Chapter 32 Zatanna #2
Chapter seven becomes chapter eight, then chapter nine. My heroine gets sharper. My hero gets crueler and somehow softer at the same time. I tell myself it’s fiction. I tell myself I am just good at borrowing emotional truth from memory.
I do not let myself think too hard about whose memory.
I answer my mother when she texts. I ignore her when she calls. I eat too many oranges. I cry once because a grocery store was out of the only yogurt I wanted and decide not to interrogate that too deeply.
Life resumes.
Not normal, exactly. But routine. And routine is sometimes the closest thing to safety a person gets.
That brings me to today as I finish my grocery shopping and return home to my apartment.
It’s early dark, the kind of gray-blue hour where the streetlights have come on but the sky is still deciding whether it’s night.
I’ve got two bags cutting into my fingers and a carton of eggs balanced precariously in the top of one.
My shoulders hurt. My ankles hurt. The baby has apparently decided to practice martial arts directly against my bladder.
I am tired. I make it to the front step of my building and fumble for my keys. That’s when I hear it.
“Zatanna.”
My name from a man’s voice.
I turn just enough to see movement in my peripheral vision, dark and fast, and then something slams into the side of my head.
Pain bursts white behind my eyes as my temple cracks against the building door. The grocery bags hit the ground. Something shatters. I scream.
The man grabs for me again. Instinct takes over.
I shove him with both hands, wild and off-balance, and he stumbles just enough for me to wrench the door half open and bolt back down the sidewalk instead of inside. I don’t think. I just run.
Or as much as seven months pregnant counts as running.
My whole body is screaming at me. My head is ringing. My breath comes in short, terrified bursts. Behind me, I hear footsteps.
He’s chasing me. “Stop!” he shouts.
I do not. I cut around the corner too hard, one hand braced under my belly, the other reaching blindly for anything, anything I can use. A trash can. A loose bottle. A brick.
My fingers close around the strap of my own bag instead.
When he grabs at my coat from behind, I swing the bag backward with every ounce of strength I have. A can inside connects with something solid. He curses. I twist, half-falling, and jab my keys straight at his face.
He jerks back with a snarl, one hand going to his cheek.
For one crazy second, I think I might actually get away.
Then he lunges again, angrier now, and this time I know I’m not going to outrun him.
I plant my feet and scream as loud as I can, not words, just noise, raw and desperate and furious. I swing again. He catches my wrist. Pain shoots up my arm.
And then… He isn’t the only one there.
A second figure slams into him from the side hard enough to send both of them crashing into a parked car.
A shout. A brutal, familiar fist.
It comes out of nowhere and cracks across the man’s jaw with enough force to send him sideways into the parked car. The sound is sickening. Metal rattles. The attacker stumbles, and before I can even process what I’m seeing, someone grabs him by the collar and slams him hard into the hood.
Aleksei.
For one stunned second, my brain refuses to catch up. Then it does, all at once.
Dark coat. Hard face. Violence moving through him like it belongs there.
He hits the man again, sharp and vicious, then wrenches his arm behind his back so fast the attacker screams. A knife skids across the pavement under the streetlight. Aleksei kicks it away without looking.
The man tries to twist free. Bad choice.
Aleksei drives him face-first into the car and growls, “You touched her.”
I have never heard his voice like that.
This is something else. Raw. Furious. The kind of anger that doesn’t need volume because it is already deadly.
The attacker chokes out something I can’t hear.
Aleksei doesn’t care. He pins him harder, one hand at the back of his neck, the other fisted in his jacket, and for one horrible second I genuinely think he is going to kill him right here on my street.
“Aleksei,” I say, but it comes out weak, breathless.
His head turns. His eyes hit mine. And everything in his face changes.
Not the rage. That stays. But now it has direction.
He shoves the man to the ground hard enough to keep him there, then crosses the distance to me in three strides.
“Zatanna.” His hands are on me immediately, everywhere and nowhere, checking. My face. My shoulders. My arms. One hand at the back of my head, gentle and trembling with restraint. The other flattening over my stomach.
“Are you hurt?”
I blink at him, still trying to breathe. “He—he—”
“I know.” His voice is low now, roughened by anger and something worse. “Look at me.”
I do. Barely.
My head is throbbing. My groceries are all over the sidewalk. I can feel my pulse in my teeth. But his hands are warm and solid, and somehow that keeps the panic from taking me all the way under.
“He hit me,” I say stupidly, because apparently that is the best my brain can do.
His jaw clenches so hard I hear his teeth grind. Then he looks at the man on the pavement and all that fury comes roaring back into his face.
“No,” I say quickly, grabbing the front of his coat with both hands. “No, don’t—” He looks down at me. “I’m fine,” I lie.
He stares at me for one beat, sees straight through it, and then lets out a slow breath through his nose like he is physically forcing himself not to turn around and finish what he started.
His hand slides back to my head. Fingers parting my hair carefully now, searching. When he finds the swelling near my temple, his eyes go black. “You’re bleeding.”
“It’s not a lot.” That is not the correct thing to say.
A muscle jumps in his cheek. “Do not minimize this.”
I should be annoyed. Instead, absurdly, I feel like crying.
Because he is here. Because he found me. Because I thought I was alone and then suddenly I wasn’t.
My knees wobble.
He catches me instantly. “That’s it,” he says, voice dropping again, all command and care now. “I’ve got you.”
The words break something open in me.
I make a sound I absolutely did not mean to make and fold into him, shaking, one hand clutching his coat, the other going instinctively over my belly.
His arms close around me at once.
Behind him, the man on the ground groans and tries to move. Aleksei doesn’t even turn. He just says, cold and flat, “Try it.”
The man goes still.
I bury my face against Aleksei’s chest because I do not need to see whatever expression made that happen.
He lowers his mouth to my hairline. “Did he touch your stomach?” The question is so controlled it scares me.
“No,” I whisper. “No.”
He closes his eyes for one brief second. Relief, sharp and private.
Then he pulls back enough to look at me again. “Can you walk?”
I nod.
He clearly doesn’t believe me, and scoops me up anyway.
“Aleksei—”
“No.”
“That is not a complete sentence.”
“It is tonight.”
Even now. Even carrying me with one arm under my knees and the other braced hard around my back, he still sounds like himself. Still sounds infuriatingly, solidly Aleksei.
I should tell him to put me down. I do not.
My head rests against his shoulder as he turns toward my building. Then I remember the man behind us. “He—”
“Will be dealt with.”
I look at his face. He means it.
I should probably be more disturbed by that. Right now, all I can manage is relief.
He pauses at the building entrance, looks down at the shattered eggs and spilled groceries on the sidewalk, then at me. “You live like this?”
I let out a shaky laugh that hurts my head. “That’s your takeaway?”
“No,” he says. “My takeaway is that you’re never coming home alone again.”
I actually would argue with that, under better circumstances.
Right now, I’m too busy trying not to fall apart in his arms.
So, I just hold on while he carries me inside, past the broken groceries and the man gasping on the ground, and for the first time in eight months, I let myself stop pretending I can survive his world by myself.