Part One: Knight Errant

Feet propped up on the table, hair loose around her face, she tried to take it all in. Her hand still gripped the phone, and it began to beep a steady dial tone as she stared into space, unheeding.

This was what it was like when your dreams came true? This horrible, sick, sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach? Well, no surprise there, really, when she considered that the dreams themselves had been fairly horrible and sick themselves. She wasn't sure why they weren't classified as nightmares— she only knew that they weren't.

So all the fantasies of escape and capture, of haunting blue eyes and the moment when she abandoned all pretense of being in control, the times she could hear herself screaming in pain, a hurt that was a thin cover for a deep well of pleasure— salt on her wounds. His hands on her neck. Fingers like a wind through her hair. His mouth a cruel force more fundamental than gravity, the pull of it like a black hole, inexorable, undeniable. A deep shudder. Spots in front of her eyes, bright flashes of light like stars exploding. Walls enclosing just the two of them; suddenly they were in jail together. Bars. Handcuffs. Endless trappings of a different type of fantasy, black and silver and cold and painful, but he'd been strangely gentle up till now and she realized that it wasn't him at all; that she was alone in the cell.

Just because he escaped.

He should be dead. She would have killed him; she had intended to kill him; he should be dead. All that pain he must feel, all the raving the nurses said he did— spilling names, dates, details. A policeman came and took everything down, the tape recorder set up on the bedside table, the man jotting things down with interest. Not admissible in court, of course, but there was no use wasting perfectly good information. Even if it wasn't true, most of it made enough sense to stick.

He killed himself there, spilling secrets that were worth more than his life. Even if he lived, there wasn't any escaping vengeance from his superiors, his former associates, his angry victims. He should have stayed in the hospital. In jail or free, it was only a matter of time.

He had a fever and she woke up sweating. He thrashed and turned and screamed and she had nightmares. There was a knight on the landing and the sword swung both ways. She could duck it the first time, but it always cut her in two before she could escape out the door. Remnants of a dream she'd had from so many years ago, when she was too young to know what hurt was. When she was too young to know that pain could be a wonderful, clean-burning fire.

Escape. He was free now, and for how long before he was found? No one wanted to protect him. No one wanted him alive. Her fantasies were just that, fantasies, and he was far too smart to come back for her.

She'd sworn that she would never let it happen to her again.

That didn't stop her from going to happen to it.

A t-shirt, a toothbrush, her purse, the cark-keys.

An open door.