“I don’t want any more,” she said, putting the cup down.

  “Have another sip,” he said. It wasn’t a suggestion. Rainy took another sip to satisfy him, flinching as she swallowed.

  “I have to check the range,” she said. As she walked away, he took a sip from his glass. She could hear him swallow.

  His eyes were all over her back. She felt as defenseless as she had at fifteen. No...no...this time it’s different. Light-headed, she picked up the raw meat with her bare hand and set it on the grill. There was a hiss, and seconds later, the aroma of charring meat filled her nose. She was hungry. He meant to get her drunk with the boxed wine, and she needed to eat something.

  “Ginger put cheese and some salami in the freezer back there,” she said, jerking her head to the walk-in. It was comical, her talking about Ginger so casually as he sat propped in the freezer like a Christmas ham. Taured kept his eyes on her as he walked backward to the metal doors of the fridge and yanked them open. He reached inside, keeping his foot in the door to keep it from shutting.

  He carried Ginger’s dinner party leftovers to the table.

  Then, abruptly: “You’ve always thought I was responsible for your mother’s death.”

  She said nothing; she couldn’t. He was responsible, and they both knew it.

  “Her death was her own fault.”

  Still Rainy said nothing. Careful what you do, Rainy. He thinks he knows you.

  She watched him, transfixed, the heat from the range billowing around her, dampening her skin. She licked her lips, cracking her neck. He was gearing up to launch his slander campaign against her mother.

  “Your mother and I were close...”

  Sure, why not? Rainy nodded. They had been once.

  “We had a sexual relationship—” he paused here for effect “—and she confided in me often, and when things became difficult for her, when her depression became too much to handle, she...well, the drugs started in Portland, and she didn’t want you to know that, of course.”

  “What is your point here, Taured? Haven’t you told me these lies before?” It was getting so hot. But Rainy had tried hot yoga a couple times and found it cleansing. She leaned into that feeling now. Taured was sweating, patches of damp forming on his shirt under his arms.

  “They’re not lies, Summer. She was willing to leave you behind if I gave her the same amount of money she arrived with. Where do you think the money came for the tickets she bought for New Mexico? That wasn’t from your grandparents. She tried to steal from me. She went back on our deal.” His teeth were getting a nice wine bath, marooning themselves around his gumline.

  He drank his wine. He spoke and he drank. He was so transfixed by the sound of his own voice that he’d stopped pressing her to drink hers. Narcissists were unfailingly distracted by themselves. He wasn’t even pausing to make sure his lies made sense.

  “She tried to steal what from you? Me?” She saw the look in his eyes and it almost made her go blind with rage. “I wasn’t yours. I never have been.”

  “I saved your life, back then and today. You owe me.”

  Rainy sighed. The thing about her rage was that it was silent. She didn’t need to cry, or become hysterical, or accuse him of things he’d done. She’d already done that: held his trial in her own mind. The screaming had been had and done and now she was resolved to end the nightmare for good. Her sigh was a little leak of insanity.

  “It doesn’t matter what she did or said. My mother isn’t on trial here, you are.” When she looked back at him, she could tell he was replaying her words more slowly. Thinking on them. She was sure things were getting a little foggy for him in the thoughts department. Looking around, she saw the mess on the floor: the vomit, the blood, the spilled wine.

  “What is it, Taured? Have you never thought that you might have to pay for what you’ve done? Let’s talk about what you did to those little girls at the compound...the little boy that was Ginger. Sara...Feena...me...”

  Beneath the neatly trimmed beard, his full lips twitched. She liked that crack in his facade. He was not impenetrable, not the god he thought himself to be. It was just the two of them here, his disciples a hundred miles away.

  “You don’t sound very grateful,” he said. “I saved your life.”

  “Well, you certainly get an A-plus for following my directions well.”

  He didn’t like that.

  “I would have recognized him without the broken nose.”

  Rainy frowned. “Maybe so, but I wanted you to recognize me.”

