Page 24 of Roulette

Lark

I woke to Roulette’s hand closing around my wrist in the dark, his grip immediate, certain, the kind of touch that came with no warm-up between sleep and alert.

“Don’t move,” he said, barely above a whisper, his mouth close to my ear. Beside me, every line of him had gone rigid, angled toward the bedroom door.

I lay still, heart already hammering, straining to hear whatever he’d heard first. Then it came again -- a deliberate drag somewhere down the hall. Leather or rubber catching, then lifting. Not the house settling. Not the refrigerator. Someone was moving through the dark, past that door, closer than either of us wanted.

I didn’t move, just like he’d told me, though every nerve in me was screaming to. The sheets stayed pooled around my waist, cool air raising gooseflesh I couldn’t shake, and I held completely still, listening. The hallway nightlight threw a thin amber bar beneath the door.

Then a floorboard creaked in the hall -- pressure shifting, deliberate, close enough that my breath locked in my throat. For one brutal second, even panic went silent.

Roulette was already moving. He rolled off the bed without a sound, and the gun was in his hand before his feet even hit the floor -- kept within reach, something I’d noticed before and never asked about, some quiet part of me having always understood it wasn’t decoration. He yanked his jeans on standing, one-handed, the gun never leaving his grip, muzzle down, finger outside the guard, the metal catching what little light reached it.

“Someone’s in the house.” His voice stayed barely above a whisper, each word placed with the same careful economy he brought to everything. No urgency. No drama. Just information, delivered like the facts were already established and the only remaining question was how we responded to them. “Get up.”

I was already moving. I found the floor with my bare feet, cold hardwood under my soles, and stood beside the bed with the blanket still tangled around my ankles and my heart hammering against my ribs hard enough I could feel it in my fingertips. Roulette crossed the room in two strides.

He took my hand. His fingers were warm, callused along the knuckles, and he pressed something small and cold into my palm -- the key to the slide-bolt, the one he’d installed on the bedroom door after taking the old lock out. The metal sat against my skin, still carrying his warmth, and he closed my fingers around it with a pressure that wasn’t rough but wasn’t gentle either.

“Lock this.” He pointed toward the bedroom door where the slide-bolt waited in its housing. “Don’t open it for anyone but me.”

I opened my mouth. I don’t know what I was going to say -- wait, or be careful, some tangle of fear and not wanting to sound afraid -- but he cut me off with a look. No shake of his head. No raised hand. Just one steady look, unyielding and containing an instruction that didn’t require words, and whatever had been forming in my throat dissolved unspoken.

I nodded. Once. The movement felt small and inadequate against what was happening, but he accepted it the way he accepted most things I gave him: without comment, without visible reaction, as if my compliance had been the expected outcome all along and surprise was a luxury he didn’t indulge in.

He turned. Pulled the door shut behind him with a softness that belied the strength in his hand. Then he was gone.

I crossed to the door. The slide-bolt was six inches of hardened steel, the kind they put on commercial doors in buildings where the contents were worth protecting, and it seated into its housing with a solid, oiled chunk that traveled through the wood of the door and into the bones of my hand. I turned the key. Removed it. Slipped it into the pocket of the sleep shorts I’d pulled on before bed, and then I backed away from the door until my shoulders hit the far wall and listened.

This wasn’t normal.

A chair scraped, somewhere down the hall -- hard, sudden, legs dragging across tile with a shriek. Someone had shoved it, or kicked it, or slammed into it, and even muffled by distance and a closed door, the sound carried violence in it.

Then a voice. Muted, ugly, the words swallowed by the length of the hallway between us but the tone needing no translation. Male. Not Roulette’s -- the pitch was wrong, higher, edged with something that might have been anger or might have been fear, either way carrying the particular quality of a man who’d miscalculated and was realizing it too late.

Roulette didn’t answer. No warning, no threat carried down the hall to me. Just silence, and then the unmistakable sounds of a man who had stopped talking and started acting.

The fight reached me the way everything in this house reached me from that far away -- muffled, half-swallowed, more felt than heard. A single impact, distant but heavy enough that the framed photo on the nightstand gave a small, high rattle against the wood. Then another, and another, rhythmless, the sounds of something solid meeting something that gave way, and the scrape of boots losing traction on tile and finding it again, all of it filtered down the hallway and through a door that suddenly felt very thin.

I pressed my palms flat against the wall anyway, needing something solid under my hands, and clenched my jaw hard enough to ache.

A grunt. Roulette’s, I thought -- rougher than his usual, the kind that comes from taking a hit and not letting it slow him down. Then a crash loud enough to carry the length of the house, something heavy hitting the floor, and I squeezed my eyes shut.

One second. Two. The darkness behind my eyelids offered nothing except the amplified version of what my ears were already collecting, so I forced them open and stared at the locked door as if concentration alone might let me see through three inches of solid oak to whatever was happening on the other side. The strip of amber light beneath the door hadn’t changed. Still there. Still steady. Whatever was happening was happening in light Roulette had chosen, in a space he had mapped, against a man who had walked into the wrong house at the wrong time with the wrong assumptions about how the night would end.

The struggle shifted. The sounds changed -- heavier now, slower, the fast scuffling replaced by something more deliberate. A thud. Another. The particular wet, meaty sound of a fist meeting something that yielded, and then a pause -- brief, loaded -- and the distinct, unmistakable sound of a body hitting the floor hard.

Not a fall. A drop. The difference was in the quality of the impact -- heavier, final, the sound of something once standing and now horizontal because someone had put it there on purpose.

Then silence.

Not the brief pause between exchanges. Not men catching breath. The fight had reached its end, and my body knew it before my mind caught up.

I pressed my knuckles to my mouth and counted because counting was the only thing left to do.

One. Two. Three.

Four. Five. Six.