Ivory Blackmore had counted twelve petals on every black rose for one year, and the latest one sat on her kitchen counter inside a locked apartment. She stood barefoot on the tile, septum ring catching the overhead light, and stared at the stem he had laid across her mail. The deadbolt was still thrown. The chain was still hooked. He had been inside while she slept. She pulled the folder from under her mattress, the one nobody else had ever seen, and added a new line in shaking handwriting: he has a key. She needed out. Not tomorrow. Now. She grabbed the framed photo from the shelf, the one of her and her mother on the porch in matching scarves, because it was the only thing in the apartment she refused to leave behind. Her hand was wet. Her grip slipped. The frame hit the floor and the glass broke into a star around her mother's face. Ivory dropped to her knees and pulled the photo free of the broken frame. Her eyes filled. She pressed the picture to her chest and tried to breathe. Something scratched at the front door. Slow. Deliberate. She froze. The scratching came again, lower, closer to the floor. She crawled to the window and lifted the blind a finger's width. Two black cats sat on her welcome mat. One had gold eyes. One had green. No man. No shadow. Just the cats, staring up at the peephole as if they had knocked. On the mat between them lay a rusted silver key, octagonal at the head, orange with corrosion. She opened the door six inches and snatched the key off the mat. The cats wound around her ankles, purring hard enough to feel through her boots. She turned the key over in her palm. It was too old for any lock in this building. The cats walked to the edge of the porch, sat, and looked back at her. When she did not move, the green-eyed one meowed once, sharp, and started down the steps. The gold-eyed one waited. Ivory shoved the photo in her jacket, the folder under her arm, and followed. They led her four blocks through wet streets she had never walked at this hour, past shuttered storefronts, to a tall black Victorian house swallowed in vines. The windows glowed orange from inside, though no car sat at the curb and no name hung on the gate. The cats slipped through the iron bars and waited on the front steps. Ivory tried the silver key in the heavy front door. It turned. The lock gave with a soft, oiled click, as if someone had kept it ready for her. She stepped inside and shut the door behind her. For the first time in a year, she was somewhere he did not know to look.

Ivory stood in the entry hall and listened. The house held still. No footsteps above. No breath behind her. The two cats slipped past her boots and trotted up the staircase like they had done it a thousand times. She locked the front door, threw the deadbolt, and tested it twice. The metal held. She tried every window lock on the ground floor next. Each one turned smooth and bit shut. Whoever had left this house had sealed it tight before walking away. She climbed. Three flights of stairs, dark wood under a thin layer of dust. The cats waited on each landing, then moved again when she caught up. The walls were papered in deep green, almost black in the low light. Brass sconces. Heavy doors. She tried each room as she passed and found the same thing in every one. Locked windows. Working bolts. A house built to keep the world out. At the top of the stairs, the cats stopped at a single door. The gold-eyed one pawed it. The green-eyed one sat and waited. Ivory turned the knob. The room ran the width of the house. A tall black bookshelf covered one wall. A heavy desk sat under a circular window the size of a car tire. The bed was king-sized, made up in black sheets with an emerald throw folded across the foot. The pillows were stacked the way she stacked her own. She set her pack on the desk and pressed her palms flat to the wood. Her hands stopped shaking for the first time in a year. The room felt cut to her measurements, as if someone had described her to a carpenter and walked away. She crossed to the window. The glass was thick and clean. Below her, the front yard ran out to a tall iron fence with spiked tops and a wide wooden gate locked shut by a heavy padlock. From up here she could see the whole street beyond it. Anyone who came for her would have to climb the spikes or break the lock, and she would see them do it. She unzipped her pack and pulled out the binder. A year of black roses pressed flat in plastic sleeves, each one labeled by date. She set it on the desk where she could reach it and slid the silver key into her pocket. The cats jumped onto the bed and curled against each other. Ivory sat down beside them and let her shoulders drop. He did not know this address. He did not know this street. He did not know this room at the top of a sealed house behind a spiked gate. For the first time, she had walls he could not walk through. She lay back on the emerald throw and watched the circle of sky through the window until her eyes closed.