“But you can’t.”

She hadn’t intended to say it. She hadn’t meant to say much of anything, really, but at the same time hadn’t been able to stop herself. The heart jackhammering inside of her chest was demanding she speak, crying out for her to do something, to say something to make this man understand that when he’d offered his assistance, she’d believed him. She’d believed him so completely that she’d put every single one of her hopes in his hands, put them there and then allowed herself to finally begin to relax just a little bit. And now? Now, here he was, sitting across from her in this swanky bar and telling her that she’d been foolish to believe him at all. It was completely shattering, shattering in a way she both didn’t want to admit and couldn’t help feeling with every inch of her being. She felt it so much that she could feel the breath inside of her chest turn to stone. She could feel her eyes growing wider and wider, and then she picked her drink up quickly, hoping desperately that distracting her body would put a stop to the process of mentally falling apart. It was a process she was in the midst of going through. It didn’t work, of course. It only made it feel like there was fire coating the inside of her throat from more than just her disappointment.

“Look, I know it’s a letdown for you, and I don’t say it lightly, but I can, actually. I don’t have a choice.”

“But, of course, you do!” Clara said loudly, so loudly that several of her fellow patrons looked around to see what the source of commotion was. It was terribly embarrassing, for both her and for Weston she was sure, but she couldn’t seem to get ahold of herself. Even as she made the attempt, she could feel the panic rising. She could feel herself on the verge of really, truly losing all hold over herself. All of the sudden, she was completely sure he was simply going to get up and leave, to get up and leave her sitting there without any other hope of where to turn and what to do. She reached out blindly without ever intending to do so and grabbed at his arm, clutching him tightly, even as a part of her screamed that this was too much, that it was the last way on the planet to get a person to do what you wanted, especially when that person was a man. She was right about him leaving, or at least she was pretty sure she was, seeing as he’d already gotten himself to a position that was half standing, and he looked down at her with shock, his brow furrowed and his beautiful eyes clouded with concern.

“Clara,” he said quietly, his demeanor impossibly composed, compared to her inarguably unhinged one, “please.”

“I know, okay? I know, I’ve got to calm down and I’m trying, but you can’t just say something like that and expect me to stay perfectly composed.”

“Nobody said it was going to be easy, Clara. I’m not claiming that it should be. But you need to calm down even so. Getting all worked up isn’t going to help anything. It isn’t going to help you. Believe me, I’ve seen plenty of people go through trying times, and panic never makes those times better. You’ve got to try and keep a good head on your shoulders. You’re going to need it, I’m afraid.”

“Am I? I mean, really? That’s what you’ve got to say? You’re abandoning me, and ‘keep a good head on my shoulders’ is what you’ve got to offer me in consolation? Not awesome, just in case you were wondering.”

Oh God, when was she going to stop? When was she going to be able to get herself well enough under control to shut her mouth and just deal with what he was telling her? She was acting like a jilted lover, for Christ’s sake, and she was doing so with a man she didn’t even know. Besides, it wasn’t like there was actually anything between the two of them. They weren’t lovers at all; they weren’t even passing acquaintances. He was just some cop, with what appeared to her to be a perpetually guilty conscious, who hadn’t been able to resist trying to play knight in shining armor with a complex about trying to save women who couldn’t manage to take care of themselves. She knew this. She knew all of it, and yet she couldn’t make herself just shut up and behave. She felt with everything inside of her that she was about to watch her one genuine hope get up and walk away from her, and it was an image she could hardly stand.

“I’m sorry. Clara, but just who the hell do you think you are?”

“Excuse me? Who the hell do I think I am?”

“That’s right. That’s what I said. I offered to help you, and I meant it, but guess what? Things change. Things change, and believe it or not, everything in this world isn’t about you. I have a job to do, okay? I have a boss, and those things matter. I get that they don’t mean jack shit to you, but they matter to me. When my boss tells me to let a thing go, that’s what I do. Not because I want to even, but because that’s what I have to do.”

“For protocol, right? I mean, that’s pretty much what you’re telling me, isn’t it?”