  Rainy touched her tongue to her front teeth and shook her head from side to side. Maybe his thinking was getting slow, or maybe he was studying her, but there was something odd about the look on his face.

  “You are the same, Summer. The same fire, the same defiance. You haven’t changed at all. That’s what I admired about you. I could always count on your defiance. My sweet Summertime.”

  “You never met a trauma you didn’t like to poke.” She shook her head in disgust.

  “Haven’t you heard that the light gets in through the cracks?” He said this like there was a joke hiding behind his words, because they both knew he orchestrated those cracks just so he could provide the religious salve for them. It created a cycle of psychological dependency in his followers.

  “I know about the photos you took of my mother, of the other mothers...of their fucking daughters! That was your thing, right? You held their children captive by draining their bank accounts so they couldn’t leave, and then you took dirty photos of them. You blackmailed them. You are on trial tonight, Taured.”

  Rainy enjoyed the look on his face. It was the face of a man who didn’t believe anything bad could happen to him, that every threat was made by a lesser person and held no ground. She enjoyed it because she intended to wipe the smug expression from his face once and for all.

  “A trial without evidence? A childish notion. I promise you, Rainy—” he tried the name out like he was humoring her “—there is none. All of your claims have always been false.”

  “This isn’t a court of law, Taured. This is two people chatting in a kitchen...ah...excuse me...” She turned the steaks with the spork, then licked her lips, wanting her words to hit in the right way. “This is my court.”

  “Your court? Do you mean to judge me?”

  “I do.” Could he tell that something was wrong? His movement was nonexistent at this point; he was still, only his eyes and mouth moving.

  He laughed, just a little laugh—like a chuckle. The past came back to her in a hurry: the heat of the day, the way the bat had felt in her hands on the softball field, slippery and heavy...the fear. Oh God, the fear was so big and she had been so small.

  He had big hands, and he’d grown wider in the intervening years; he was no longer a lanky thirtysomething, but a guy in his late fifties. He was half-perched on the stool Ginger had pulled over, the gun on his knee, his finger still curved around the trigger. One of his feet was settled firmly on the floor, the other resting on the stool’s rung.

  “I stole a floppy disk back then. Out of an envelope in your car... Do you still have that old piece-of-shit BMW?”

  Did the expression on his face change? She thought she saw something like fear, and then it was gone.

  He cracked his neck, and there it was: Rainy could see it. A cataract of anger dropped over his eyes again. All traces of his earlier amusement were gone. He was getting with the program, seeing his rival for the first time.

  “I think you wanted to kill me yourself, didn’t you? That’s why you’re here today. I got away back then and you saw my call for help as a way to help yourself...to me?”

  “You’ve drugged me. How?”

  She reached behind her back and began to braid her hair. The steaks were really cooking now, probably past well-done. The meat smelled good, wild. Or maybe she felt wild.

  “Anger, as it turns out, is an even greater medium to work with than metal. My anger bends the material as much as the heat does.” She flipped the half-braided hair over her shoulder, her fingers moving rhythmically as she finished. “Can you hand me that, please?” She pointed to a rubber band on the table in front of him.

  Taured’s face was slack. He picked up the rubber band, looked at it, then held it across the table toward her. He wasn’t as sloppy as she needed him. The drug was present, but hadn’t taken full effect yet. The band was a little thing, pinched between his fingers. She reached across casually and took it from him, holding his eyes. He had hunted her for years. Well, this was hunting, too.

  “You took my glass,” she said, lightly turning her back to him. “I softened some quaaludes for you in my mouth and spat them in.” She stopped, looked over at him with her face scrunched up. “I promise you I’m not the first person to spit in your drink.”

  She finished tying off her braid and looked at him like a woman who was ready for a drink.

  “I met your son, you know, while I was posturing over in Friendship, trying to get you to notice me. Marvin, I assume, let you know I was in town...”

  The steaks were smoking now. The air smelled charred.

  Taured stood up.

