Mia POV
I don't sleep.
I know before I even lie down that sleep is not happening tonight, but I go through the motions anyway change my clothes, turn off the main light, lie on top of the covers with my phone on the pillow beside me and my eyes open and the ceiling doing absolutely nothing useful above me.
The woman's voice plays on a loop.
The next body in that alley will be yours.
I keep returning to the part that bothers me most, which is not the threat itself but the certainty in it. She was not angry when she said it. She was not emotional. She delivered it the way you tell someone their food order will be ready in ten minutes factual, mildly inconvenient, completely routine.
That is the kind of certainty that comes from having done it before.
I stare at the ceiling.
I think about Luca walking out my door three hours ago. His face before he left that one moment of something I refused to read. I think about how he said you're already in the middle of it and how I told him to leave anyway, which was the correct decision, the only decision, the decision any reasonable person in my situation would have made.
I think about how correct decisions have never once made me feel less alone.
The clock on my phone reads 11:43. Then midnight. Then 1:17.
I watch the shadows under my front door for moving feet.
At 1:52 I give up on horizontal and sit up against the headboard with my knees pulled to my chest. I draft a mental list of practical things I can do tomorrow change my number, ask Rosa for a few days off, look into whether I can stay with anyone. I do not have a long list of people to call, which has never bothered me as much as it bothers me right now.
My mom used to say I collected strays instead of friends. She said it like it was a character flaw she had mostly made peace with. I brought home three cats, a dog, a bird with a broken wing, and once memorably a boy from school who had nowhere to go for Thanksgiving.
Apparently I have not grown out of it.
I am thinking about that about my mom, about the bird, about the specific look on her face that was equal parts exasperated and proud when the knock comes.
Three short. Then two.
I am off the bed before I have decided to move.
I stand at the door.
Every smart thing I own tells me not to open it. Unknown knockers in the middle of the night have not historically been good news for me this week. The chain is on. The deadbolt is locked. I do not have to open this door. I could stand here and wait and eventually whoever it is will leave.
I look through the peephole.
The hallway is dark except for the overhead light that flickers the way it has flickered since I moved in. But there is enough light to see him. Standing square to the door, jacket on, one hand in his pocket and one hanging at his side. He is not looking at the peephole. He is looking at the floor, just briefly a two-second downward look that I have never seen on him before.
He looks like a man who is not sure he should have come back but came back anyway.
I undo the chain.
I open the door.
There is blood on his sleeve. Not a lot a dark patch on the left forearm, not his wound reopened, something newer. His knuckles on his right hand are split. He is otherwise completely composed in the way that tells me composed is a choice he is making continuously and not a state he is currently in.
I do not ask about the blood.
I do not ask about whatever happened between my door and wherever he has been for the past four hours. Some part of me understands instinctively that there are pieces of his world I do not have the context for yet, and asking about blood at 2 a.m. falls into the category of answers I am not ready to receive.
He looks at me. His jaw is tight. Something in his eyes has changed from this morning a new layer of it, something harder and colder sitting on top of whatever was already there.
"They know you exist," he says.
His voice is quiet. Level. It is not a dramatic delivery which somehow makes it worse. Drama can be managed. This is just fact.
"They know your address. Your name. Your workplace." A pause. "They were going to move on you tonight. I handled it."
I look at the blood on his sleeve.
"You came back to tell me that?" I ask.
Something shifts in his face. "I came back," he says, "because I am not leaving you here."
The sentence is simple. Eight words. He says it the way he says everything stripped down, no decoration, just the thing itself.
And it lands somewhere deep in my chest where the loneliness lives and just sits there, warm and terrible and completely unwelcome.
I hate how much it lands.
I hate that no one has said anything like it to me in so long that eight plain words from a man I have known for six days are enough to make my throat tight. I hate that my eyes are doing something I need them to stop doing immediately.
I blink it back.
"How bad is it?" I ask.
"Bad enough that staying here isn't an option."
"Where would we go?"
"Somewhere safe." He meets my eyes. "I give you my word."
I look at him at the split knuckles and the borrowed shirt and the man underneath all of it who knocked on my door at 2 a.m. instead of making this someone else's problem.
"Your word," I say. "From a man who wouldn't tell me his last name for five days."
"Ferrante," he says. Just like that. "My name is Luca Ferrante. And I will not let anything happen to you."
I open the door wider.
He steps inside.
I look past him just a reflex, just one last check of the hallway and my eyes go to the end of the street below, visible through the stairwell window.
A black car. Lights off. Engine running.
Not moving. Just sitting.
Watching the building.
I close the door.
Lock the deadbolt.
Put the chain on.
And turn to find Luca already at the window, looking down at the same car.
"How long has it been there?" I ask.
"Since I arrived." His voice is very quiet. "They let me come up."
I go still.
"They let you" I process that. "They wanted you inside the building."
He looks at me.
"They're not here for me," he says. "They're here for you."