The knife block is in the kitchen, and I cross the apartment in four steps. However, an arm hooks around my waist before I reach it and hauls me backward. I throw my elbow back hard and feel it connect. He swears, and his grip drops. I lunge forward and close my hand around the handle and spin.
He stops.
I’m breathing hard. He’s not breathing hard at all.
“Don’t,” I say.
There are two of them in the apartment now. The second one has closed the door. They look at the knife and then ateach other, and the look that passes between them tells me everything.
“Put that down,” the first one says, patient in the way that people are patient when they’ve already decided how something is going to end. “Mr. Kozlov wants to talk to you, that’s all. You come quietly, no one gets hurt.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you.”
He moves. I slash with my good hand and catch his forearm. He swears for real this time, and then his fist hits the side of my face, and the kitchen tilts. The knife goes somewhere. The second man grabs both my arms from behind. I wrench against him, but the wrapped wrist takes the strain, and the pain is so sudden and so total that I can’t breathe around it.
He knows. He feels me go still, and he knows.
He twists it.
The sound that comes out of me is not something I choose to make. It whites everything out for a second, long enough for the first man to get hold of my collar and shove me hard into the wall. My head connects with the plaster. The room tips sideways.
I hit the floor.
Get up. My mother’s voice, clear as a bell. Get up right now.
I try. I push onto my hand, but my arm shakes and gives out. One of them drags me upright by the back of my shirt, and I swing with my left and miss completely. His knee drives into my stomach, and all the air leaves me at once. I just. Stop. Fighting.
The thought surfaces, very calm, very clear: This is how it ends.
A boot connects with my ribs. My vision goes white. I stop trying to track what’s happening and just try to breathe, just that, just one breath, and then the next one, and my face is against the floor and it’s cold, and that’s the only thing I can hold on to. The cold floor. My own breathing. Getting smaller and farther away.
I’m going to die in this apartment. Brooke will find me. I think of that, and I almost want to laugh because of all the things to think about right now.
My ears are ringing. The blows keep coming.
Then, from somewhere I can’t place, there is a sound.
Not a voice. Not a crash.
A growl.
Low and continuous and wrong in a way I have no category for, the kind of sound that reaches into the base of my skull and bypasses thought entirely.
Then the weight on me is gone. Both of them are just gone, and I hear the impact of bodies hitting walls and something breaking and a sound from one of the men that I have never heard a person make before.
Then nothing.
Chapter Eleven
Grayson
I keep trying to remember if she was angry.
When I drove her home the next morning, all she did was curl up in the passenger seat and beg me not to breathe so loudly. I haven’t heard a word from her about the dress. I know it was delivered to her, but she hasn’t answered my messages either.
Was she pissed off that I sent the dress? She seemed pretty upset that she ruined it since it belonged to her friend. I thought I was being helpful. But why skip out on the team sessions? She needs the money. I really can’t see her being so irresponsible. Maybe that’s why I’m driving up here. It’s been a week now. Irritation has morphed into worry.
If I overstepped, she should just come and yell at me. Why is she avoiding me like this?
