Chapter 12 Jillian
JILLIAN
“Come to me / In the night hours / I will wait for you”
— “War of Hearts” by Ruelle
I get back from Mount Sinai a little after one in the morning.
It wasn’t exactly a fun trip to the hospital.
It’s always amazed me that people go work there every day, because to me, hospitals are some of the least pleasant places on the planet.
Beeping monitors, squeaky stretcher wheels, hushed and morbid conversations—not the backdrop to a nice day at the office, in my opinion.
But the nurses always seem to tolerate it just fine.
Heck, a pair of them manning the desk on the ER floor were giggling with each other for most of the evening like all was right in the world.
The whole time, I sat there running the math on what I’d done. I dragged Elliot to that restaurant because I was too afraid to go home alone. I used him.
And the Masked Man made him pay for it.
In some twisted kind of penance, I made myself sit in that awful plastic chair under those awful buzzing lights and wait until all the nurses and doctors had gone in and done what Elliot needed them to do.
One of them, mistaking me for some kind of wife or sister or girlfriend, stopped by to give me the report.
He had a hairline fracture to his orbital bone, two cracked ribs, fourteen stitches to close the gash over his left eye, and he required a blood transfusion to make up for all that he’d lost. Luckily, there was no internal bleeding, but they were going to keep him overnight for observation since his answers to the concussion test were not what anyone would call “accurate.”
I nodded and mumbled thank you, then sat there for a few more hours because I didn’t know what else to do. Finally, I couldn’t keep my head upright. It was time to go home.
But I also couldn’t leave without at least looking at him. So, after waiting a little longer to be sure no other medical professionals needed access to him, I slipped into Elliot’s room.
He was propped up in the bed with half his face swollen shut and a row of fresh purple stitches above his brow. He looked small in that bed and that papery gown. I saw his ever-present Knicks jersey, looking like a bloodied rag, in a Ziploc bag next to his bed, and I almost cried.
“Hi,” I whispered from the doorway. “Elliot, I just wanted to say I’m so—”
His good eye found me for half a second. The fear in it was so frothy and so total that I stopped talking and died a little inside.
That was bad. What was even worse was how, then, he stiffened and looked away from me as if I no longer existed.
Yeah. I deserved that.
I left.
Now, I’m home…
… and there’s a message painted in blood on my wall.
I stand in the doorway for a while and look at it.
I TOLD YOU NOT TO GO. Some of the blood has dried darker than the rest, almost black at the edges.
Part of me wants to clean it, but the thought of expending the energy required to find a bucket, and soap, and bleach, and hot water, and to stood where he stood and scrub away what he wrote there…
It makes me want to vomit with exhaustion.
Instead, I back up and pull the bathroom door shut.
Other rooms beckon to me. The kitchen, to eat something. My bedroom, to sleep until this horrible saga ends. The couch, to numb my brain with mindless TV so I don’t have to think about how terrified Elliot looked to see me again.
But I don’t go to any of those places. I walk to the kitchen, open the junk drawer next to the fridge, and dig around until my fingers close on the Taser I bought a few years ago in a midnight, post-nightmare frenzy.
It’s pink and shaped like a small flashlight.
I check the battery indicator. It shines green. Good enough.
Then I sit down at the kitchen table.
The apartment is quiet. The window is shut now. The lights are on. The fridge hums. The clock on the microwave says 2:33 A.M.
I set the Taser on the table in front of me.
And I wait.
Because he’s coming back. I know he is. He was here tonight. He wrote on my wall in Elliot’s blood and then he left, and now, he’s out there somewhere doing whatever he does when he’s not terrorizing me, but at some point soon, I just know it in my bones, he’s going to come back through that door.
When he does, I’m going to be sitting right here.
As I sit and wait, I think about everything that’s happened so far. I try to do it dispassionately. If this was a story I’m researching, then I’d be laying out the facts.
Here’s what I know: A masked man broke into my apartment last night and told me he was sent to kill me.
Then he left. He followed me to a coffee shop and bought me a drink.
Then he left. He followed me to a restaurant and beat the shit out of my neighbor.
Then he left. He came here and wrote a love note in blood on my shower tile. Then he left.
He keeps leaving. That’s the part I can’t stop turning over. He keeps showing up and he keeps leaving and I keep being alive at the end of it. How does that make any sense?!
He’s had chances to do what he said he’d been sent for.
Real ones. He had me pinned to a wall in the dark with no phone and no power and nobody coming, a gun pressed into my spine.
He could’ve done it then. Or if not then, he could’ve poisoned me at the coffee shop, snatched me off the street, dragged me anywhere he likes.
He hasn’t.
Which means one of two things. Either he can’t kill me… or he won’t.
Both options interest me. Because either way, the man who told me he was sent to kill me is failing to do it, and that failure is a crack. A crack I can fit my fingers into and pry open.
He has a weakness.
Me.
And that gives me power.
The sound, when it arrives, doesn’t come from the door.
It comes from behind me.
A scrape, a soft thud, and then the whisper of fabric against the windowsill. The window I shut. The window I locked.
I snatch the Taser off the table and spin in my chair. The Masked Man is already inside, one leg still swung over the sill, and I don’t think; I just squeeze. The Taser crackles and spits its twin darts into the dark and they sail…
… past his left shoulder, to embed themselves in the curtain with a pathetic little thwip.
“Shit,” I breathe.
He straightens up to his full height and looks at the darts hanging from the curtain fabric, then back at me. The mask covers his nose and jaw. His pale eyes are calm above it.
“You missed,” he observes.
“Yes, asshole, I can see that.”
He strides across the kitchen, long legs chewing up the ground between us. I try to fire again but nothing happens—the cartridge is spent. One shot, that’s all I had.
Then his hand is around my wrist. He twists, not hard enough to hurt but enough that my fingers open and the Taser falls.
I try to yank my arm back, but he doesn’t let go. He reels me out of the chair and into him, my back flush against his chest, both my wrists gathered in one of his hands and pinned against my stomach. His other arm wraps around my ribcage, locking me in place.
I can feel every inch of him pressed against me. The heat of his body soaking through my clothes. The rise and fall of his breathing against my shoulder blades. That smell—cinnamon, sandalwood, musk—filling my nose until it’s all I can process.
My body does something awful: It relaxes. Not all the way, not even close, but enough. The taut line of my spine softens a fraction against him.
“Let go of me!” I demand.
He holds on for one more second. Then he releases my wrists and steps back.
Moving casually, like I just invited him over for a nightcap, he pulls out my chair and nods graciously toward it, as if to say, Rest yourself, if you please, my lady.
He must not realize that chivalry and home invasion don’t typically go hand-in-hand.
When I refuse, he shrugs and sinks into it, as nonchalant as ever.
He leans back, crosses an ankle over the opposite knee, folds his hands in his lap, and looks at me.
“Sit,” he says.
“Don’t tell me what to do in my own apartment.”
I don’t move. My wrists are tingling where he held them. The Taser is on the floor way off to my left, spent and useless.
He pushes the other chair out from the table with his foot. It scrapes across the tile and stops in front of me.
“Sit,” he says again. “I just want to talk.”
I look at the chair. I look at him.
Then, with a sigh, I sit.