Elena's POV
"Open the door, Elena. It's me."
I nearly didn't hear it over the sound of my own pulse hammering in my ears, still frozen by the window with the curtain settling back into stillness, but the second knock came harder, more insistent, and Damian's voice carried through the door with an urgency that cut straight through my paralysis.
I crossed the apartment on legs that didn't feel entirely like my own and checked the peephole before unlatching anything, some instinct refusing to abandon caution even now. It was him, unmistakably, hair disheveled like he'd run the whole way here, still in the same shirt from that morning with the sleeves shoved up past his elbows.
I opened the door.
"Are you hurt?" His eyes moved over me fast, cataloguing the same unsettling precision he alw
