When the soft knock sounded at the door, Fiona’s heart tried to break out of her chest. She quietly approached the peephole and looked through, only to find no one in sight. A breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding released, and she wrote the noise off as kids or someone’s bag hitting the door as they went by. It wasn’t completely unusual for something like that to happen.

Just as she was about to take up her stance to begin running through her moves, the noise sounded again, but this time, it was stronger, louder. She went back over, ready to tell the kids that they needed to treat their neighbors’ doors with respect and not go around knocking on them, but the sense of foreboding that overcame her made her stop in her tracks. Before going any further toward the front door of her apartment, she rummaged through her purse and grabbed the miniature taser she kept hidden within.

Now she felt ready. Even if Tommy was on the other side of the door, she’d be able to handle him. As she looked out of the peephole again, all she could see was an empty hallway. The sound of something scraping along the wall had her opening the door so she could yell at the kids. It wasn’t kids, though.

Tommy stood there, tall and wiry as he always had been, and the next few seconds happened faster than she could process. She’d raised the taser, only to have it pushed out of her hand as if it was nothing more than a paper airplane. Her whole body was shoved back into the apartment so forcefully that she stumbled and fell, smacking her head on the coffee table as she went down. Everything spun around her; the world seemed to be topsy-turvy.

The door slammed behind Tommy, and she was still trying to figure out which way was up when his voice growled above her. “Should’ve known you wouldn’t’ve liked your present. I wanted to make nice, to remind you how good it was, but you just threw it all away like the bitch you are.”

“Tommy . . .” she started, but his hand was around her throat before she could speak any further.

“I loved you; hell, I still love you, but you’re just out here whoring about, showing your titties in the window for any man to see. Do you know how many plans I’d made for us? How much effort I’d put into training you already? I put my heart and soul into you. You were my greatest project, and we would have made the perfect team. No one would even mention Bonnie and Clyde when they had us to think about instead, but you threw it all away.”

His rage seemed to abate momentarily as she clawed at his hands, terror making her forget most of what she’d learned. She knew she’d drawn blood. She could feel his skin getting slick with it, smell the metallic scent of it in the air mingling with the pervasive odor of his cigarillo. As a breath squeezed past the constriction of his hands, her brain kicked back into gear, and her hands stopped clawing and punched out instead, striking him directly in the solar plexus.

Tommy collapsed immediately, and she shoved him to one side, springing to her feet and making a break for the door. His hand snaked out and grabbed her by the ankle, yanking her back down to the ground. As she kicked and struggled to get free, he pulled her closer and closer to him as though she weighed nothing. When he reached for her other leg, she kicked out, but missed.

He released her foot and pushed himself to his feet faster than she could. It was exactly the advantage he had been looking for as he positioned himself between the front door, the only exit, and Fiona. She wanted to scream and rage, but she knew if she did that, he would only beat her even more, at least until the cops showed up, but she honestly wasn’t sure if she would survive his rage.

“Come back to me. It’ll be good again, and then we won’t be stuck in this cycle. I have the perfect victim picked out back home, exactly what you need to understand what I’m talking about.”

“Tommy,” she croaked, “I’m never going to kill someone with you. If I had thought you were serious earlier in the relationship, then I would have left you sooner.”

He snarled at her. “Who else would want you, you fat cow? Huh? I’m all you’ve got, all you’ll ever get.”

She started backing up as he spoke, hoping there was a way she could lock herself out on the balcony of her tiny apartment and separate herself from his crazy somehow.

“You think most men want something like that?” He gestured to her body. “Please, most men wouldn’t even want to look at you right now, let alone touch you. I’m the best and only man you’ll ever have, and all I’m asking is that you come home and be my partner.”

“You’re a fucking psychopath,” she whispered.

“I’m what now?” He laughed, and she knew she’d just signed her own death warrant. “If I’m crazy, it’s only because you make me this way. If you hadn’t’ve left, then none of this nonsense woulda happened. I’d given you my favorite knife. Don’t you know what that meant to me?”

