On the seventh day, he came.

Not in the night this time. Not wearing a mask either.

I’d been expecting the delivery man—Carl, I think this one was—so I opened the door when the knock came.

I could do that. Most of the time. Sometimes my hands weren’t even shaking on the doorknob, my heart not racing, or my breathing shallow. But this was not sometimes, and all three things were happening. It was a miracle I was able to open my door at all. But I needed to. The supplies were dwindling, and the weather was looking to pack it in in the coming days, which meant I might be isolated out here for weeks.

No one would look for me. No one would care.

Which would’ve been preferable, if not for the ice blue eyes that met my trembling gaze.

I didn’t scream, slam the door in his face or run.

I didn’t scream because there would’ve been no point. My nearest neighbor was about seven miles away and likely didn’t know I existed. Plus screaming wouldn’t help. It never did.

Didn’t slam the door in his face for the same reason I didn’t run. I was frozen in place. With fear or shock, I didn’t know, but my brain knew that even if I wasn’t, such things were stupid. Where would I run to? My house chained me in; there was nowhere to go. He knew that. I knew that. So I stayed rooted to the spot.

He blinked as if he expected a cocktail of these three things.

His eyelashes were long up close, dark frames to his piercing eyes. He didn’t have the mask on, and he was as hauntingly beautiful as I expected. But a bad kind of beautiful—like Christopher.

His jaw was clean-shaven, angular, strong. His nose perfectly symmetrical, which meant he either hadn’t been in many fights or hadn’t lost any.

His hair was almost as white as the snow behind him, slicked back like ice to a small bun at the small of his neck.

He wore an expensive suit and wool overcoat, melding over the muscled body that inhabited my entire doorway. It was a surprise he could even step in. But he could.

He did.

I scuttled back as his scent once more assaulted my nostrils with its allure.

He politely shuffled the snow off his shoes before he stepped into the house, closing the door quietly behind him, all the time watching me.

“Are you back to kill me now?” I asked, voice flat yet shaking.

He looked at me a beat more, then brushed past me into my bedroom.

I followed him on wooden legs, my slippers scuffing behind his Italian loafers.

He bypassed my bed and went straight for my closet, a small walk-in, near empty. I left with just the clothes on my back and hadn’t acquired many more. One didn’t exactly need cocktail dresses when she was staying inside all day. Unless she was Miss Havisham, of course.

My style lent directly toward thick black leggings, thermals, soft and oversized wool cardigans, and Ugg boots. The layers were for warmth, but also for protection. I was never without them, even in the middle of summer when my ancient air conditioner labored against the heat. I had the house, but I could feel the pressure of the outside swelling against the roof, seeping through the cracks. The layers were just more protection.

So the walk-in was near empty, but the man—my assassin—found the one duffel I owned and threw it on the bed.

I looked at the bag.

As did he.

Then I looked at him.

His gaze found mine.

“Pack a bag,” he ordered.

I blinked. Didn’t move.

Neither did he, until almost a minute passed.

I counted. Forty-eight seconds of silence, yawning on through the room.

“Pack a bag,” he repeated, voice hard.

I swallowed sandpaper. “What are you talking about?”

He sighed, long and purposeful. “I’m talking about what I said. Pack a bag.”

“Why?”

“So you can have more than moth-eaten sweaters and saggy leggings to wear in the snow,” he snapped. “Though it seems that’s all you’ve got.” He glanced at the woeful excuse for a closet. “We’ll rectify that, once we get out of here.” He looked to the duffel. “Pack.”

I blinked at him again, this time rapidly. “Once we get out of here?” I repeated.

He nodded once, tersely. “Quickly.”

I swallowed, crossed my arms. “I don’t get out of here, just in case you hadn’t noticed,” I said quietly. “And if I did, it wouldn’t be with the man who might kill me.”

“Might is better than certain,” he said, not bothering to reassure me. “And certain is what the men who come here will be about your death. You can trust that, solnyshko.”

The endearment jolted me for a moment. Harsh and cold, it didn’t sound like it belonged in the sentence, or to the man gazing at me with mildly hostile indifference.

Russian, if I wasn’t mistaken. I’d taken some in high school. My parents made sure I was fluent in two foreign languages—Mandarin and Spanish—and had at least passable knowledge in three more.

