She was still staring at where the man had been.
The blood. The absence. The impossible, clean 'nothing' where a large, sweating, terrible person had been pressing himself against her spine thirty seconds ago.
Her dress was torn at the front.
Her hands were holding both sides of it together over her chest — the full, soft weight of her breasts pressed behind her own fists, the nipples still peaked from cold air and adrenaline, the fabric edges jagged where his hands had been.
She looked up.
At the man in the doorway.
He was — she didn't have a word for it immediately.
The sunlight from the shop's high window came down at the angle that hits people either badly or very well, and it hit him the way it hits the subjects of portraits that expensive painters get commissioned for — the dark hair, the jaw, the specific quality of his stillness that her brain kept trying to categorize as 'noble' and kept abandoning because it wasn't quite that.
The purple eyes found hers.
