Chapter 10 #3
“Miranda.” Brooke’s voice is careful. “Talk to me.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine.”
“I will be.” I stand up slowly. “I just need to sleep. I haven’t really slept.”
She stands too, then reaches for my arm before she stops herself. “Let me stay.”
“Go home, Brooke.” I say it as gently as I can. “I mean it. I’m okay. I just need a few hours and then I’ll be able to think straight.”
She reads my face. She’s known me long enough to know when I need space and when I’m lying about needing space, and right now the answer is both, and she knows that too. She picks up her bag and squeezes my good wrist once carefully.
“Call me when you wake up,” she murmurs. “I mean it. I’ll be here in ten minutes if you need me.”
“I know.”
I watch her go. Wait for the door to close. Then I sit back down on the couch and don’t sleep.
The letter is still on the table.
The apartment has a particular sound when it’s empty. I know it well. I’ve been listening to it for years.
Three knocks on the door.
I drop my hand, looking at the door. It’s probably Brooke, back because she decided she wasn’t leaving after all.
I get up, cross the room, and open it.
Two men.
Not Brooke.
The one in front is big, wide through the shoulders, with the kind of face that hasn’t arranged itself into a pleasant expression in years.
I know him. Not his name, not personally, but I know what he is.
I’ve seen him before, in a parking lot, with Scarface and another man who had held me against a pillar while someone hit me.
Kozlov’s people.
“Miss Carver.” His voice is unhurried. “Tough week.”
My hand tightens on the door. I start to push it closed. His foot goes into the gap.
“Mr. Kozlov heard you lost your job.” He tilts his head slightly. “Convenient timing for us, less so for you. You won’t be making payments now.”
“Get away from my door.”
“We went to the hospital looking for you.” His sneer makes my blood run cold. “Your colleagues are very helpful. One of them in particular, Dr. Hudson. He sent his regards.”
Of course he did.
The man pushes the door open.
I stumble back, catch myself, and run.
The knife block is in the kitchen, and I cross the apartment in four steps. However, an arm hooks around my waist before I reach it and hauls me backward. I throw my elbow back hard and feel it connect. He swears, and his grip drops. I lunge forward and close my hand around the handle and spin.
He stops.
I’m breathing hard. He’s not breathing hard at all.
“Don’t,” I say.
There are two of them in the apartment now. The second one has closed the door. They look at the knife and then at each other, and the look that passes between them tells me everything.
“Put that down,” the first one says, patient in the way that people are patient when they’ve already decided how something is going to end. “Mr. Kozlov wants to talk to you, that’s all. You come quietly, no one gets hurt.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you.”
He moves. I slash with my good hand and catch his forearm.
He swears for real this time, and then his fist hits the side of my face, and the kitchen tilts.
The knife goes somewhere. The second man grabs both my arms from behind.
I wrench against him, but the wrapped wrist takes the strain, and the pain is so sudden and so total that I can’t breathe around it.
He knows. He feels me go still, and he knows.
He twists it.
The sound that comes out of me is not something I choose to make. It whites everything out for a second, long enough for the first man to get hold of my collar and shove me hard into the wall. My head connects with the plaster. The room tips sideways.
I hit the floor.
Get up. My mother’s voice, clear as a bell. Get up right now.
I try. I push onto my hand, but my arm shakes and gives out. One of them drags me upright by the back of my shirt, and I swing with my left and miss completely. His knee drives into my stomach, and all the air leaves me at once. I just. Stop. Fighting.
The thought surfaces, very calm, very clear: This is how it ends.
A boot connects with my ribs. My vision goes white.
I stop trying to track what’s happening and just try to breathe, just that, just one breath, and then the next one, and my face is against the floor and it’s cold, and that’s the only thing I can hold on to.
The cold floor. My own breathing. Getting smaller and farther away.
I’m going to die in this apartment. Brooke will find me. I think of that, and I almost want to laugh because of all the things to think about right now.
My ears are ringing. The blows keep coming.
Then, from somewhere I can’t place, there is a sound.
Not a voice. Not a crash.
A growl.
Low and continuous and wrong in a way I have no category for, the kind of sound that reaches into the base of my skull and bypasses thought entirely.
Then the weight on me is gone. Both of them are just gone, and I hear the impact of bodies hitting walls and something breaking and a sound from one of the men that I have never heard a person make before.
Then nothing.