The moment the door opens, everything collapses—literally.
Kael had pulled it inward maybe three inches.
Three inches.
That was all the opening it took.
The man came through like dead weight—no warning, no sound, just a wall of soaked black fabric and rain-cold mass pitching forward and hitting Kael's floor with a force that rattled every loose thing in the apartment.
The steel bowl jumped. The ceiling dripped. The walls shook.
Kael stumbled back hard, catching himself against the desk, knocking his cold coffee everywhere.
"What—"
The word came out strangled. Useless.
He stood there, chest heaving, staring at the man now face-down on his floor.
On his floor.
There is a man on my floor.
His brain offered nothing helpful for approximately two full seconds.
Then instinct kicked in—not the useful, action-oriented kind. The absolute chaos kind.
He lunged for the door.
Shoved it shut.
Locked it.
Deadbolt. Chain. He pressed his back against it for good measure, breathing in sharp, ragged pulls, like he'd just run a sprint instead of crossed four feet of his own apartment.
The man didn't move.
Just lay there, heavy and still, one arm stretched out across the floorboards like he'd been reaching for something and run out of time before he found it.
Kael pressed the back of his hand to his mouth.
Okay.
Okay, okay, okay—
He was dressed in black. All of it—jacket, shirt, trousers. The kind of black that was deliberate, not fashionable. Tactical. The rain had soaked every inch of it through, and it clung to him in a way that made the shape of him very, very clear.
Big.
Broad.
Enormous, Kael thought, slightly hysterically. Absolutely massive. Why is he so large? This is not proportionate to my apartment.
He swallowed hard.
Focus.
He pushed off the door and moved closer, crouching a few feet away, trying to assess the situation from a safe distance like a person observing a very dangerous animal that might still have opinions about its surroundings.
The man's face was turned slightly to the side.
Pale skin. Sharp jaw. Dark hair plastered flat against his forehead from the rain, the longer ends trailing against his neck—
Kael stopped that observation immediately and redirected.
Is he breathing.
He watched.
Yes.
Barely—but yes. The faintest rise and fall of his back. Shallow and uneven, like each breath was a negotiation.
Is he bleeding.
Also yes.
Significantly more yes.
The black of his jacket was darker in patches—the left side, just beneath the ribs, and somewhere along his upper arm. The rain had diluted it, streaking pink and red across the backs of his hands, dripping steadily from the hem of his jacket onto Kael's floor.
He's been shot.
The thought arrived flat and certain.
He's been shot at least twice and he's been lying in the rain and he's on my floor and this is—
This is fine, the unhinged part of his brain offered helpfully.
This is not fine, said everything else.
Kael pressed his fingers to his temple, squeezed his eyes shut for exactly one second, then opened them and moved forward.
Check pulse. That's first. That's the first thing.
He reached out, hesitated, then pressed two fingers against the side of the man's neck.
A beat.
Faint.
Sluggish.
But there.
Kael exhaled.
Okay. Alive. Currently.
He shifted, trying to assess the wounds without moving him too much. The one beneath the ribs looked worst—the jacket was saturated there, and when Kael carefully pulled the fabric back an inch, the dark, slow seep of it made his stomach turn completely over.
I'm a barista, he thought, with a kind of desperate, internal despair. I make oat milk lattes. I debug code at midnight. I am not equipped for this. I have absolutely no relevant qualifications for this situation—
The man's hand moved.
It was small—barely a twitch. Fingers dragging against the floor, slow and instinctive, like a reflex rather than a decision.
Then they found Kael's sleeve.
And closed around it.
Kael froze.
The grip was weak. Almost nothing. The kind of grip a person managed when they had nothing left to manage with.
But it was there.
Four fingers curled into the fabric of his sleeve, holding on with the specific, wordless desperation of someone who had stopped asking and started just—holding.
Kael looked at that hand for a long moment.
Rain-cold. Scraped knuckles. A thin scar running across the back of it that had healed long before tonight.
He didn't pull away.
The fingers went still.
The grip didn't loosen—but the tension left it, like the person behind it had simply run out of conscious effort and was running on reflex alone now.
"Check every floor!"
The voice cracked through the storm like a whip—distant but clear. Male. Authoritative.
Followed immediately by the sound of a door banging open somewhere below.
Kael's head snapped up.
Every hair on his body stood at attention.
They were in the building.
Still in the building, moving floor by floor, room by room, and this floor was next, and there was a man bleeding out on his floor with his hand on Kael's sleeve and the deadbolt was locked but locks in this building were decorative at best—
His eyes dropped back to the man.
The shallow breathing.
The pulse that had barely been there.
The blood spreading, slow and patient, across the floorboards.
Kael did the math.
It wasn't complicated math.
If he did nothing—
If he just waited, stayed quiet, let the situation resolve itself—
The man would be dead before whoever was checking floors even reached this level.
Not maybe.
Not probably.
Before.
Kael stared at him.
At the slack hand still loosely holding his sleeve.
At the blood.
At the barely-there rise and fall of his back.
I make coffee, he thought, one last time, quiet and helpless.
I make coffee, and I fix broken code, and I keep my head down, and I do not get involved—
The footsteps on the floor below grew louder.
And Kael realized, with the specific, sinking clarity of someone whose decision had already been made for them by their own inconvenient conscience:
This man was going to die.
Unless Kael did something.
Right now.