The memory flashed over her mind’s eye. She’d thought it was a necklace or a bracelet in the long black box. The red bow that held it shut looked exactly like the one they used in those jewelry commercials she saw on TV. When she’d opened it to find the silver of a knife winking at her in the light from the candles on her birthday cake, she’d thought it was a joke. When he’d explained that this was the knife he’d grown up using, the knife that he’d trained with and experimented with day after day, she knew everything she’d been trying to brush off as his quirks and peculiar interests was just the warning signs for the crazy that he’d hidden from her in the beginning. She had left him the next day without a word. Fiona had called the police, tried to convince them of what he had told her, but they just laughed her off. After all, Tommy was a certified member of the good ol’ boys club, and was friends with a lot of the cops in the town they lived in. One of them had promised to go over to his place, take a look around, but when she never got a call back, she knew they hadn’t found anything. Looking back on it now, it probably hadn’t been the best way to end things, but what else was she going to do with a man who gave her a knife as a present, one that he had definitely used to kill animals and most likely people, too.

Cool air tickled her back, chilling the sweat that ran down her spine. She was close to the back door now. They both knew there was no way for her to get down from there, so he wouldn’t expect her to go through. Having seen the anger in him, though, she knew that it would only be a matter of minutes before he smashed the glass door and had her cornered. Her mind raced frantically, trying to come up with options.

The whole reason she’d been forcing herself to go to the gym was so she could have the muscles needed to get out of this very situation, the one that had haunted her nightmares from city to city as she’d tried to escape him. Tommy took a step toward her, the menace radiating off him in waves. Her hand scrambled against the door behind her.

“There’s nowhere to go, little lamb.” He crooned his favorite nickname for her, sending another wave of revulsion down her spine.

Her fingers snaked around the handle, trying to flip the latch as quietly as she could, while her heart hammered in her chest. How was she going to prevent him from following her? The thought raced around in her head like a child on a sugar high. Finally, the door was unlocked. All she had to do was get through it and she’d have an exit, one way or another.

Fiona yanked it open behind her and stepped backward before slamming it closed. She wasn’t quite fast enough, though, and Tommy’s hand caught it, but not before the full force of the door hit it, trapping it momentarily between the door and the frame. A blue streak left his mouth as he protectively pulled his hand toward his body. The angry red marks and strange shapes of his fingers let her know that the door had done more damage than she had initially thought. There wasn’t time to waste, though. An injury like that would only make him angrier and wouldn’t slow him down for more than a moment.

The railing of the balcony poked into her back, and she realized that the whole time she’d been watching him, her body had been trying to get away. Now she was faced with a choice—find some way to jam the door, or climb over the railing and, hopefully, jump to the balcony below.

His eyes lifted from his hand to her, and she knew that the choice was an illusion. She needed to get off the balcony any way she could. Before he’d made a move, she swung her legs over so that she was balancing on the very edge with her toes under the railings as her hands tightly gripped the top.

This was it. Her moment of succeed or fail and possibly, no, probably, die. She switched her grip from the top to the spindles of the railings that connected to the bottom, and moved into a squatting position. The door in front of her opened, and Tommy came out.

“Really think that’ll help?”

“If it gets me away from you . . .” she breathed as she extended one leg down.

He kicked her fingers, smashing them between his steel-toed boot and the metal bar of the railing. “There, now we match.”

She shrieked in pain and withdrew the hand when he let up on the pressure. “I could just kick the other one and let you fall. You’d probably knock yourself out, and then I could just put you in my truck and take you home.”

The thought terrified her, and she knew that he would do exactly that if she didn’t move. She swung her other leg down and tried to move her feet toward the balcony below, but they struggled to find purchase. When his boot landed on the hand that was still wrapped around the railing, she screamed bloody murder. Lights flicked on in rooms around her, but she knew by the time anyone did anything, it would be too late.

He kept her trapped by her fingers for a moment, making the trajectory of her swing useless, before her weight became too much. Fiona’s body pulled her hand free, even though Tommy was fighting against it. The delicate bones in her fingers cracked, and as she tried to angle herself to land on the balcony below, she knew she was just going to fall. When her foot slipped against something, hope bloomed in her heart, and she thought she might have fallen on the right side of the railing below, but she was wrong. The planter of flowers that her neighbor had hooked over the railing gave way as she connected with it, and they both fell to the ground.