"Sit," he said. Not unkindly. He had already fished my keys back out from beneath the bumper, and he made no move to return them, which I noticed and did not fight. He steered me with two fingers at my elbow, the lightest contact a person can make and still call it steering, toward a low black car waiting at the foot of the ramp that I had not heard pull in. He opened the passenger door. "Sit, before you fall. You are about ten seconds from it, and I would rather not catch you twice in one night."
I sat. He was right about that as well. The shaking came all at once, late and total, my body finally opening the message my brain had spent a week refusing to sign for, and I jammed my hands flat between my knees and could not make them go still.
He came around and folded into the seat beside me, and he did not start the engine and did not rush to fill the quiet, which I was beginning to understand was a thing he did on purpose,this awful patience, this willingness to let a silence run until somebody else cracked it. I cracked it.
"The police are going to want a statement."
"They are already on their way. I called them before I crossed the garage." He glanced at the man still curled on the concrete. "They will find a stranger with drugs and a knife and a story no one believes, and they will be glad of it, because it is a simple night for them and not a real one. I did not mark him anywhere that shows. You were never close to him. You will tell them a man you have never seen frightened you, and someone passing by stepped in. All of that is even true."
"You worked out my alibi with his blood still on your knuckles."
"I think of one thing." He said it the way another man might mention the time. "I have been thinking of one thing for two weeks."
"And what does that buy me, exactly?" I asked. "Help, from someone like you. Walk me through it, because I've seen this movie and it ends with a girl who isn't allowed to leave her own house."
"It buys you alive and inconvenienced," he said. "Men near your door you will pretend to resent. A car that is not yours, with someone in it who can drive it through a wall if the night calls for it. You keep your job. Your friends. Your terrible apartment. You lose only the part where you face this alone." He paused. "That was the part that was going to bury you."
I looked at him then. At the blood drying on his knuckles that he had not bothered to wipe off himself. At the coat. At the terrible stillness of him that had stopped frightening me somewhere in the last five minutes and started doing something else entirely, something I did not have the strength to look at directly tonight.
I thought about my apartment and its useless new locks. About my car, which would never again be only mine. About Aaron asking me to text him, and Deysi making me swear on both bolts, and a whole city of decent people telling me to be careful, as though careful were something you could simply decide to be. Not one of them could stand between me and a pair of hands in the dark. This man had, twice now, without being asked, and then had stood there and asked me for nothing.
Pride, it turns out, is a luxury. So is sleep. I was fresh out of both.
"Okay." My voice did something humiliating on the word, and for once I let it. "Fine. Help me. But I have rules."
The corner of his mouth moved, the same near-miss of a smile I had caught through the car window days before, the one that made him look briefly like a man instead of a warning.
"So do I," he said.
6
KOLYA
The apartment I offered her was the best one we keep, which is to say it had three ways out, none of them obvious, a door that would hold against anything short of an argument with God, and windows that turned bullets into disappointments. I had spent the morning making certain of every inch of it. I stood in the middle of it now and watched her decline to be impressed, which was a novel experience for me, because the place usually does the convincing on its own.
"It's nice," she said, in the voice people save for a relative's ugly baby. "It's also not mine."
"It is safe. Everything else about it is negotiable. That is not."
"It's a box with good locks. I already have one of those, and look how that's going for me." She walked the length of the room, opening a closet, testing a faucet, the way a woman inspects a thing she has already decided to refuse. "And the windows that actually open?"
"None of them. That is rather the point."
"Then it's a very expensive jail, and I'm not the one who did anything wrong."
She crossed to the window that would not open and laid her palm flat to the glass, the way you test a thing you do not trust. "How many people have you kept in here?"
"Enough."
"And where are they now?"
"Alive," I said. "Which was the assignment."
I did not mention the compound. The compound was the real answer, walls and distance and forty armed men who would treat her like the last clean thing in the world, and I had learned inside of two minutes that the word would end the conversation before I could win it. So I came at it from the side.
"There is another option. A house beyond the city. People who would see to it that nothing ever reached you."
"Beyond the city." She turned the phrase over and laughed, not cruelly. "You want to lock me in a castle and leave a dragon on the step. No. I have a job, Kolya. I have patients with my name on their charts in the morning. I have a grandmother who calls at six to be sure I ate. I am not going to vanish into whatever your life is and become a woman who waits at a window for permission to exist."
