8. EIGHT
EIGHT
Brooklyn
The apartment was quiet without him in it.
I slid the chain into the track. I tested it the way he always tested it — one firm pull — and then I got in the shower, because his absence was easier to take under noise.
I stayed in until the hot water quit. Got out, pulled on a T-shirt — his, the gray one he’d left, too big, smelling like him in a way I was not going to think about right now — and went to find my phone.
It was on the counter by the kettle. One missed call on the screen. Him. No message. Eleven minutes old.
I called back. Straight to voicemail, which his phone does when he’s working — when he’s in a room he can’t leave, when the operation is live. That’s all this was. He was busy. He was doing his job. He’d call when he could.
I told myself that, put the phone down and reached for the kettle, because tea is what I do with my hands when something feels wrong and I don’t want to look at it.
That’s when I heard the lock.
The deadbolt — the Medeco, the one he’d installed, the one he’d told me couldn’t be bumped or picked with anything short of professional equipment — turning. The sound of it was wrong in a way I felt before I understood. Metal moving inside metal, smooth, certain.
My first thought was Caleb. Stupid and instant and hopeful — he came back, he’s here, he finished early — and I was a step toward the door before the rest of me caught up.
Caleb would have texted. Caleb doesn’t surprise people.
Caleb knows better than anyone alive what surprising me in the dark would do.
The deadbolt turned. The door opened.
And stopped. Four inches. The chain caught it and the door jerked against it and held. The hallway light came through the gap. I could see a shadow. A shoulder. The edge of a coat.
For one second the chain held and I thought: it works. The thing he put in actually works.
Then a voice came through the gap. Soft. Displeased. A voice I’d heard a hundred times across a desk, asking me to find it a table.
“Brooklyn. You weren’t supposed to put that on.”
I didn’t answer. My hand was on the counter. The phone was next to the kettle. Four feet from the door.
“I know you’re there. I can hear the kettle.” A pause. Patient, like he had all the time in the world. “I know where Caleb is, too. I know exactly where he is. I sent him there.”
He hit the door.
The whole weight of a man thrown at four inches of brass and a chain plate screwed into a frame that was older than the building’s last renovation, which was 1987, which was the year the wood around my door frame had last been anyone’s problem.
The chain held. The frame didn’t. I heard the wood groan — a deep, structural sound, the sound of screws pulling through soft grain — and he hit it again, and on the third hit the chain plate tore out of the frame and went skittering across my kitchen floor with a piece of door jamb still attached.
The chain he installed. The chain I’d let myself trust.
The chain had done its job. The building hadn’t.
Tom Griffin stepped into my kitchen and closed the door behind him.
* * *
Under the club’s light he was just a man who tipped to be seen. Under my one bare bulb he was something else. His hair was loose. His breathing was up from the door. He looked at me the way you look at something you’ve already paid for and have come to pick up.
“There,” he said, smoothing the front of his coat. Calm. Satisfied. Like the door had been a minor inconvenience. “That wasn’t necessary.”
The counter was between us. My phone was on it. My feet were bare on the kitchen tile.
“Get out of my apartment.”
“No.” He said it simply. Not angry. Factual. “You’ve been very busy, Brooklyn. Talking to the wrong people. Making things difficult. I’ve spent a lot of money and a lot of time on you, and the least you can do is stand still.”
He stepped forward. I stepped back. He took the space I gave him — the way he’d always taken space, at the desk, in the club, every time. Except there was no desk between us and no Caleb in the corner and no rule he was pretending to respect.
“I don’t want to be rough,” he said. “I’ve never wanted to be rough.
You could have made this easy. Dinner. A conversation.
I’m a reasonable man. But you went and got yourself a fucking guard dog, and now I’ve had to do this the other way, and I need you to understand — this is your fault.
You asked for all of this. That’s on you. ”
I ran for the door.
Bad plan. Only plan.
The busted front door, four steps away, the dark hall past it — I got two of the steps before his hand closed in the back of my wet hair and pulled.
A fistful of hair wrenched backward, the world tilted, the floor came up, and I hit it on my hip and elbow and the crack went up through my shoulder and into my teeth.
My phone. I’d knocked it off the counter on the way down. It had slid under the cabinet lip, screen down, close — three feet, maybe less.
Griffin crouched beside me. Calm. Straightening his cuffs the way he straightened them at the desk. “Don’t run. I’ve told you. I don’t like it.”
Then he hit me. Open hand. Across the face.
Hard enough to put me flat against the tile and fill my skull with a white static, and the taste of copper, and for a second I couldn’t see.
I could hear — his shoes on the tile, his breathing, my own breath coming in thin scrapes that didn’t sound like me.
“Up,” he said, from somewhere above me. “We’re going to have a conversation.”
Here is what happens when a man twice your size puts you on your own kitchen floor and tells you to get up.
It isn’t courage. It isn’t strength. It’s arithmetic.
He was between me and the front door. The bathroom was behind me, to the left, eight feet. My phone was under the cabinet lip, three feet from my right hand. He was standing. I was on the floor. He thought I was done.
