He extends his left hand.
His right hand, the one that's redder, the one that did whatever it did out there, stays at his side.
"It's over," he says. "Give me your hand."
I stare at his left hand. It's still bloody, but less so. It’s smudged and thin, not the thick, wet coating like on his right. He's offering me the cleaner hand. The hand that wasn't directly involved.
I take it.
His fingers close around mine and he pulls me up out of the tub, gently, and when I stumble over the rim he catches me with his left arm around my waist and holds me against his chest, and his shirt is wet and warm against my cheek and I know the warmth is blood but I don't pull away.
I don't pull away.
Because the apartment behind him, the parts of it I can see through the bathroom door, looks like a war zone. There's a body on the living room floor. I can see one leg, the sole of a boot, a dark pool spreading slowly across the hardwood. There'sanother shape further back near the kitchen, and I think there might be a third but his body is blocking my view and I think he's doing that on purpose.
His left hand comes up and covers my eyes. Just his palm, warm and broad, settling over my face the way you'd cover a child's eyes during the scary part of a movie. His fingers curve against my temples and his thumb rests against my cheekbone. The world goes dark and I can hear his heartbeat, steady, so steady, not even elevated, the heartbeat of a man who just killed multiple people in his own living room and isn't even breathing hard.
"Don't look," he says against the top of my head. "You don't need to see this."
He guides me out of the bathroom with his hand over my eyes and his arm around my waist. I let this blood-soaked man lead me blind through the aftermath of violence because the alternative is seeing it, and I have already heard it, and hearing it is enough.
He takes me to my bedroom. I know because I count the steps, fourteen from the bathroom to the hallway, six down the hall, and then the specific sound of the bedroom door opening. He walks me to the bed and sits me down and removes his hand from my eyes and I blink in the light and his face is right there, inches from mine, blood-streaked and calm.
"Stay here," he says. "I'm going to clean up. Then I'm going to come back and I'm going to explain. Okay?"
I nod. I can't speak. My throat is closed and my body is still vibrating at a frequency that doesn't feel sustainable.
He looks at me for one more second. Then he does something he hasn't done before.
He presses his lips to my forehead.
It's brief. A contact that lasts maybe two seconds. His mouth is warm and his breath is warm and the blood on his face transfers to my skin in a faint smudge that I feel, and the intimacy of it is so jarring, so misplaced, so completely insane in the context of what just happened, that it short-circuits something in my brain and the tears stop.
He leaves.
I sit on the bed and stare at the wall and I think about the fact that three men just died in the other room. Three men came to this apartment to kill Dominik, or me, or both, and Dominik killed them with a calm efficiency that suggests he's done this many times before, and then he walked to the bathroom and offered me his hand and covered my eyes and kissed my forehead.
I think about what would have happened if those men had come on a day when Dominik wasn't here.
I think about what would have happened if Dominik hadn't come home early. If he'd arrived at his normal time and found the apartment breached and me gone or me dead or me in the hands of whoever sent those men.
I think about the world outside this penthouse. The world I came from, the world of my father's debts and Morozov's auction and men with viper tattoos who look at girls and sayshe'll do. That world didn't stop existing because I'm on the top floor of a glass tower eating salmon and reading books and coming on a stranger's tongue every night. That world is still out there, pressing against the windows, testing the locks, sending men with guns to take back what they think belongs to them.
And in this apartment, between me and that world, there is Dominik.
Blood-soaked, dead-eyed, forehead-kissing Dominik, who kills with his right hand and shields me with his left.
I pull the cashmere sweater up over my nose and breathe in, it smells like him, and I close my eyes, and for the first time since the van, I am not pretending when I think: I am safer here than anywhere else in the world.
That's the most terrifying thought I've had yet.
Because I think it might be true.
Dominik
There are three bodies on my living room floor. Blood in the grout between my Italian hardwood planks. A bullet hole in the Rothko above the fireplace. But the only thing I can think about is the smudge I left on her forehead.
Blood. Transferred from my lips to her skin in a moment of weakness I didn't plan and can't undo, and she sat there on the edge of the bed and looked at me with those dark eyes and didn't wipe it off.