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Daniela climbs out of bed and walks naked out of the room.

It takes me a minute to find my boxer shorts in the twisted-up comforter, and by the time I pull them on, Daniela is emerging from her bedroom in a terrycloth robe.

We head out into the living room.

The pounding on the door continues as Daniela approaches.

“Don’t open it,” I whisper.

“Obviously.”

As she leans into the peephole, the phone rings.

We both startle.

Daniela crosses the living room toward the cordless lying on the coffee table.

I glance through the peephole, see a man standing in the hallway, his back to the door.

He’s on a cell phone.

Daniela answers, “h.e.l.lo?”

The man is dressed in black—Doc Martens, jeans, a leather jacket.

Daniela says into the phone, “Who is this?”

I move toward her and point to the door, mouthing, It’s him?

She nods.

“What does he want?”

She points at me.

Now I can hear the man’s voice coming simultaneously through the door and through the speaker on her cordless.

She says into the phone, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s just me here, and I live alone, and I’m not letting a strange man into my home at two in the—”

The door explodes open, the chain snaps and flies across the room, and the man steps in raising a pistol with a long black tube screwed into the barrel.

He aims it at both of us, and as he kicks the door closed I smell old and recent cigarette smoke wafting into the loft.

“You’re here for me,” I say. “She has nothing to do with any of this.”

He’s an inch or two shorter than I am, but st.u.r.dier. His head is shaved and his eyes are gray and not so much cold as remote, as if they don’t see me as a human being, but rather as information. Ones and zeroes. The way a machine might.

My mouth has gone dry.

There’s a strange distance between what’s happening and my processing of it. A disconnect. A delay. I should do something, say something, but I feel paralyzed by the suddenness of the man’s presence.

“I’ll go with you,” I say. “Just—”

His aim s.h.i.+fts slightly away from me and up.

Daniela says, “Wait, no—”

She’s cut off by a burst of fire and a muted report not quite as loud as a naked gunshot.

A fine, red mist blinds me for half a second, and Daniela sits on the sofa, a hole dead center between her big, dark eyes.

I start toward her, screaming, but every molecule in my body seizes, muscles clenching uncontrollably with stunning agony, and I crash down through the coffee table, shaking and grunting in broken gla.s.s and telling myself this isn’t happening.