I went loose. Let a sound out — not faked, not entirely, because my face was on fire and my elbow wasn’t working right and the sound was real, it just wasn’t the whole truth.
I let my body go the way it goes when you’ve given up, because I have watched men my entire life and I know what they want to see, and what they want to see is the moment you stop.
Men like Griffin live for the moment you stop.
He bent to pull me up by the arm, satisfied. I closed my right hand around my phone under the cabinet and drove the heel of my left hand up into his face.
I felt his nose go. The wet sound of cartilage giving way under my palm. He made a noise — high, surprised, nothing like his smooth voice — and his hands went to his face. I was up and moving before he finished making it.
I don’t remember crossing the room. One second I was in the hallway, the next I was shoving the bathroom door shut behind me, fingers fumbling for the useless little push-button lock.
The kind that anyone could pop open with a coin in two seconds flat.
It wasn’t meant to keep anyone out. It was only meant to buy me a breath.
Back against the door. Feet on the tile. Hands shaking.
The same position. The same posture. A different bathroom in a different apartment in a different borough and I was sixteen again.
Same floor. Same door. Same silence where nobody was coming because nobody had ever come, because that was the lesson and I had learned it well and it had kept me alive and it was killing me right now, in this apartment, in this bathroom, with a man on the other side of the door telling me in a wet, ruined voice what he was going to do when he got through it.
Except.
There was a phone in my hand.
Slick with blood — his, mostly, from his nose — shaking so badly the screen kept jumping under my thumb.
The door hit my spine. Again. The privacy lock was clicking with each impact, the little button bouncing, and the screws in this one were in the same old soft wood and they weren’t going to hold, I could feel them giving, a quarter-turn at a time.
I unlocked the phone. Missed the contact on the first try. Missed it on the second. Got it on the third.
It rang once.
He picked up before it finished.
“Brooklyn.” Already sharp. Already moving — I could hear an engine, a road. "Talk to me.”
“He’s here.” It came out in pieces. Not my voice. Some broken, stripped-down version of my voice that I didn’t recognize. “Griffin — he’s in my apartment — he’s at the bathroom door — Caleb, I can’t hold it, the lock is giving—”
“Listen to me.” Fast but steady. Not raised. The tactical voice, the one that clears rooms and moves people and expects to be obeyed. “Feet braced against the base of the tub. Get low, get your weight into the door. Don’t open it for anyone.”
The door hit my spine again. I felt the lock give another quarter-turn.
“Caleb—”
“I’m twelve minutes out. You hold that door, Brooklyn. You hear me? You hold it.”
And then quieter. Almost not to me. Almost to himself, except I heard it, clear as anything I’ve ever heard in my life.
“I’m going to kill him.”
I braced my feet against the tub. Got my weight low, my back flat against the door, my heels dug into the grout lines between the tiles.
Griffin hit the door again and I held. He hit it again.
I held. My phone was pressed to my ear and Caleb’s engine was screaming through it.
I could hear him talking to Theo on his work phone, short clipped words I couldn’t make out, and the sound of his voice — steady, present, coming — was the thing I put my back against. Not the door. His voice.
Griffin hit the door and the screws pulled another fraction and I held.
I held the way I’d held at sixteen, except at sixteen I’d been holding for no one. Holding because there was nothing else.
I held, and this time someone was coming.
The hitting stopped.
He went quiet. The whole apartment went quiet.
And in the silence I heard it too: footsteps.
Heavy, fast, taking the stairs without any attempt to be quiet, hitting every step including the third hallway board, the one that gives you up if you step on it wrong.
Whoever was on those stairs wasn’t being careful.
Whoever was on those stairs was running.
Then a sound from my kitchen. Something fast and heavy and final — a thud, a body hitting a wall, Griffin’s voice starting a word he didn’t get to finish.
Then nothing. Then silence. Then footsteps, crossing the apartment, and then a hand on the bathroom door, not hitting it, just resting there, and a voice. Low. Wrecked. Breathing hard.
“Brooklyn. It’s me. Open the door.”
I opened the door.
He was standing there. Blood on his knuckles.
Breathing like he’d run up four flights at a dead sprint.
His face was the most terrifying thing I’d ever seen — not because it was angry but because it was empty, completely wiped, the face of a man who had just done something with his hands and hadn’t come all the way back from it yet.
And then he saw me. Saw my face — the swelling, the blood, whatever I looked like — and the empty went away and what came through underneath it was worse.
He didn’t grab me. He went to his knees on the bathroom tile — this huge, terrifying man, on his knees — and he put his hands on either side of my face, carefully, so carefully, like I was the thing in the room that might break. He said my name again, just my name, and I fell into him.
I put my face against his chest and I held on to him the way I’d been holding on to the door, with everything I had.
He wrapped both arms around me and put his mouth against the top of my head and he didn’t say anything, and I didn’t say anything, and the silence was the first safe one I’d ever known.
The chain was on the floor. The door frame was splintered. Griffin was somewhere in my kitchen, not moving, and I didn’t look.
I just held on.