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I keep my wrists together like they're still taped, the scalpel hidden flat against my palm, even though my hands are free now.

I have to hand it to him—he's trying hard, bless him, but I feel more ready now to do whatever it takes to get back to the life he's trying to take from me.

"You've made one mistake," I tell him.

"Have I?"

"You shouldn't have underestimated me."

My hand comes up out of my lap and I ram the scalpel into the side of his neck.

He jerks back half a second too early. The blade catches him under the ear and rips down along his jaw instead of going deep, and the blood comes fast, spraying hot across my face and hands and his collar. Too high. I went too high. He shrieks, then throws himself at me.

His whole weight hits me and the chair goes over backward, me still taped to it at the ankles, the back of my head cracking off the concrete. His hands find my throat. His blood is pouring off his face and onto mine, and he's screaming something I can't hear over my own pulse.

Behind him the other two are sprinting toward us.

Then something hits the door so hard it tears off its hinges and crashes down onto the concrete, and the whole space explodes into chaos. There are men shouting and boots pounding across the floor, then the gunfire starts. Each shot slams through my teeth, chest, and the floor under my back.

I can't see any of it. All I can see is the face above me, blood everywhere, his eyes wild.

And his grip tightens around my throat.

I claw at his wrists as the room keeps roaring around us, and somewhere close a man screams then goes quiet. My eyesight starts to blur, and a thought arrives with a calm that scares me more than the panic did: that this is how it ends, here on a filthy floor, and I don't even get to see Laszlo one last time.

Then the weight is torn off me all at once, and the hands leave my throat. The air comes rushing back into my lungs so fast it actually hurts.

I roll onto my side, coughing, dragging air back in while the gray clears out of my vision. Somewhere above the ringing in my ears there's one more gunshot, then the noise in my head resumes. The concrete floor is cold against my back, yet it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters when Laszlo appears in front of me.

He drops blood beside me. His hands are on my face, my neck, my shoulders, moving fast, and they're shaking. Bloodied and shaking. I've never felt his hands shake.

"Manon." His fingers move over my throat, jaw, and chest now, checking me like I would, looking for wounds this amount of blood would result in. "Where? Where are you hurt?"

"It's not mine." The words are torn from my throat. "The blood. It's not mine."

My legs are still taped to a chair and I’m soaked in a man's blood, but I start to laugh because he found me. And I'm alive.

“That man.”

“Dead,” he says firmly, “and buried.”

"You're late," I tell him. "Luckily I had my scalpel on me."

Laszlo unties me, then holds his free hand out to me and pulls me up. I see he’s holding a gun. Looking at the man on the floor, who’s barely breathing, he then turns to me. “He hurt you,” he says simply. “But this time I’ll let you decide.” He offers me the gun.

“I don’t need that.”

With absolute clarity, I know what I have to do. I feel like I am finally at peace with myself. I kneel beside the man who was going to kill me and my husband, and put my hand on his jaw. The adrenaline is still rushing through my blood. I lick my lips, knowing that Laszlo is watching.

"I told you," I say to him, "you shouldn't have underestimated me."

I slash his throat in one motion while his eyes go frantic. His mouth falls open and a gurgling sound comes out as he bleeds to death. Laszlo's hand closes over mine on the scalpel as I do it, steadying the cut, finishing it with me.

Both of us. Together.

For a moment, neither of us moves. The building has gone completely silent. There's a dead man under my hands, his blood soaking through my scrubs and up my arms, and I'm losing my breath.

Then I look up at Laszlo, kneeling in the mess of it with me, and a year of missing him rips my chest open. I drop the scalpel and grab him, crushing him to me.