One week before Christmas, my madness spoke. I'd fallen down on one of the jobs I'd helped Six on, cracking the skin above one of my cheekbones. My face was still sore from having been beaten up the month before and the reminder of that particular pain induced memories of the night Six had rescued me. They were coming back, hazy but haunting.

I was staring in the bathroom mirror, studying my face. My face was small with sharp edges and pale skin stretched over the bones my mother had given me. Small nose, small mouth, big eyes. I was a cartoon character.

My fingers traced the bruise around my cheekbone, trembling. I felt the intention from that stranger again, like a brand. I'd been raped before, though I had no recollection of the event itself. I had the pain after. I had the moments after, when I realized something had been taken from me.

And though I hadn't been assaulted the same way this time, having the memory of it made me want to scrub my brain with bleach.

Damaged. Broken. Weak.

The voices taunted me, as if they were painting the words themselves across my reflection.

Burdensome. Ugly. Stupid. Addict.

I couldn't even console myself by calling them lies. I was all of those things; a poison infecting all the good I let in my life.

Before I knew what was happening, I slammed a fist against the mirror, shattering it into a few dozen pieces. My reflection was fractured; parts of me were missing. It was the perfect metaphor for how I saw myself. I pulled my fist back and felt the blood trickling down my wrist before I saw it for myself. Rivulets of red raced down my skin.

In an emotionless haze, I turned into the living room. The painting I'd been working on, an amalgamation of blues and blacks—Six's eyes—suddenly nagged at me. Without thinking again, I slammed my bloody fist against it, smearing red on the canvas.

The reason I'd avoided being institutionalized in the past was that I could see my crazy. I could see it for what it was: scary. As I drew my fist down the painting, I knew that if someone else saw this, they wouldn't see what I saw. They'd see the crazy, and that was it.

They would see a crazy woman, smearing her blood onto canvas. I saw a woman bleeding her pain, expressing her pain. I knew it wasn't right, not really, but it was the only way I could express myself when there was no one around to hear any verbal lamentations.

I picked up the painting then, realizing I'd ruined it. I kicked the easel to the floor and tossed the painting across the room. The smack of it against my wall was completely unsatisfying. I closed my eyes briefly in frustration.

I stalked over to the canvas and picked it up again, slamming it to the floor beneath me. The crack of the wood frame reverberated into my arms, shaking me in the deepest part of my shoulder joint.

I stepped around the mess of wood and canvas and then flung my hand over my counter, tossing dirty plates and cups to the ground. Some things had broken, that much I knew, but my rampage wasn't over yet. I grabbed the chair Six had left behind—had insisted on bringing with him—and held it in the air for a moment. Before I could regret what I was doing, I slammed the chair against the wall.

The pale white plaster cracked, dropping chunks to the floor. But the chair remained solid. I shook out my shoulders and then slammed it back down. The legs broke in three places. Emboldened, I slammed it again and again, my wild hair flying around as I cracked it into a hundred pieces.

When I finally went to bed, my apartment was in shambles. To anyone else, it would look childish. To me, it was the only way to deal with the things that flooded my brain. I couldn't shut my brain off; I couldn't avenge the wrongs done to me in any other way than to destroy what was whole – which meant everything unbroken in my apartment needed to be in tatters, much like I was.

* * *

I was lying on the floor among the shambles in the morning, chain smoking.

My music was loud. Louder than a respectable level, but I needed it to be. I didn't answer the knock on the door, but I still heard it over the noise.

Six walked in, and I watched him carefully, waiting for his reaction to the mess. He took in the broken walls, the pieces and chunks of plaster scattered across the floor. His eyes glided over the splintered wood and the paints that had spilled in my fit.

“Doing a little redecorating?” he finally asked.

A prolonged pause followed, both of us meeting eyes before I finally broke the silence. I laughed, wiping the leftover makeup from my eyes. “I guess you could call it that.”

He walked into the kitchen and fed Henry—poor fish—before opening my refrigerator and surveying its contents. “Do you ever buy food?” he yelled over the music.

I shrugged and lit a fresh cigarette.

Six walked around the apartment, picking up pieces of wood and tossing them into a garbage bag. His hands traced the hole in the plaster. I imagined him as an archaeologist, trying to decipher what he could about me, about the way I lived, by touching something I'd touched. When he picked up the ripped canvas and held it in front of him, I waited. For the look. For the disgust. But I waited for naught, because all he did was roll it up and set it against the wall.

I noticed that while he picked up the mess I'd made, he didn't turn down the music. He moved to a different beat, a smooth, powerful beat—a sound that didn't live outside his body. I longed then, to hear what he heard amidst the noise. I longed to know if he too had voices in his head and what they said.

