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I turn back to the man. “If you go near her again, I will kill you.” I step closer, and he presses back into the wall. “I won’t threaten you twice. I won’t go to the police. I won’t send a lawyer. I will find you, I will cut you open, and I will put what is left of you somewhere no one will ever dig deep enough to find.”

He swallows. Blood has stained his teeth. “You can’t⁠—”

“I can.”

He looks past me to Elara, and I see the second he considers saying something else.

I take another step. He shuts his mouth.

“Elara,” I say without looking away from him. “Come.”

She comes because my hand’s still around hers, and because she is shaking too hard to argue, and because whatever he did to her before I arrived has left her unable to pretend she is fine.

Sergei meets us at the front steps. His eyes go to Elara first, then to the side of the building, then to my bloody hand. “Alive?”

“For now.”

He nods once. Elara’s fingers tighten around mine. I feel it.

“Leave him,” I say.

Sergei looks at me.

“He follows, he dies.”

That’s enough.

Kirill comes out a moment later with Anya beside him. She is holding a little return gift bag and looking confused, her eyes moving from my face to Elara wrapped in my coat.

“Papa?”

“We are going home.”

“Did something happen?”

“No,” Elara says too quickly.

Anya looks at her. “Elara?”

“I’m okay, sweetheart.”

She’s not.

Anya knows it. I know it. Kirill definitely knows it, because his eyes drop to her wrist and stay there for one second before his face turns hard.

Mrs. Harrington appears behind them, worried and polite. “Is everything all right?”

“Yes,” I say.

No one argues.

I help Anya into the car first, then Elara. She sits beside Anya, still wearing my coat, staring down at her hands. I sit opposite them because there is no way I can sit beside her right now without touching her, and I don’t know if touching her will help or make this worse.

Kirill drives. No one speaks for several minutes.

Anya holds Elara’s hand. Elara lets her.

I look at the red marks around Elara’s wrist and think about the fact that I stopped because she asked me to. If she had not, I would still be there.