“Of course, for protocol!” he shouted, getting the attention of the few people left in the bar who hadn’t already caught wind of the fact that there was what appeared to be the beginning of a fantastic couple’s fight in their midst. “Do you understand how important a thing like that is in my line of work? No, let me guess, not even close.”

“Sure, I get it, protocol matters for cops. But are you telling me that it matters more than a person’s life? You’re a cop, Weston, and last time I checked, protecting people was supposed to be the whole point of what you do.”

“You know it is, Clara.”

“Except for when it goes against protocol,” she spat, sounding like a person she didn’t even recognize anymore. “I guess when it winds up being something like that, everyone has to look out for themselves.”

“Do you even hear yourself? Do you know how insane you sound? You know what I think? I think maybe my partner was right. I think you’re just some crazy girl, setting all of this shit up for some kind of sick nod at getting attention. You need help, Clara, and not the kind of help you could get from me.”

More than anything that had happened in this terrible meeting, that comment felt like a physical slap in the face. It was like Weston had rooted around inside of her for the most upsetting, damaging thing he could have said to her and then flung it in her face. If he’d set out to hurt her as badly as he possibly could have, he couldn’t have found a more painful thing to say to her. It left her feeling stuck in place, wanting to say a thousand different things and yet unable to even open her mouth to get a single word out. Even as she struggled to do so, she watched Weston stand the rest of the way up and fish his wallet out of his back pocket. When she saw that happen, she realized that he really did mean to leave her sitting there, completely on her own, with the most terrifying, unreal thing she’d ever encountered in her life. Clara had always considered herself a strong and capable girl, despite the fact that she had a tendency to be a bit of a pushover, but when she finally understood that he really did mean to cut off ties with her and her problem, she started to cry. She wasn’t a crier. She didn’t think of herself as a crier, and yet here she was, tears running down her face in a bar full of swanky people, all of whom were looking at her with mixtures of disdain and pity. She wanted to scream at them, to tell them all to go to hell and look somewhere else, but she could no more speak to them than she could to Weston. Never in her life had she been so terribly humiliated, and yet she felt like she was plastered in her spot, like somebody somewhere with some kind of invisible remote control had put her on pause while allowing everyone around her to go on about their lives.

“You know what?” Weston said quietly, apparently not interested in gaining any more attention for the two of them than he already had. “I feel bad for you, Clara, I really do. But that doesn’t mean you don’t need to get your shit together—because from what I can tell, you absolutely do. I’m sorry you don’t like what I’m telling you, but it doesn’t change anything. I can’t help you. Maybe find a shrink, alright? Maybe that could help you.”

And then he was throwing money down on the table, a wad of cash that would have been enough to pay for the drinks they’d had three times over, and he walked out of the bar. The people sitting closest to her watched him go without making any kind of attempt to hide their gawking, and then they set about whispering about the free show they’d all gotten to witness.

For a moment, Clara was sure that she would fall apart completely, that she would give them a better show than what they’d had already gotten and behave the way Weston had made it sound like she would. He’d said she was crazy, hadn’t she? That what she needed more than a cop; that what she needed was a shrink? He most definitely had said that, and the last thing she wanted to do was stick around and prove him right. With this in mind, she made herself sit where she was, staying at the table until she had finished her drink and could leave as gracefully as possible. She left with her head held high, ignoring whatever residual whispers her exit might have gotten and walking straight out onto the sidewalk where she hailed a cab.

