Mia
I stare at the water while he waits.
It's not an impatient kind of waiting. There's no shift in his weight, no clearing of his throat, no glance at a watch. He simply sits in the chair he's turned to face mine, and he waits with the specific quality of a man who has decided he will wait as long as it takes and means it.
He is very large. Very still. Dark-haired, dark-eyed, the kind of face that was put together with intention.
Very angular and controlled, with nothing soft about it except perhaps his mouth, and even that is pressed into a line right now that doesn't invite the word soft.
He is wearing a suit jacket and shirt with no tie, his collar open, and he radiates the authority of a man who has never once had to announce that he's in charge of a room because the room already knows.
A strange kind of relief moves through me from having stopped moving.
My feet have been carrying me through the city for however long it's been, and now they've stopped the weird tension in my body has stopped with them.
Like a machine that's been running too hot and has finally, reluctantly, been switched off.
"She texted me at eight," I say.
My voice still sounds wrong to me. Like a recording of myself made in a bad room.
"Sasha. She said she was going to be late to the club and could I do her a favor on my way. Pick up a piece of jewelry she had left at her uncle's house because it was on my way."
The memory tries to surface and I press it back down. Not yet. I can't do the whole thing yet, I can only do it in pieces, in the order my mouth decides to release them.
"I got there just before nine. Knocked. He answered. Told me to come in, he was just cooking dinner. Said the earrings were in a box, but he needed to wash his hands." A pause. "So I followed him through."
He's watching me with an expression I can't read.
There's something moving behind it, but it's controlled in a way that gives me nothing to orient by.
No pity, which I'm grateful for, but the very complete and focused attention of someone who is listening to every word and also to everything underneath the words.
"He was cooking," I say. "Onions. Garlic. The smell was—" I stop. Start again. "It was very normal. He said Sasha had called him, and the box with the earrings was on the kitchen island, I just had to grab it."
I look down at the water. The glass is still trembling fractionally in my hands, so I wrap my fingers tighter.
"He was between me and the door."
I say it like that. Flat, clinical, like a stage direction, because it's the only way to say it and keep the door shut on what comes after it.
"He said I might as well stay for a drink. I said no thank you. He said—" My mouth tightens. "He said it wasn't a question."
Silence.
Across the desk, Iosif doesn't move. Doesn't make a sound.
The absence of response is so complete and so careful that I understand it's intentional.
He's giving me the space to keep going without the interruption of his reaction, and I find I can use that.
I find it's easier, with no sound coming back at me, to let the words keep coming out.
"I tried to go around him." Past tense. Keep it past tense. Keep it over there, in the room it happened in, not in this one. "He grabbed my wrist.”
“I dropped the earrings," I add absently, only just remembering now.
I look at my wrist. The marks are there, purple and obvious. The specific pressure of fingers that closed and didn't let go.
"He told me to just be good. You obviously want it if you’re dressed like this. I pulled away. He didn't let go. He forced me against the island.” I look down at my dress with a frown, remembering the sound of the fabric as it tore under his other hand. The one that wasn’t wrapped around my wrist.
“I reached for the counter because I needed something to hold onto, something to steady myself against, and my hand—"
The door in my mind shudders.
I'm pressing my back against it as hard as I can, but something on the other side is pushing.
"My hand found the knife."
I close my eyes for one second. Just one. Then I open them and look at him and say the rest of it the way you pull a plaster off. Quick, before your nerve goes.
"It was a chef's knife. It was just on the counter. I didn't — I wasn't — I grabbed it because my hand found it and I was trying to make him let go of me, I was trying to make him stop, and he didn't stop, he didn't—"
I breathe in.
"He fell," I say. "He let go of my wrist, and he fell."
Silence again.
I realise my hands are shaking badly enough that the water is moving in the glass. I set it down on the edge of his desk because I can't trust myself to keep hold of it, and I press both palms flat against my thighs the way I've been doing all night, because it’s the only control I have left.
"I checked," I say, and my voice does something strange. Warping briefly, before I pull it flat again. "He was... There was a lot of blood. I checked. He wasn't—" I stop. Try again. "He was already gone. Or close enough that I couldn't—"
I couldn't have done anything. Even if I'd known what to do. Even if I'd had anything but my own hands and a phone I couldn't make myself pull out of my clutch.
"I left," I finish. "I closed the front door and I walked. I don't know how long for or what time it even is now. But I ended up here because I am supposed to meet Sasha."
The room is very quiet.
I can hear the music through the walls, that low muffled thrum, too far away to make out. Everyone else's Friday night proceeding entirely without me.
I look at him.
He's still watching me with that unreadable expression, and for a long, suspended moment I can't tell what he's thinking or what he's going to do.
"I know what it sounds like," I say. "I know you don't know me, and I know how it sounds." My throat tightens but I push through it. "I'm not asking you to believe me. I need to know where Sasha is. She was supposed to be here, and she sent me to his house, and she doesn't know—"
I stop.
Because I've just arrived at the thought I've been carefully walking around all night. The thing that's been there at the edge of my vision, too big to look at directly.
Sasha doesn't know what happened in that kitchen. Sasha is going to find out. Sasha is going to find out that her uncle is dead and that I was there and that I walked here in a torn dress with blood on my hands instead of calling for help.
Something breaks open in my chest. A sudden, terrible pressure, like something's been held together with the wrong kind of tension all night and it's starting to give.
"Sasha didn't set me up," I say, and I don't know who I'm saying it for. "She didn't know. Whatever he is… whatever he was… she didn't know."
"I know," Iosif says.
Two words. Quiet, but not to reassure me. He doesn't say it the way people say things when they're trying to comfort you, with that softness that feels slightly wrong.
I look at him.
"How do you know?" I ask.
"Because if Sasha Vinzlee wanted something done to you," he says, "she wouldn't have left it to chance."
I stare at him.
It is, objectively, an awful thing to say. It is also, somehow, the most comforting thing anyone has said to me all night.
I laugh.
It comes out wrong. Short and fractured and completely without humor. It startles both of us, I think, because something shifts in his face. Not much. A fractional loosening. Like a mechanism releasing one notch.
"Okay," I say, when the laugh has finished happening to me. "Okay."
He leans back slightly. He looks at me for a long, quiet moment, and I get the impression he's reorganising something. Running new information behind those dark eyes.
"You need to clean up," he says. "And then we need to talk about what happens next."
I blink. "Next?"
"Markus Vinzlee was the head of his family.
" He says it carefully. Precisely. Like he's handing me something fragile and wants me to have a chance to take hold of it before he lets go.
"His death won’t go unnoticed for long. By morning there will be questions.
People asking where he is. People asking who was at his house. "
The cold comes back. Spreading out from the center of my chest.
"People," I repeat slowly. "What kind of people?"
He meets my eyes.
"My kind," he says.