"Three men broke into the apartment," I say. "They were sent by a man named Kir Belov. He's a rival of mine. He was at the auction. He was the one bidding against me for you."
Her face changes. Goes paler.
"He didn't send them for you," I say. I don't know if it's true, but I say it anyway because the alternative is her believing that she's the reason three men died on my living room floor, and I won't let her carry that. "He sent them for me. You being here was incidental."
"Incidental," she repeats. Her voice is flat. Shock-flat.
"Kir has been a problem for a while. Before you. Before the auction. This was coming regardless. The timing is unfortunate."
"Unfortunate." She almost laughs. The sound a person makes when the gap between reality and language becomes too wide to bridge. "Three people just died in the other room and you're calling it unfortunate."
"Would you prefer I call it something else?"
"I'd prefer it hadn't happened at all."
"So would I. But it did, and now we adjust."
She looks at me, and I can see her trying to assemble the pieces of me into a coherent picture. The man who cooks her dinner. The man who kneels between her legs every night. The man who just killed three people and then kissed her forehead. None of these pieces fit together in a way that makes sense to her, and I understand that, because they don't make sense to me either. I have never been all of these men simultaneously. I’ve never needed to be.
"Are you hurt?" she asks.
The question surprises me, even though it probably shouldn’t.
"No," I say. "I'm not hurt."
"Your hand."
I look down. The knuckles on my right hand are split and swollen, bruised purple around the breaks in the skin. I hadn't noticed. The adrenaline has been doing its job.
"It's nothing."
She unfolds herself from the bed and walks to the bathroom and comes back with a damp washcloth and she stands in front of me and takes my right hand, my killing hand, the hand that broke a man's jaw less than an hour ago, and she presses the cool cloth against the torn skin and holds it there.
I let her.
I let her tend to me because the act of refusing would require me to pull my hand away from hers, and I am physically incapable of doing that. Her fingers are small and careful around my knuckles, and the cloth is cold. She's standing close enough that I can smell the cashmere sweater, which smells like me, and underneath it the warm, clean scent that is purely her, and the combination of those two things, me and her, blended together in the same breath, does something to my brain chemistry that I am certain no pharmaceutical could replicate.
"Wren."
She looks up. We're close. Closer than we've been face to face, because every other time we've been this close my face has been between her thighs and eye contact was limited to whatever she could manage through the haze of what I was doing to her.
"I need to tell you something," I say.
She waits. The cloth is still pressed against my knuckles. Her thumb is making a small, unconscious circle on the inside of my wrist, over the vein, and I don't think she knows she's doing it.
"What happened tonight is going to happen again."
Her hand stills.
"Not the breach," I say. "I'll make sure the breach never happens again. But the violence. The blood. The world I operate in. It won't stop pressing against the walls of this apartment, and eventually, no matter how many men I put between you and it, something will get through."
"Then let me go."
The words come out of her quietly, almost like a reflex. Like she said them because she's supposed to, because it's the obvious response, but her hand hasn't moved from mine, her eyes haven't moved from mine and her body hasn't taken a single step toward the door.
"No."
"Dominik--"