She should have gone straight home, that was what she should have done. She should have gone home and gone to bed and woken up the next day with a renewed dedication for figuring out what in the hell she was supposed to do. The problem was, there was very oftentimes a difference between what a person should do and what they actually did, and in this case, Clara was no exception to the rule. When she got into her cab, complete with a driver who wouldn’t stop trying to look down her dress, instead of telling him to deliver her to her door, she had him take her back to the old neighborhood, back to Frankie’s, which was where everything had essentially gone south, anyway. When she walked inside, she saw Frankie himself and ducked her head down so as not to have to make conversation. She could see that same look of pity in his eyes that had been there when she’d come in the last time, and the last thing she wanted was to have to have a conversation with him about how his boy wonder Weston had turned out to be a letdown, to say the very least. She sat at the end of the bar and ordered her drinks without making eye contact; she did it every single time. And there was definitely more than one drink ordered, there was no two ways around that. Clara had never been the kind of girl to go out and get plastered when she was feeling bad about something, but then again, she’d never been the type of girl to be stalked and have nobody believe her, either. If ever there had been a time in her life to break from her own personal convention and get herself good and wasted, this was it—and that was exactly what she set about doing. One drink after another she stared down at the old wooden bar, willing her mind to finally get so inundated with booze that it would shut up and leave her alone. She made a point of looking nowhere around her, of making eye contact with not another soul in the bar. There would have been no point in it, in the end. She wasn’t a part of the same world as these other people, these people watching their sports and hitting on girls and finding people to go home with by the end of the night. She wasn’t a part of any world at all anymore, not any world aside from the one going on inside of her own head, and if there was a worse place to be, she didn’t know what it was.

“Sweetheart, are you okay?”

Clara looked up quickly, so quickly that with the amount of liquor she had in her system she actually got dizzy, and she saw Frankie himself standing in front of her, exactly the person she’d been hoping would just leave her alone. Served her right for going to his bar, but she hadn’t known where else to go and the old-time neighborhood felt like the only place that made sense.

“Look, I’m not trying to pry, but—”

“I’m alright,” she answered quickly, feeling actual pain at hearing the sound of concern in this older man’s voice. “Really, I’m fine.”

“It’s just that, and please pardon me for saying so, but you don’t look all that fine. My wife likes to tell me that I meddle too much, and I have no doubt she’s right, but it sorta comes with the territory, you know? I see a whole lot of people in here, day in and day out, and when you do that, you get pretty good at telling what it is a person's drinking for.”

“Really? And what would you say I’m here drinking for?”

“I don’t know, a broken heart, maybe? That or somebody went and royally pissed you off, one of the two.”

“Ha! I guess you could say it’s a little bit of both, although probably not in the way you think.”

“You were the girl in here from before, weren’t you?”

Clara looked at him closely, a feeling that he was trying to get an answer to a question he wasn’t quite willing to ask her, and then smiled ruefully. It was a simple question, but it made her want to laugh so badly that if she hadn’t known that he would have thought she was laughing at him, she would have lost it completely.

“I thought you said you saw a lot of people coming in and out of here.”

“I do that, for sure.”

“Then why would you remember one girl in particular? Even more, how could I know what girl you think I am?”

“True,” he answered almost sheepishly, shrugging his shoulders and putting his hands in the air in a kind of a “I’ve been caught” gesture that made him impossible not to like. “You’re a sharp kid, you know that? Definitely got a point. But I remember you, of course I do. From the other night. The girl Weston went to talk to.”

“Oh. Then yes, you would be correct.”

“Let me guess. It didn’t go so well with him helping you.”

It was horrifying, the last thing on the planet she wanted, but she could feel the tears beginning to well up in her eyes once again. She folded her arms in front of herself and clamped her nails down on them, digging them into her skin so hard that when she finally stopped to take notice the next day she would see little crescent moons of blood peppering her skin. She would not cry again in this bar. She would not shed any other tears over Weston and the nasty turn he’d given her. She wasn’t useless, wasn’t incapable, or at least not the last time she’d checked. She had no idea what she was going to do, but she knew that crying over a man she’d hardly even had the chance to get to know wasn’t going to make her any safer.

“What makes you say that?” she answered him as nonchalantly as possible, more because she had to say something than because she really wanted to. “A girl can be upset for all kinds of reasons, can’t she? At least the last time I checked, we aren’t all upset over Weston Daniels.”

She winced even as she was saying it, wishing for probably the umpteenth time that day that she could have just kept her mouth shut. She winced because it wasn’t a kind thing to say, which was generally outside of her nature, but also because the words themselves gave her away for the liar that she was. Never in the history of the world did a girl say a thing like she’d just said, and in the tone she’d said it in, unless there was some kind of hurt there. Frankie knew it, too, because he sighed and wiped one hand across as sweaty brown before leaning forward on the bar and doing everything he could to force her to look him in the eyes.

