This man kills people.
I knew that. But seeing the gun in his hand, seeing the way he moves through the apartment checking windows and angles and sightlines with the practiced efficiency of someone who has done this before, turns the abstract into something real and heavy and impossible to unfeel.
"Dominik, what's happening?"
He's at the window, standing to the side of it, peering through the edge of the curtain at the street below.
"Someone is coming," he says. "It's being handled. You're safe."
"Someone is cominghere?"
He looks at me, and the look is so steady and certain that it almost works. It almost convinces me that whatever is happening, he has it under control.
"No one is getting into this apartment," he says. "But I need you to do something for me."
"What?"
"Go to the bathroom. The guest bathroom, not the one in your room. Get in the tub. Stay below the rim. Don't come out until I come for you."
"Dominik--"
"Now, Wren."
I fight the urge to stay beside him, wondering where it even came from, and go.
The guest bathroom is in the interior of the apartment, no windows. The tub is a deep freestanding soaker in white porcelain, and I climb in fully clothed and pull my knees to my chest and sit there in his cashmere sweater in a dry bathtub and try to understand what is happening to my life.
Nothing happens for a while. Long enough that my heartbeat starts to slow, long enough that I begin to feel ridiculous sitting in a bathtub in the middle of the afternoon, long enough that I almost climb out.
Then the first gunshot cracks through the apartment and the world splits open.
It's not like television. It's not a clean, contained pop. It's a physical force that I feel in my teeth and my sternum and the base of my skull, and it's followed by another, and another, and then a sound that isn't a gunshot at all, a heavy, wet, crunching impact that I will hear in my nightmares for the rest of my life.
Shouting. In Russian. Multiple voices. The sound of furniture breaking, something heavy hitting the floor, glass shattering. Another gunshot, closer this time, so close that the bathroom door vibrates in its frame.
I press my hands over my ears and push my face into my knees and I am making a sound, a thin, high, continuous sound that I don't recognize as my own voice. It's the sound a small animal makes when the trap has already sprung and the only option left is to wait.
It goes on forever.
Then silence.
Silence so complete it roars. The only sound is the ringing in my ears and my own ragged breathing.
Footsteps. Coming down the hallway.
The bathroom door opens.
Dominik is standing in the doorway, and he is covered in blood.
Not just splattered. Covered. His white shirt is soaked through, the fabric clinging to his chest and stomach in a way that makes it impossible to tell where the blood ends and the cotton begins. His hands are red to the wrists. There's a spray pattern across his face, fine droplets that arc from his jaw to his hairline, and his eyes are burning through it, pale and bright and absolutely, terrifyingly alive.
He looks like a painting. He looks like a nightmare. He looks like the thing that mothers warn their daughters about, the thingthat lurks in the dark spaces between streetlights, and he is looking at me with an expression that contains not one atom of remorse.
He steps toward the tub and I press back against the porcelain and a sound comes out of me that I don't authorize. A whimper. Small and pathetic and involuntary.
He stops.
His expression shifts. The burning intensity dims by a single degree, and he looks at me. A girl in an oversized sweater curled in a dry bathtub with her hands over her ears and tears streaming down her face and her whole body shaking so hard her teeth are clacking together.