  * * *

  In New York, Rainy had taken a self-defense class once a week called Fighter Flow in a former storefront with blacked-out windows. She did a lot of stuff like that back then: photography classes, a wilderness survival class. Once, she’d taken up archery, only to give it up for fencing. But Fighter Flow was different. She’d heard someone talking about it on the train. Snippets of conversation, a woman whose sister had been mugged in her driveway was taking the class to feel safe.

  “I don’t know what the instructor did, but it worked, because she’s a different person. He made her—” They’d stepped off the train, their conversation lost to her forever.

  When Rainy got back to her studio, she’d looked the place up online. The only things on the website were testimonials and a phone number. When she called, a woman answered.

  “How did you hear about us?”

  “On the train... I was eavesdropping.”

  The woman laughed a little and then asked for her email. “I’m going to send you a questionnaire. Answer it and shoot it back to me tonight if you can. I can see if you’re a good fit and we can go from there.”

  Rainy had agreed and hung up. She was intrigued; the woman on the phone had given her no information, but she filled out the questionnaire, anyway, and sent it back. She was making herself a sandwich for dinner a week later when she got the call back; she’d forgotten about Fighter Flow. Licking mustard off her finger, she’d carried her plate to the table, balancing the phone against her shoulder.

  “We have two available time slots for you—Mondays at seven a.m. or Saturdays eleven p.m. Your choice, but you’re going to have to give me an answer right now because there are other people who want to fill these slots.”

  “Mondays,” she said quickly. And she jotted down the address the woman gave her.

  It was taught by a retired marine corp veteran who asked her to call him Tito.

  She’d dropped her chin and asked, “Tito like the tequila...?”

  And he’d lifted his chin and said, “Yup.”

  At six feet even, Tito looked like the guy you should be running from. His scars had scars and three of his teeth had been knocked out in fights and replaced with gold. “Street fighting made me this beautiful,” he told her. “I light up the whole airport when I go through security. I have enough metal in my body to make me the tin man.”

  His first rule: “My gym caters to people who need self-defense, not those who merely want it. For that reason, I make things comfortable and private. You refer someone if they need help. Otherwise...?”

  “You don’t talk about fight club.”

  He nodded. “Good answer.”

  “It’s not a matter of how big or strong someone is or whether you’re ‘tough,’ it’s a matter of being trained, being prepared. Knowing your enemy. Got it? I can prepare you, but you have to put the mental work in.”

  “Is it possible for a woman to feel safe in a world where men leverage their physical strength?”

  “Safer,” Tito told her. “No one’s gonna get you if you can help it, eh? You’re gonna be the last woman that man ever fucks with because there will be nothing left of him when you’re done.”

  She didn’t believe him then.

  * * *

  When he stood up from the stool, he didn’t sway, and that’s what she’d wanted to see. Instead, he took a step toward her, lifting the gun. She was cornered between him and the grill, his body a barricade.

  “I have a drug dealer. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, right?” She made a face. “I wasn’t really sure what you used on us back in the cult days, so I had to guess.”

  He lunged to grab her, but she dove right under the table and peddled backward on her palms. On the other side of the table, Rainy was on her feet in three seconds. Adrenaline was a good drug. Anger was a better one.

  “I smuggled them in under Band-Aids.” A burst of laughter rippled from her throat. “And now here we are.” She rubbed the palms of her hands on her thighs.

  He hadn’t lifted the gun yet but she knew he would. Her back was to the walk-in freezer; it pressed against her shoulder blades. Taured considered the table between them. He perched on the edge, on one side of his buttocks, never lowering the gun. Swinging his legs over, he landed on the other side. Rainy was impressed. She’d never stopped moving away from him, small, shuffled steps.

  “You can shoot me, but it won’t matter. You’re going to jail this time. I sent the police everything you’d thought you’d hidden.” The air was heavy, and it burned through her nose and deep into her lungs. She ducked and ran, and she heard the gun go off. So, so loud. And then she felt a white-hot pain in her upper arm, the impact almost throwing her off-balance. The pain in her arm was fire—a burning hot stone.