“Look, there’s something you gotta know about Weston, alright? And believe me when I tell you that he’d probably use his gun on me if he knew I was telling you this.”

“No, really, you don’t have to. I don’t want you telling me anything about him he wouldn’t want me to know.”

“Sure, but you oughta know, if not for nothing else so that you don’t walk away thinking he’s some kind of a giant ass.”

“I never said I thought that.”

“You didn’t, and you didn’t have to. I told you, I don’t only run a bar, you know, I gotta wife. If that ain’t the thing to teach you how to read it on a woman’s face when she’s unhappy, then God help you, you ain’t never gonna learn.”

“Still, you don’t need to explain anything to me, nothing, okay? He’s not even a friend of mine, not somebody I know at all.”

“And you ain’t gonna know him if you don’t listen to what I'm trying to tell ya. Listen, okay? He’s a good boy, Weston is, a good kid, but he’s had a life with rotten luck like you wouldn’t believe. His parents didn’t go so well when they went and his wife—”

“Wife? He’s got a wife?”

She wanted to kick herself for that one just like all of the other. She wanted to pick the words up and shovel them back into her mouth where they belonged, but of course that wasn’t an option. The best she could do now was hope that this Frankie guy hadn’t been able to read anything in her tone other than mild surprise, which was all she had any right to be feeling anyway. And now that she was on the subject, just what the hell was she so taken aback by to hear that Weston had a wife, anyway? Had she thought that he was actually interested in her when he said he was going to try and help her out of her crazy situation? Had she really? A man like that, a man as good looking and successful as he was, of course he was married. She was a total idiot to think anything else, which of course she should have known about herself already. 

“No, sweetheart, that’s the thing. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. He was married. He ain’t no more and not because they got divorced, either. She didn’t make it, see? Not her. Not the baby she was growing inside of her, either. He changed after that, you know? He’s not the same guy as he was before. He don’t always do so good with people these days. It don’t necessarily make a good enough excuse to make up for whatever it is he done to make you cry this way, but at least you know now, alright?”

“Alright,” she whispered, staring down at her hands and feeling nothing but numb. “Thank you for telling me, I guess.”

“I know, right? I mean, it’s not really the kind of thing you wanna know, but I thought maybe you should. Whatever happened, I thought you maybe should know.”

Clara thanked him again and then asked him for her tab, which he stubbornly refused to give her. He’d been the one to put the two of them in each other’s way, he insisted, and seeing as it had ended in tears for her, the drinks were on him. She fought it, but not as hard as she would have if she hadn’t been so desperate to get out of there and into the open air. As it was, she felt like she would die if she didn’t get away; she felt like she couldn’t possibly spend a minute more around all of these other people. There was also the vague, far off possibility that she might get sick at some point after drinking considerably more than she was used to, and so she let Frankie cover the tab and practically ran out into the street, desperate to get away. The only problem, she found, was that once she was away from the bar, she wasn’t entirely sure which “away” she wanted to get to. The idea of going back to the apartment that had been not once—but twice violated by her unknown assailant—was almost more than she could take, and she couldn’t imagine bothering Elsie one more time with her strangest of all crises. She wasn’t even sure that it would have made a difference…even if she had felt like waking Elsie up in the middle of the night was a good idea. There was nothing anyone could have said, nothing anyone could have done to make this situation any better for her. The only person who could have done so had bailed, leaving her with no options aside from her own ingenuity.

“Stop it,” she hissed to herself, shivering a little despite the undeniable warmth of the night. “Just stop it. You’re being an idiot.”