He walked into the bathroom and came out with a towel. Tossing it to me, he said, “Take a shower. I want to take you somewhere.”

I clutched the towel to my chest and rolled to my side, blindly following his request. “Where?”

“You'll see,” he said, his voice calm despite the volume of it.

I looked to the CD player, seeing the counter beneath it shake due to the intensity of the bass. Over the music, I yelled, “My music is loud.”

He shrugged and picked up a few more pieces of the chair I'd destroyed.

“Doesn't it bother you?” I yelled again, feeling the satisfying burn of my vocal cords as I stretched them to be heard over the music. I wanted it to bother him. I wanted him to see me for who I was, to show fear. To run.

He was crouched on the floor, garbage bag open and halfway full when he looked up at me. “I know you're loud, Mira.” He gestured around him, around the mess that remained. “This is what you are. You need the loud.” He turned back to picking up pieces as I ducked into the shower.

* * *

Six brought me to his apartment.

“Don't touch anything,” he said, shrugging off his leather jacket and tossing it over the couch. My eyes followed him, appreciating the way he moved around the room, turning on lamps in his path. I looked up, took in the overhead lights, which remained off, and followed him into his kitchen.

Where my apartment was standard with its white walls and creaky floors, Six's apartment was dark wood and silence, bursts of light throughout the room illuminating pockets, but not the grand space. I shuffled over to one of his bookshelves, dragged my fingers across books on military history, and stopped at a photograph of a woman with dark hair holding a small child. They looked like the same people from his wallet. Bracing myself for him to ignore me again, I asked, “Who are they?”

Six looked over at the photograph before looking back at me. He seemed to wrestle for a moment before saying, “Lydia and her daughter.”

“Family?” I didn’t know why, but jealousy curled around my words.

“Besides my mother, they're the closest people I have to family.” He paused, glanced up at me. “Friends. Good friends.”

“You keep a photo of them in your wallet.”

“Yes.”

I nodded and continued walking around the apartment, touching just because Six told me not to. “She's a beautiful little girl.”

Six frowned and walked past me. “I grew up with her mom.”

“Do they live here?”

“No.” Six didn't seem to want to talk about Lydia and the little girl with the haunting eyes.

On the wall were a few photos of Six in military uniform, surrounded by other service members. “Were you in the Army?”

“Special Forces.”

I read the inscription on one of the more formally posed photos. “William?”

“That's my name. I don't go by it.”

“Obviously.” One of the photos had a note scrawled across the bottom. Thanks for being my Six, battle.

In the kitchen, he pulled down two short glasses and poured one finger of whiskey into each. I held up two fingers, fingers parted in a peace sign before snapping them together and curling them toward myself.

He raised an eyebrow but poured a little more into each glass before holding it out for me.

My hand curled around the glass, gliding my cold fingers along his warm ones, and he released the glass, the weight of it falling into my palm.

“Let's go to the table,” he indicated, pointing behind me.

There were boxes piled in a neat tower next to the small table where a full ashtray sat among piles of papers and photographs.

He eased into one of the two chairs and gestured for me to sit in the other. He sipped his whiskey and placed the glass down with a resounding thud. Without looking, he switched on the table lamp. The cherry wood flushed with light a moment before he slid the stack of photographs across to me.

“Claire,” I said, recognizing her instantly. Her black hair was in a chignon, head wrapped in a scarf.

“She went to Seattle.”

I glanced up at his face, saw the way he was watching for my reaction. “Oh?” I picked up the whiskey and sipped it as Six had, swishing it around in my mouth a moment later.

He took the photograph from me. “It's probably a good thing you told her to go after him in Seattle,” he said in a low voice, looking at the photo and then looking at me. “You sped things up a little bit.”

“Oh?”

He nodded. “Claire surprised my client, at her home. And then Claire broke things off with Clay.”

I raised a fist in the air and held up my drink. “Go team.”

A smile tugged his lips, but he didn't give in. “My client gave Clay another chance.”

I set my glass down. “Oh.”

“And this time, she hired me to track him more thoroughly.” Six flipped open a folder, tipped it, spilling photographs on the table. “Claire wasn't the only one.”

“Well, no shit.” I wasn't surprised.

“He has connections all over.” Six pulled out a pack of cigarettes and shook it, pulling one out and putting it in his lips. I watched his brow furrow as he patted himself down, looking for a light.

I reached into my coat and tossed my gold lighter to him.

“My lighter.”

“My lighter.”

His eyes flicked to mine as he lit the end of his cigarette, the flame bouncing shadows off his hands. In between puffs, he said, “Can you play sad?”

