you so you stop thinking about calculating an exit strategy. You don’t need it this time."
I look at him for a long moment. The very idea of not having an exit strategy scares me; he’s asking me to trust him on a level that I’ve never trusted anyone. Besides Evie, that is.
