I fingered the gold necklace around my neck, my thumb rubbing over the “K” etched there, grateful that it had been safe, at least. Grateful that we were safe.

I told myself that it was just stuff, that if we were going to run, I would have left a lot if it anyway, but it wasn’t as much about the stuff as it was the violation of it all. Someone had broken into my home again. Gone through my stuff. Tried to kill me. Tried to kill us.

My heart pounded, my breath hitching, the urge to cry bubbling over. My steps slowed, my knees buckling, legs trembling, the air whooshing through my lungs. Matt’s hold on me tightened, jerking my hand and pulling me along, his strides lengthening, each one full of purpose as he put more distance between us and my apartment building.

When we finally reached the car, my heart slowed a bit, those four doors feeling a lot like safety.

My fingers shook as I buckled my seat belt, my mind racing. When my father had basically told me to watch my back, I’d sort of assumed that I had a few days or something, not exactly, “Watch your back, I’m going to have you killed right fucking now.” Apparently, I was an idiot and needed to lower my expectations when it came to people’s humanity.

I doubled over at the waist, putting my head between my legs, breathing in and out, struggling to steady myself. I felt Matt’s hands stroking my back, tracing the length of my spine, threading through my hair, each touch a soothing caress. I allowed myself to relax into him for a moment, trying to expel the pressure and panic building inside of me. With each brush of his fingers, the fear inside of me ebbed. A minute passed and then I sat up, feeling like I’d regained a little bit of my sanity.

“What do we do now?” I asked.

Matt pulled away from me, turning the key in the ignition. The car roared to life, but he just sat there, wrapping his fingers around the steering wheel, his body tense.

“Stay alive.”

“That’s looking more difficult with each moment that passes.”

“Yeah, it is.”

He put the car in drive, maneuvering onto the D.C. street with ease. I heard more sirens in the distance, watched as a fire truck drove by us. Matt pulled over to let it pass, and then we were driving through the intersection, heading away from my apartment.

“Where are you going?”

I was glad he was driving; I was way too shaken up, my mind further along in the process of what had happened than my body. Whatever had plagued Matt back in the stairwell and later on when we were outside on the sidewalk seemed to have been replaced by a steely resolve.

He changed lanes with ease, winding his way through the evening traffic.

“The hotel I checked into when I first came back to the city,” he answered. “It’s a shit hole, but I checked in with a false ID, so I don’t have any reason to believe it’ll be compromised.”

“Then what?”

He turned down a side street, crossing the boundary between my neighborhood, which just barely straddled the line on sketchy, and into trouble.

“I don’t know. I need to come up with a plan. Need to see if my father’s employee can help us at all.” His gaze shifted to me, his voice softening. “I’m sorry about your apartment. Sorry you lost everything. We’ll get you some clothes and stuff.”

I hadn’t even thought about the fact that everything I owned now consisted of this stupid blue and white dress and matching heels.

“I didn’t lose everything,” I replied. “Trust me, I thought I’d lost everything before. This is just stuff. It could have been so much worse.” I reached across the armrest between us, grabbing Matt’s hand and holding on tight. “Thank you for saving my life.”

He nodded, squeezing my fingers, something about the sight of our linked hands making me feel as though everything was all right in my world, even as the walls crumbled down around us.

He hadn’t been kidding about the hotel.

It was rough, in a part of D.C. I’d certainly never been to, and if I hadn’t had big, strong, beard-sporting, six-two, Army badass Matt with me, I probably would have been just as scared over my chances of getting randomly knifed as I was about the odds that whoever had blown up my apartment was still out there trying to kill us.

I followed Matt into the cramped room, a strange odor in the air that I didn’t even want to name, feeling like my life had taken a surreal turn somewhere along the way.

“Is your back okay?” Matt asked. “You hit the concrete pretty hard. I tried to protect your head, but you probably have some scrapes.”

My back, like the rest of my body, felt completely numb. I didn’t know if it was shock or what, but it was as if I was floating through this evening, as though everything had happened to someone else. Just a few hours earlier, I’d been at work writing a report on Syrian intelligence, preparing for dinner with my parents, and now I was here, in hiding, trying to keep from being killed. It was times like these when I wished my skills had been in covert affairs and not analysis. My job training would have served me well.

I sat on the edge of the bed while Matt grabbed the first-aid kit, his movements confident and clearly rote. How many times had he patched himself up? How many nights did he spend in places like this, hiding and fearing for his life?

The mattress sunk down as Matt joined me on the bed, his big body behind me, his presence reassuring. His hands came up to my nape, dragging the zipper down my dress, his knuckles brushing against my bare skin just above my bra strap. I shivered beneath his touch, his lips following his fingers to press soft kisses along my skin in a line down my spine.

“You have a few scrapes, but it isn’t terrible,” he murmured. “I’m going to put some peroxide on them to clean them out and then I’ll use an antibiotic cream.”

“Thanks.”

“Does it hurt?”

I shook my head. “I’m not sure I feel much of anything right now.”

“Your body is probably in shock. It happens. It’ll wear off eventually.”

It felt like I’d been in shock since he came back from the dead; this was starting to feel normal. Everything else felt like the anomaly.

I heard Matt opening the kit, rifling around for what he needed.

“This’ll probably sting a bit.”

His fingers grazed my skin again, his touch gentle.

“How did you know? Back in my apartment, how did you know that we shouldn’t go up there? Does that happen to you a lot?”

He didn’t answer me for a moment as he dabbed at my back.

“Sometimes. Sometimes I sense danger and it’s nothing at all.”

I could hear the frustration in his voice, could feel the tension vibrating from him now. Part of me wanted to back down, knew this was a can of worms that probably shouldn’t be opened with everything else we faced, but we’d always been able to talk about everything. Our relationship had been built on our friendship, so nothing had ever been off-limits or too difficult to share. He needed to talk to someone, and as far as I knew, I was the person he was closest to. I hadn’t lived through the things he had, and I didn’t know what it was like to watch your friends die before you, but I knew him, and I couldn’t sit by while this ate at him, not when I thought that I could help. He needed someone to listen to him, someone to take some of the burden off of his shoulders and give him somewhere to lean.

“You had a moment back there, didn’t you?” I asked, not sure how else to describe it.

He swallowed, his hand on my back still. “Yeah.”

I paused, waiting to see if he’d share more, wondering if he was ready to let me in.

“I can’t control it. Don’t know when it’s going to come on. Usually stress is a trigger. Sometimes everything will be calm and then something will happen, something that reminds me of what it was like in Afghanistan, and I’m back again. It can be as simple as opening a door with bells on it, and instead of walking into a coffee shop, I feel like I’m in a market somewhere, the people pushing into me, unable to see where the attack is coming from.