I held my hand flat on the table, palm up, and let him drop the lighter in my hand. “Can I play sad?” I asked.

He nodded and pulled the cigarette away from his mouth. He blew smoke across the space between us, and I inhaled, letting it coat my throat, leaning closer to him across the inches that separated us.

He licked his lips. “Clay has a weakness for sad women.”

I was listening, but my mind was on his lips and the addictive scent of tobacco filling the air. “I can play sad.”

Reaching forward, I plucked the cigarette from his lips and brought it to my own. I flicked the tip of my tongue over the end of it as I inhaled, letting the flavor linger.

“Are you bumming a cigarette off of me or trying to show me how you play sad?” He crossed his arms over each other and leaned on the table, closer to me. “Because if it's the latter, you're failing.”

“I can do sad, trust me.”

His eyes flicked to the exposed skin of my wrist, but he didn't flinch. Instead, he grabbed my arm just above the scabs and held it still.

He regarded them without emotion, without touching them, but I felt the concern in his grip nonetheless. I didn't flaunt them, but when they were exposed to someone, I often saw the flinch in their eyes, the clench of their jaw. I could feel the confusion and, on occasion, the revulsion. In Six's eyes, I saw none of these things.

“When did you do this?”

I turned my wrist over and looked, but I didn't need a physical reminder to remember. “A couple days ago.”

“Why?”

There were a million answers to that question, but because Six wasn't judging me, I answered with one of the more honest answers.

“Because sometimes you need to be reminded that things can heal.” I was talking about my head, about the crazy Mira that dwelled in the tissue there. I sucked on the cigarette and leaned closer, exhaling the smoke from my lips and into Six's open mouth.

He didn't move for a minute, whether absorbing my words or letting my smoke wash his lips I wasn't sure. But he'd heard me.

“I'll need you to play sad.”

“Is there an echo in here?” At his sharp look, I sighed. “Okay,” I agreed, taking a weird satisfaction in the way he brought the cigarette to his lips, knowing seconds earlier it'd been on mine. I sat back, feeling the bubble around us in that moment pop. “Why don't you turn on your ceiling lights?”

Six sat back as well, but still angled his body to mine. “Because I don't want everything illuminated.”

“I think you prefer the dark.”

“If I preferred the dark, why would I turn on the lights?”

“Because we can't live in the dark all the time.”

Wisps of white smoke disguised his eyes from my view, but I knew he was looking at me. “What's your excuse?”

“What excuse?”

“You embrace the dark.”

“I have a madness.” It was as much as I knew, after hours of therapy and a dozen diagnoses. “I don't embrace the dark; it embraces me.”

Six picked up a remote and turned on a speaker nearby. Music blasted through the speakers, and he let it. He turned to me with his arms out. “This is your song.”

It was “Killer Queen.” I listened to the lyrics for a beat. “I agree.” I laid my arms down on the table, putting my hands close to his. “I'm very loud,” I spoke over the music.

He nodded. “You need it.”

“It doesn't bother you?”

“I told you, loud is what you are.”

“I can't help it; my madness makes me this way.” I grabbed the burning cigarette from him and brought it to my lips. “I come on a little strong,” I admitted before inhaling.

“I know.” His lips curled. “You say that as if it's a bad thing.”

“Isn't it?” I asked.

He shook his head and took the cigarette back, twirling it in his fingers. “Not to me.”

It didn't matter what he thought, not really. He was just a person. Not someone of significance to me. Even if I was forming some kind of attachment to him, it wasn't permanent.

Or, at least that's what I told myself. “I'd rather people think of me as too strong, too loud, too much instead of too weak, too quiet, not enough.” Green eyes studied me. “Even if my madness makes me weak, I fight it.”

He tilted his head to the side and his arm brushed against mine on the table. “You live with madness, Mira. What could possibly be weak about that?”

It was the perfect answer.

When I didn't say anything, he asked, “Do you know what causes your madness?”

Love. Love was the vehicle for my madness. But I didn't tell him that. “No.” It was my first lie of the evening. And he knew it. He made a noise in his throat, and I looked everywhere except directly at him.

I glanced around the room, saw the few bright spots of light on tables and chairs. Over his head on the wall was a large, wooden 6. “What's 'battle' mean?”

Six narrowed his eyes. “Where'd you see that?”

“One of your photos had a note signed on it. 'Thanks for always being my Six, battle.'“

“Battle is what we called one another.”

“Why do you call yourself Six?”

“I don't. They do.”

“Who's they?”

Six sucked long and hard on the cigarette before stabbing it out and blowing smoke across the table, reaching me despite the increased distance between us. “The people who need me.”