The talking to herself only served to get her more attention than she’d already drawn to herself, which was pretty much the last thing in the world she wanted, and she began to walk, head down and without much of a clue of where it was she was going. She was so much inside of her own head, in fact, that when she looked up and found herself in front of the church that had been the head of her orphanage, she had zero idea of how she’d managed to get herself there. She must have walked for several blocks to do it, and yet had zero memory of having moved for so long. All she knew was that when she looked up at the church, she felt like screaming and rejoicing at the same time. Because what she’d really done was come home, wasn’t it? There was no warm parents’ house to return to, no mother’s or father’s shoulder to rest her head on and have a good cry. She had nothing but this cold, stone building and the gardens beside it she’d always loved to wander through. It was those gardens she entered now, letting her hand graze along the somehow still familiar greenery as she went. She felt a strange sense of calm wash over her, a feeling that while she was in this place there was nothing that could hurt her, nothing that could touch her in any way at all. Perhaps it was this almost dazed sense of isolation that caused her to let her guard down, that along with the serious amounts of booze still running through her system, but either way let her guard down was exactly what she did. It was the last thing a girl having been through the traumas of her last month should have done and yet she did it anyway. She was a smart girl, and yet she did it anyway. It something it would take a very long time for her to forgive herself for.

“Oh! Wait!”

It was the stupidest thing she could have said, although that didn’t stop her from saying it. It made it sound as if whoever had just run up behind her and knocked her to the ground in the dense, lush greenery had done so on accident, and what were the odds of that? A hit like the one she’d just suffered couldn’t possibly have been a mistake. It was too hard, too direct. She felt all of the wind get knocked out of her body as the dirt beneath her filled her mouth. She felt as if she must surely suffocate, as if she would choke on the earth infiltrating her orifice, and all the while whoever had knocked her over remained on top of her, pinning her down and making it all but impossible for her to move a muscle. To make matters worse, she could feel the hot breath of her assailant on her neck, making her skin crawl and igniting inside of her such an urge to scream that it was almost a good thing that her mouth was filled with dirt. She had a feeling screaming would not help her make it out of this attack alive, certainly not when she could feel the cold steel of a knife digging into her rib cage. Her mind whirled, desperate to find some way out of this, and yet it was still slow and sluggish with the alcohol she should never have tried to anesthetize herself with in the first place.

“I’m gonna let you know right now, if you try and scream you’re a dead girl. Understand?”

Clara did her best to nod and felt that she couldn’t move even enough to do that. She was desperate to comply, desperate to make this man with the raspy, gravelly voice be sure that she wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize her own safety, but she simply couldn’t do it. She was paralyzed, whether with fear, with the weight of the man still on top of her, or with both, she couldn’t yet be completely sure.

“You better answer me, bitch, or you’re gonna feel this knife in a whole other way. And trust me, it ain’t gonna be too good for you if that’s the way this goes. Believe me when I say that, sister.”

“Yes!” Clara managed to gasp out, gagging on the dirt and convulsing with the effort of speaking. “Yes, I understand!”

“And if I get off of you, are you gonna be a good little girl?”

“Yes!” She gasped again, helpless to stop the flow of hot, angry tears that had begun to course down her cheeks.

“Good, that’s good. That’s what I was hoping to hear. Now get up.”

Her attacker got up quickly, as if it were the easiest thing in the world, and pulled her up roughly by the back of her head as he did so. It was by far the roughest treatment of her life, and her entire body cried out for her to make it stop, to just comply with whatever this animal wanted so that she could make it stop already.

“Turn around, and keep your mouth shut. You don’t talk unless I tell you to, got it? That means a direct question. I ask you one of those, and I want an answer. Anything else? Keep your fucking mouth closed.”

Clara nodded, turning around while she did so just as she’d been instructed to do. She wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting when she turned, but the first thing she was struck by was an insane wave of disappointment over the fact that this strange, dangerous man was wearing a mask. She had no right to be surprised by it, let alone disappointed, and yet those were precisely the things she felt rushing through her because now she’d never be able to describe the guy to anyone, even if there had been a person she could get to both listen to her and take her seriously, both of which were pretty big “ifs.” The only things about the man that stood out were his height and his eyes, and although she was not at all convinced that either of those two things would be enough to make a difference in any kind of attempted description, she clung to memorizing them all the same. She had to do something, and freaking out and behaving in a way that was entirely useless simply wasn’t an option. And so she noted meticulously his unusual height, close to six foot five she estimated, and strikingly blue and bloodshot eyes. She did her best to memorize every little line etched around those eyes and knew without a shadow of a doubt that she would be able to draw them herself if only she could make it out of the garden alive in order to do so.

“Do you know why I’m here?”