  She turned to look at him; he was chasing her, but he slipped in her vomit. A piercing noise suddenly split the air: the fire alarm. She could still see him, and he was standing up now. Lungs straining, she ran for Braithe, who was still cuffed to the table leg. She yanked at the cuffs, swearing. The key had to still be on Ginger.

  Braithe was limp, and Rainy felt for her pulse as Taured got to his feet. She didn’t have the keys for the door to the hotel, and without it she was trapped here with him. She could head toward the range and around to the server’s area where the bathroom was, lock them in until the fire department came, but depending on how many bullets he had...

  Braithe groaned, opening her eyes. She saw the smoke, saw Taured and seemed to pull on the last of her strength. “Get the key,” she said, shoving weakly at Rainy.

  “Take shallow breaths and stay low,” she said in Braithe’s ear. She stood up as he lumbered toward her. He was holding his arm, his clothes checkered with her vomit. He was hurt and his eyes looked strange. Coupled with the drugs, it was enough to slow him down. Maybe.

  She charged for him, yelling, and he lifted the gun. Rainy dove right. The bullet hit the wall with the windows, four feet above Braithe’s head. His aim was way off. She needed him to follow her, to get him away from Braithe. When help came, it would come through those doors, and they’d see Braithe first. She picked up a bottle of water Ginger left on the table and threw it at Taured’s head. He didn’t lift the gun this time, but he followed her instead. The smoke was bad, her lungs exhausted, struggling with the lack of air. She ran for the source of the smoke, back toward her steaks.

  She passed through it, choking. She could hear him behind her, ducking through the kitchen and into the dining room; her hip banged against the corner of something hard and she cried out. Taured lunged for her—he was closer than she thought. There was less smoke here. None of the tables had arrived for the new restaurant, and the dining room stood bare, exposing her to Taured.

  She ran, so many parts of her throbbing she couldn’t pinpoint the pain. The lobby...the host stand. The door that led to the hotel was bolted.

  She turned, expecting to hear more shots.

  Taured was in the dining room, but he wasn’t holding the gun. He had one of Ginger’s hammers in his hand.

  “No more bullets?” Rainy asked. “Come on, then,” she said.

  He came for her, eyes bloodshot, lips slack. She sidestepped him and then turned around to watch as he swayed on his feet. She’d mushed both of the pills and held them on her tongue, not daring to swallow until she spat them into her wine. But even now, she felt dizzy from the smoke and from whatever drugs had made it into her system. She was not, however, as dizzy as Taured. Running past him, back through the server’s area, back to the grill, she waited.

  He came. He was disoriented enough to stumble as he made his way around the corner. Instinctively, he reached his hand out to steady himself, grabbing the red-hot grill. His scream made her leap backward. Holding his hand in front of his face, he tried to study the wound, but there was too much smoke.

  If they weren’t going to die from each other they’d die from this.

  While he was still preoccupied with his hand, she launched her weight into him, knocking him sideways. He twisted, landing stomach-down on the grill. It didn’t take much—that’s what she’d think later. Maybe it was the drug she’d given him or maybe it was the smoke, but he went down and stayed down. Using the wall as leverage behind her, she pushed her boots on his ass and held him there as he screamed. As he tried to lift himself off the grill, he burned his hand, too, and he flailed helplessly. There was a different smell this time—burning flesh.

  “Summer! Help me!”

  “I’m not your fucking Summer.”

  His body spasmed. She could hear the sizzling of his flesh between the whooshes of the fire alarm. He was screaming, so high in pitch it matched the rest of the chaos. He was roasting, this was his hell. She didn’t want help to come yet—this wasn’t finished—but the sound of shouting filled her ears somewhere beyond the door. She closed her eyes. She heard her name being called. By whom? Braithe? It wasn’t being called, it was being screamed—everyone was screaming. It was Rainy they were calling—Rainy, not Summer. Rainy... Rainy... The name she’d chosen to outsmart her trauma. Taured had stopped moving. He’d just...stopped. When? She was so tired. She dropped to the floor.