Not a hint of an accent, though. He was either first-generation American, or he’d excelled at getting rid of any defining characteristics about his voice.

I betted on the latter.

There was something dark, foreign, alien about him. He was not from here.

My stomach churned at the certainty of what came before the endearment.

Had I not known it would come? My death?

“Well I guess they’ll come,” I said, voice small.

Anger, real hot anger, flickered from the depths of his glacier. “What?” he hissed.

“They’ll come,” I repeated. “And you’re right, my death will be certain. Most likely slow.” I glanced to the bag. “Because I know there is no way I’m packing that, or leaving the house.” I paused. “I can’t.”

He undid his suit jacket, for freedom of movement, I assumed. Because then he went to my closet and yanked out every item in there, systematically stuffing them into the duffel.

I stood, feet glued to the floor, tongue glued to the roof of my mouth and watched. Dumbly silent, letting him pile my meager belongings into a single bag.

He glanced up. “I’m assuming you have a pharmacy full of medication inside your bathroom that you’ll need to remain whatever passes as functional for you?”

I blinked. “Drugs?”

He nodded once. “Antipsychotics, antidepressants. Uppers. Downers. Valium, Lorazepam, Prozac.” He listed them off with impatience and malice.

“I don’t take those,” I said in a small voice. I hated how small. How every part of me shrank in his presence, not that I was large to begin with. Not that I was strong. But I would’ve liked to have thought I would’ve had more… fight in a situation like this.

But as I learned repeatedly about myself, I didn’t have any fight. I only had failure.

He tapped his forefinger against his pants leg. The movement may have been a spasm on anyone else. A minor display of annoyance, perhaps. But I was certain that, for him, that little twitch was equivalent to him punching through a wall.

I didn’t know why I knew this. I just did.

“No wonder you’re fucking like this,” he muttered, almost to himself.

I found it. Whatever remained of my strength, lying amongst the broken pieces of me, the accusation and cruelty in his voice. His utter disgust in what he thought he’d surmised about me.

“You have no idea what I’ve been through,” I hissed.

“No, I don’t,” he agreed. “I will assume it was horrible. Ugly. Evil. Unfortunately, horrible, ugly and evil aren’t surprising, nor uncommon.” He stepped over to my nightstand, fingering the book lying facedown, open. “In fact, it would be near impossible to find a person not touched with horror in their lives. Some are only brushed, others grazed, while a lot are stabbed, burned, filled with it.”

He picked it up, dog-eared it and shoved it in the bag. I didn’t have time to inspect this strangely thoughtful gesture, as his cruelty and indifference returned. Not that it had ever left.

His eyes focused on me as he zipped the bag. “So that isn’t special, nor is it an excuse to give up. Because there are two options after horror. You survive. You don’t. Two, that’s it. No third option. You somehow found a way to dangle between the two. It’s not indefinite. You have to choose, or your hand will be forced. I’m the one forcing that hand right now. So quite frankly, solnyshko, I don’t give a fuck what you went through, because you’re not special. People have gone through less and worse, and they’ve survived. I care not about your past, but I will ensure you have a future. Why, even I don’t know. But my decision is made, and I do not sway from decisions easily.”

And with that said, he hoisted the duffel bag onto his shoulder, striding across the room, snatching my arm and dragging me along with him.

Once I figured out his destination, I began to fight.

“Let me go!” I screamed, squirming, wrenching, yanking myself from him. It was all no help, his entire hand circling the top of my skeletal arm—I was weak from malnutrition and… life. So he continued to drag me to the harbinger of my doom.

The front door.

“I can’t go out there!” I screamed.

He stopped abruptly, hand on the handle. “You can,” he said. “You can because you are and if you don’t, you’re dead. Don’t you understand that?”

I sucked in an uneasy breath as sweat beaded at the top of my forehead. “Of course I understand that,” I hissed in between breaths. “It doesn’t change anything. I cannot leave.” The thought of it, the proximity to the door, made my stomach roil painfully and violently, and my vision flickered.

He inspected me, with disdain and something else. “You cannot die,” he declared, with something that seemed like ferocity.

And then he turned the knob.

And then there I was, descending into madness, tumbling and hitting every part of my psyche along the way. The pressure of the open air suffocated me, my lungs tightened, everything spun as he dragged me.