“You’re mugging me?”

“Cute,” he snarled, grabbing her tightly by the shoulders and shaking her roughly, “you wanna play with me, sweetheart? Try it, see how far it gets you.”

“Well then, I don’t know! I don’t know why you’re here, how would I know that? I was just going for a walk, and then you jumped me.”

“Things are only going to keep getting worse. This should be you’re proof of that.”

As if to drive his point home, he let go of her with one hand and then immediately used that hand to smack her across the face, hitting her so hard that he actually drove her head backwards, made it rock like a delicate little flower on a stem that was about to break. She didn’t need a mirror to know that her lip had split and was now trickling blood down her chin. She could taste it inside of her mouth; she could taste the copper of her own blood mingled with her ever increasing terror. When she looked back at him, after she was able to get her head cleared from the fog the hit had caused, she saw something in his eyes that made her fear complete and all-encompassing. He was happy, maybe even turned on by what he’d just done. She was now absolutely sure that he was there in relation to the other atrocities, the slaughtered pet, the strange pile of information left for her to find, but she was sure of one other thing as well. Whatever his role was in this whole awful ordeal, he had enjoyed hurting her just now, which meant it would take a hell of a lot less to get him to do it the next time. She needed to be careful here, extremely careful if she was going to make it out of here without having suffered any kind of serious damage to herself. Because this was not a man entirely in control of himself, and if given the appropriate level of provocation, he would gladly slit her throat and go about his day. He would surely get himself into all sorts of trouble with the person who’d sent him after her, but that didn’t mean he would be able to control himself. She needed to be careful, more careful than she’d ever been in all of her life.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, struggling to keep from lifting her hand to her mouth, not wanting to show even that small sign of weakness now. “I’ll do whatever you say.”

“Now if that were true we wouldn’t be in this situation to begin with, now would we?”

“I don’t understand—?”

Bam! Another slap to the mouth, another rocking back of the head. Her first instinct was to lash out and hit him back, an instinct she was unfortunately able to get in check before she actually did anything. He was pushing her, but it was what he was trying to do, and she was smart enough to realize it despite the drinking and the total disorientation of being attacked. He was trying to bait her, and there wasn’t a chance in hell that she was going to fall for it.

“You do understand, you little bitch! You absolutely understand.”

“You’re right,” she said quietly, speaking with a calm she hadn’t even known she had inside of her. “I apologize.”

“Good,” he snarled, looking like he was anything but pleased by her compliance, “I’m glad to see you’re catching on. Now here’s the deal, so listen up. You’re going to get a message detailing what’s expected of you. Either do it or wait and see what happens next. Up to you sweetheart, but I’d think long and hard before you try and pull anything. Because we’re watching you. The boss man’s always got eyes on you and he’s gonna know if you do something stupid.”

And then, before she could say anything at all, he had let her go and was walking briskly in the opposite direction from her. For a crazy minute, she thought she was going to call after him, to give him a message to take to his “boss man” and then to take off running. That would have been just asking for a beating, or quite possibly something far worse, but her adrenaline was pumping so hard through her body that it was difficult to keep herself sane, let alone quiet. She actually had to clamp a hand over her mouth, wincing as she did so and gagging a bit over the renewed taste of blood in her mouth initiated by the contact. She stood that way, completely still, until the awful man was gone and for a long while afterwards as well. It wasn’t until she had waited for long enough that she almost couldn’t believe the man had ever been there at all that she allowed herself to move a muscle, at which point she collapsed into a heap on the ground. It had to have been at least thirty minutes from the time the man had jumped her to the time when she fell, and not a soul had given it any notice. It felt like that couldn’t possibly be so, but then again, they were in New York City, and there were people being hurt all of the time. There was nothing special about her plight and no superhero waiting to come and scoop her up and deliver her to safety. If she was going to have that, she was going to have to go out and get it for herself, and there was only one way she could think of. Only one way and although she felt far from ideal about it, she was also pretty sure she had no other choice. She pulled her phone out of her purse with hands that were shaking and dialed the only number that made any sense to her at all.

“I know it’s late. I’m sorry. I didn’t know what else to do.”