Mia POV
I don't sleep.
Not even close.
I sit in my kitchen with my back against the cabinet under the sink the one that puts the most walls between me and the front door and I watch the shadows under the door for moving feet. The deadbolt is locked. The chain is on. I pushed a kitchen chair under the handle at midnight because the deadbolt suddenly didn't feel like enough.
The footprints won't leave my head.
Someone knocked and walked away before I could answer. That means they didn't want to talk. They wanted to confirm. Someone is home. Someone is here. We know where to find them.
I turn that over and over until 4 a.m., when exhaustion finally drags me sideways into a half-sleep on the kitchen floor with my phone in my hand and every light in the apartment still on.
I wake up two hours later with a sore neck and a worse feeling in my stomach.
And the stranger on my couch is burning up again.
His fever comes back hard and fast, the way the second wave of anything is always worse than the first. I know it the second I cross the room I can feel the heat radiating off him before I even touch his skin. His jaw is tight. His breathing is shallow and quick. He is somewhere between unconscious and not, in that terrible in-between space where the body is fighting something and losing ground.
I wring out the cloth in cold water. Fold it. Lean over him carefully and press it to his forehead.
His hand shoots out and grabs my wrist.
In the same motion the same single second, so fast I don't even see it happen something cold and sharp is against my throat.
A blade. Small. Came from nowhere. From his sleeve, from under the cushion, from thin air I have no idea and it does not matter because it is there, pressed just below my jaw, and I am not breathing.
I don't move. I don't scream. My brain empties out completely no thoughts, no plans, nothing. Just the cold edge against my skin and the sound of my own blood in my ears.
His eyes are open. Fully open. Staring directly at me.
But they are not right. Not focused. He is looking at me and not seeing me at the same time, seeing something else, something from somewhere I don't have access to, and his whole body is coiled like a spring that has been wound too tight for too long.
One second.
Two.
His eyes clear.
It happens like a light turning on one moment he is somewhere else and the next he is here, in my apartment, looking at my face, registering my expression, understanding what his hand is doing and where that blade is sitting.
The knife disappears. I don't see him move it. It is simply gone.
His hand drops from my wrist.
His eyes close.
"Sorry." One word. Low and rough and stripped of everything except the fact that he means it.
Then he is out again. Completely. His chest rises and falls, fever-fast, and he is gone back into whatever his body is fighting and I am standing over him with a damp cloth in my hand and no air in my lungs.
I sit down on the floor.
Right there, beside the couch, knees pulled up, back against the cushions. I don't plan to do it. My legs just make the decision for me.
Twenty minutes. I know because I watch the clock on the microwave from where I'm sitting and I count every minute the way my mom taught me to count steps. Not because the minutes mean anything. Just because counting is the only thing my brain can do right now that isn't screaming.
He didn't mean to do it. I know that. I saw his face the before and the after and I know with complete certainty that there was no intent in it. His body reacted before his mind got involved. A reflex built from a life I can't imagine, in situations I don't have context for.
He felt it the moment he was back. That's the part that stays with me. He didn't make excuses. He didn't explain. He just said sorry like the word weighed something real.
One word. And somehow that matters more than it should.
By the time I stand up, my legs are steady. I wring out the cloth again. I lean over him again slower this time, more deliberate, close enough that if some part of him registers the approach, it registers me specifically, not a threat.
I put the cloth back on his forehead.
He doesn't move.
I pull the chair up beside the couch, sit down, and go back to the business of watching him breathe.
I do not examine why the blade didn't make me want to leave.
I really, truly do not examine that.
By morning the fever has dropped again. Not gone but lower. He sleeps through the whole night without another sound, without another nightmare, which I am choosing to take as a win.
I have a shift at eleven. I need the money badly enough that missing it isn't an option rent doesn't care about mysterious strangers. I check his bandages one more time, leave a glass of water and two painkillers on the coffee table with a note that just says don't move too much, and feel absolutely ridiculous writing it.
The walk to the diner feels strange. Like the city is the same and I am slightly different shifted one degree off my usual axis. I keep my head down. I watch the street more than I normally do. I notice cars parked too long. I notice people who look once and then look again.
Maybe I'm paranoid. Probably I'm paranoid. Almost certainly this is what happens when you don't sleep and spend the night watching someone else's fever.
By one o'clock the lunch rush is in full swing and I am so busy I almost forget. Almost.
I'm clearing a four-top when my phone buzzes in my apron pocket.
I check it between tables. Unknown number. Just a text.
Eight words.
You should not have touched him.
Walk away now while you still can.
I read it twice.
The plate in my hand is very heavy suddenly. The noise of the diner the clatter and the voices and the hiss of the kitchen goes distant and tinny, like someone turned the volume down.
My thumb hovers over the screen.
While you still can.
Present tense. Not a warning about something that already happened.
A warning about what comes next.
I look up from my phone.
Through the diner window, across the street, a black car is parked at the curb.
The engine is running.
The windows are tinted just dark enough that I cannot see who is inside.
But I can see that whoever it is they are looking directly at me.