Knife.
I'm moving before the thought completes. Four strides. The crowd parts without knowing why. My hand closes around Sergei's wrist and I rotate. Not a clean break. A grinding separation of bone and tendon that I feel through his skin, the joint giving way with a sound like a branch snapping underwater. The knife clatters to the marble. Small. Surgical. The kind designed to slip between ribs.
Sergei's mouth opens. I cover it with my palm before the scream escapes. Lex is beside me. Between us we walk Sergei toward the back corridor. Smooth. Unhurried. Two men helping a friend who's had too much. The party continues. No one notices. That's the skill.
The back room. Door closed. Lex outside.
Sergei is on his knees. The wrist hangs at an angle that says it will never work properly again. His face is gray. Sweat beads along his hairline.
I roll my sleeves. One fold. Two. Methodical. The ritual of a man who keeps blood off his cuffs because dry cleaning is expensive and killing is frequent.
"You touched my wife."
I hit him. Not the jaw. The solar plexus. The punch that collapses the diaphragm and makes the body forget how to breathe. He folds.
"You held a knife to my wife."
The second blow splits his lip. Blood sprays across the concrete floor in a pattern I've seen a hundred times and never tire of.
"You put hands on what's mine."
He sags. Wheezes. Tries to speak through the blood filling his mouth. "Reznikov will — he'll send more —"
"Let him. I'll do this every time. To every man. Until Viktor runs out of men or runs out of courage. Tell me, Sergei. When he gave you the knife, did he mention what I did to the last man who threatened her?"
Silence. The particular silence of a man understanding that he was sent to die. That Viktor didn't expect him to succeed. That he was a message, not an assassin.
I look at Siobhan. She's in the doorway. Black dress, bare shoulders, the collarbone I've kissed a hundred times exposed in the fluorescent light of a back room. She could leave. The hallway is behind her. The party is behind her. The world where men don't bleed on concrete floors is three steps away.
"Turn away if you need to."
"No."
The word is quiet and absolute. The word she used in the kitchen after the warehouse. The same word she'll use every time I ask. The answer that means:I see you. I see what you are. I'm here anyway.
I draw the knife. Sergei's knife. The blade that was pressed against my wife's ribs sixty seconds ago. There's a symmetry to this that satisfies a part of me I don't examine closely.
I cut his throat. Not fast. A controlled line drawn from left to right with the deliberation of a man signing a document. The blade parts skin and then deeper. Sergei's eyes go wide. His hands come up to his neck. The blood is immediate and total. He makes a wet sound. Then quiet.
I stand. The blood is everywhere. My hands. My shirt. A spray across my jaw that I can feel cooling on my skin.
I look at my wife.
"Are you afraid of me?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because you'd never hurt me. And anyone who tries won't live to try twice."
I cross to her. Blood on my hands, my shirt, my jaw. She doesn't step back. Doesn't flinch. She stands in the doorway in her black dress and watches me come with an expression I've been trying to read since the first night I saw her and I finally understand it. It's not fear. It's not horror. It's not even acceptance.
It's…hunger.
I kiss her.
I don't ask. My hand cups her face. The blood on my fingers smears across her cheekbone and my palm settles against her jaw and my mouth finds hers and I take. For the first time since our wedding kiss, I don't give her time to decide. I don't step back. I don't check. I kiss her because if I don't kiss her rightnow, I will come apart and the only thing holding me together is her mouth against mine and the taste of her underneath the copper.