The questions keep turning over in his head—repeatedly, insistently—as they settle back into their lives and into their relationship, as the tensions of the trial ebb into memory, into just a news story, covered by Emily Lane.

Which is why Zack is both utterly stunned, and not surprised at all, to enter their apartment one evening two weeks later, switch on the overhead light, and find Karloff sitting on their bed with a gun and silencer pointed straight at Zack.

86.

86.

Karloff uses the gun muzzle to motion Zack to sit. He stares at Zack silently. Zack looks back blankly. His mind has shut off completely.

“It helps to be a myth,” Karloff says at last—accent harsh, brusque, but his words seem measured, chosen carefully. “It keeps the police off the trail of reality.”

Zack can hear the words. The accent. But he is aware of only the gun. Everything else recedes. The familiar apartment around him, its familiar objects—lamps, coats, dishtowels—becoming distant.

“I fooled them for now,” says Karloff, “but I can’t fool them forever.” He shakes his head side to side, almost gently, as if still trying to take in the turn of events. “My network is ruined. So I go back now to Bulgaria. Where I come from. Where I can still disappear.”

Karloff furrows his brow and casually inspects the end of the black silencer. A tradesman checking a tool. “You fooled me,” he says, his irritation still strong. “Your little phone trick…you fooled me, didn’t you?”

The last weeks come circling back to Zack. A whirl of circumstance. A roller coaster coiling tightly through switchbacks of terror and tension and victory and love.

He knows how the world has always seen him—as a child of luck and lightness, of air and smiles and fun, of cleverness and ingenuity, who has always somehow managed to dodge the darkness. But now the darkness has found him. He is cornered by it. It is, in the end, apparently inescapable.

Something in him should have known it would end this way. Something in him has always known it would.

His breath, his final breaths, come short, pained, tight now. Each is a conscious struggle. He is already heading toward nothing. His existence is already ceasing. His body and his mind are preparing together, shutting down.

Karloff points to the silencer. “With this, no one will hear it, even in this building. No one will know till I am long gone.” He twists the silencer firmly against the barrel until there is a click.

The gun. Its oiled black muzzle. It’s all Zack can see, all he can focus on or think about.

Only dimly, numbly aware now…It’s sensation as much as thought…

The last moment of my life. The worst moment of my life.

Yet the moment manages to become far worse.