I tumbled after him, tripping on loose gravel and ice, unable to fall because his grip hindered that. My skin was pulsating with the force with which I was trying to escape it. Shallow shafts of air escaped my mouth. I tried to suck more back in, but it didn’t work. The outside air wouldn’t work. Only safe, inside air would keep me oxygenated.

This was poison.

The world around me was a blur. I catalogued it in perfect detail from the safety of my window, watching it, committing it to memory. But now there was no pane of glass, no protection, so black spots danced in my vision. I saw the dark flash of a vehicle, heard the slam of a door.

Descending into madness. No, I’m not descending. I was already there, standing inside the prison my mind had made for me. I was already there and denying it. This is just reality.

And on that thought, the moment he snatched my arm with brutal force, shoving me into the car, I succumbed to reality.

In other words, my panic attack deprived my brain of oxygen, so I passed out.

Where am I going to be when I wake up? I thought, yelling at the darkness. Am I going to wake up?

* * *

I did wake up, but I wasn’t sure if I was in this world or the next. Surely, if I was dead, waking up wouldn’t feel like I was a corpse, would it?

My heart was still beating, because it was thundering painfully and rapidly in my chest cavity.

I wasn’t in my room, in my home, I knew that immediately. Because there was a cinderblock that settled on my chest when a sliver of air snaked through my nostrils.

It smelled wrong, this air. Clean, sterile almost. Cold. I knew I should panic. I wanted to panic. But there was an incorporeal quality to that panic. It couldn’t quite actualize. My thoughts were too soft at the edges. Not quite urgent enough.

I was lucid enough to realize I should be hyperventilating, screaming, if my voice wasn’t trapped somewhere below my throat. But there wasn’t a need for that.

My eyes found the dark wood of a ceiling, intricately carved. Old, shiny. Very clean. I could smell the musk of the wood, trickling down through the air to meet my senses.

Or maybe I was dreaming that, the quality of my wakefulness not quite solid enough to be confirmed as awake.

I must be on something.

I should’ve cared about that too. Since I discovered my condition, since it slowly began to suffocate me when I ventured into the outside world before I’d been sequestered into my house, I had been adamant there would be no drugs.

I hadn’t even been sure why at the time. Maybe because of the quality to my thoughts right then. The easiness, the numbness.

I didn’t deserve to feel that.

For my problems to have a cotton candy quality to them. To not have them eat up my insides every day. No, I didn’t deserve that. I deserved what madness and pain I’d spiraled into.

But now I had no choice.

Someone had made the choice for me.

I glanced down. White sheets. Thick, downy, expensive white coverlet. I was only inhabiting a small space of the large bed I was lying in. The spare room yawned across the mattress, showing me just how much I’d shrunk. The ornate bed frame matched the ceiling. I weakly tried to lift my arm to play with the subtle patterns of the coverlet. For a second, I was convinced I was a puppet and someone else was pulling my strings, like the one attached to my arm. Then I realized the clear tube was going right into my skin and was attached to a clear bag of liquid.

IV.

It looked out of place in the room, which was large and decorated in English Country—Royalty Edition.

A man stood by a large dresser, arms folded.

I’d thought he was a statue at the beginning, he was that still.

Then I remembered a man that still. The blinking statue.

My assassin.

His eyes met mine as my heart labored against the medication keeping it steady.

He didn’t say anything, just continued to watch me with his empty stare.

Is it empty? No, it might be so full of something that it just looks empty. It’s crafted that way.

I was silent too, but that was because my mouth was cotton wool. Dry. My lips were heavy, unable to open, to form words. I just stared at him, dumbly mute, maybe terrified mute. Because I was terrified. Beyond that. Underneath all the layers of whatever was tamping down the panic in my system, I was unraveling. Completely. Coming out of my own skin. But I was doing it without actually doing it. That didn’t make sense. No, it didn’t, but it did. Like drowning, but someone had tricked you into thinking water was oxygen, so you drowned calmly. Without knowing it.

But no one could drown indefinitely.

No one could dangle between life and death.

A man, a strange man, was suddenly at my bedside. Maybe he’d walked up and I’d been so deep inside myself I hadn’t seen. Maybe I’d been too focused on the empty—or was it full—ice eyes that were focused on me.

