He says something in French, raising his voice.

“Let me go!”

“Angèle, you know I drive on Fridays. Why do you not call me?” His grip tightens, towering over me. “You cannot keep running, Angèle. We must talk of what happened!”

I dig in my bag and yank out the stun gun. Mathieu sees it and releases me, throws me forward, so that I catch my balance against a garbage bin.

His upper lip curls in a sneer. “First, you would . . . scratch me? Now you would hurt me again?” The streetlamp above casts him in darkness.

I don’t respond, not trusting my voice. His outline blurs in and out in my vision, and I know a full fever is on its way.

He growls. “How you were there one second at the bordel . . . and gone the next?”

“Listen to me. I don’t care what happened between us earlier. Leave me alone.” I step back toward Angela’s building without breaking eye contact.

“Angèle, wait . . .”

I throw a twenty-euro note to him and turn and jam the jailer’s key in the door.

“Angèle!”

The entry slams shut, and I pause behind the safety of six inches of metal. The curved handle jiggles underneath my palm. “Angèle!” Mathieu cries, his voice muffled, though his angry expression is clear through the glass. “Angèle, return, please!”

I make my way to the stairs, shaking, and ignoring his words in English, then French. Based on my experience with him at the brothel, the way in which he described Angela’s escape the last time they met, and his behavior now—Angela might have been warning me about him, too, on the whiteboard, in addition to Jean-Luc. Although she wouldn’t be this afraid of one person—so afraid she hasn’t gone to the police, or come to me directly—would she? Are Jean-Luc and Mathieu working together, then? Mathieu probably has connections from the brothel, a network of black market muscle, like the man who offered me help in getting even with any heartbreaking ex-boyfriends. Does Jean-Luc have those same connections?

The three flights of stairs are my Mount Everest, and it takes all I have to stay upright. My balance teeters at every curve in the stairwell, and I stop twice to rest on a step. Mathieu is silent by then, hopefully driven far away, never to return.

When I get inside the apartment, I lurch straight for the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. I paw Angela’s stash of over-the-counter medications until I find something that treats headaches, fever.

Lifting my eyelids requires herculean effort, so instead I fumble for the pills and swallow. Each feels like a brick against my dry esophagus. If a serial killer or anyone else wanted to kill me now, I’d probably thank them first. I stumble to the bed and fall deep into a dream.