I didn’t see him until he was there, right there beside me. He was tall, thin, spindly. Nice sweater. Expensive. Glasses that made me want to say the word spectacles. Because those distinguished people wore spectacles. And he was distinguished, with his fancy sweater and combed hair and his hooked nose. And his spectacles.

His eyes, magnified by glass, focused on me. They were kind. But a cold type of kind, detached.

Then he looked down.

In slow motion, I did the same, as cold and dry fingers attached themselves to my wrist. Gentle but firm. They stayed there for a second. Or more. I didn’t have quite a good grasp on time. It was slippery. Then the cold and dry grip was gone.

His mouth moved.

I was still underwater because I didn’t hear. Or maybe because my thundering heartbeat was drowning it out. Because it was coming, panic that was only dimmed. It was the deep breath before the dragon breathed fire. And it was fire in my throat and lungs as it came over me, the reality. I was out of my safe space. In a stranger’s house. With a stranger’s hands on me. With an assassin’s eyes on me.

The outside world would swallow me up, but not before setting me on fire first.

And then there was pain, a small prick compared to the burning, but it followed with a cooling sensation.

“Cotton candy,” I managed to murmur as I settled my gaze on the syringe exiting my arm.

It was empty.

That was nice.

Whatever was in it was now in me, and it was nice.

No more immediate fire. It was saved for later. But later didn’t seem quite as urgent and terrifying anymore. In fact, a sleep would be nice. My eyes dreamily landed on those full-empty ones. The ice ones. But the ice felt warm now. And it followed me to my dreams, that ice.

* * *

Him

He closed the door quietly behind them, though he wasn’t sure why. There was no need for quiet, not with the cocktail of drugs she’d been administered. He found himself doing it anyway, and speaking in a soft tone as they walked down the hall.

“You need to fix it,” he said. He commanded. He worked like that, not in questions or requests, in commands.

His doctor looked at him sideways. “By it, you mean her, I’m assuming?”

He nodded once, resisting the urge to clench his fist. Such a gesture would display emotion, weakness. He didn’t do that. Physical tics were one of the first tells of discomfort. Of lack of control. It was one of the first things he’d mastered.

“Oliver, you cannot fix what she has,” Evan said, stopping at the front door.

He glared at the man for using his name—not his real one, but still. Maybe he was as close as he could be with the doctor, who knew as much as he could know without Oliver having to take him out, but he didn’t like the familiarity in his tone. “You can. Give her a pill. Or a lot of them. Whatever it takes,” he said, voice cold, dangerous.

The doctor—Evan—regarded him in that probing way that Oliver didn’t much like. “There is no pill for this. Not for the cause, at least,” he sighed. “Especially not at this stage. We can only keep her sedated. You’ve triggered an immense psychological episode by forcing a woman suffering agoraphobia from her home. Such things should never be done under duress, which is the only circumstance in which you work.” He eyed him. “Such things definitely shouldn’t be done in a matter of hours. Gradual exposure in addition to aggressive therapy and mood stabilizers are what’ve had the most success in phasing the agoraphobic back into the world. I’m not a psychologist, but she’s near comatose from the psychological trauma of this.” He sighed again. “There is no fix for her, not from me, or you. Whatever is the root cause of this, whatever she was hiding from, it’s found her. And it’s up to her whether she lets it devour her.”

This time, Oliver did clench his fists, and he couldn’t control it. Nor could he control the reaction he was having to Evan’s words. Frustration, surely. Because he was infuriated at the things he couldn’t control. He eliminated such things, because they were threats.

But he’d tried that with her. And he couldn’t do that.

Instead, he’d brought her here. To his home. Most likely the one place she’d be safe from his client. But she wasn’t safe from him. His reaction was too emotional. Too uncontrollable. The mere clenching of his fist told him that.

“Oliver,” Evan probed.

He snapped his gaze to him. The man refused to flinch and held his eyes.

“She needs to be committed,” he said.

“Not an option,” Oliver hissed.

Evan pursed his lips. “Well then, only time will tell,” he mused, knowing Oliver well enough to know there was no swaying him.

Oliver closed the door behind the doctor when he left.

“Only time will tell,” he repeated.

Yes, it would. It would tell whether Evan had a patient to come back to, or if Oliver had another addition to his collection.