The house wraps a thick blanket of silence around me, and I curl into it, relaxing in its familiar warmth. My eyes are closing at last, heavy with the first traces of sleep, when I hear the keening cry of a siren tearing the blanket away from me. I sit up in bed, shivering, and only then do I realize that Azrael is not beside me. Sighing heavily, I slide from bed, find my slippers in the darkness, and go to the front door.

The click of the lock surprises me, as I haven't yet reached for the handle. I jump back right in time for someone else to throw the door open and slam it shut once again, putting up another wall between me and the noise outside. I'm more than a bit slow on the uptake; once the intruder wraps his arms around me, I finally realize that Azrael has arrived home. As I am about to speak, meaning to ask him why he has been gone until the sirens chased him back at two in the morning, he holds me tighter.

"Please, Raphael," he murmurs, "you can't say a word. Let's just go to bed now."

I nod against his shoulder. I could never be like some of the jealous lovers on television, who demand where their husband has been when he comes home hours late. I could never press Azrael for details; I would shrink away from him at the first sign of his annoyance. He guides me into the bedroom again, lays me down, gets me comfortable in the renewed blanket of silence. Then he undresses and gets in beside me, warming me further than the silence ever could. "Azrael?" I whisper.

He makes a small grunting noise, acknowledging me, but not permitting me to say anything that might upset him. I tread carefully, my words like tiptoed footsteps across thinning ice. "Azrael, where are those sirens coming from?" I carefully do not mention that it seems they heralded his arrival, like trumpets for the wanted man.

I push those thoughts immediately out of my head.

"From out on our street," he replies, a bit more coldly than usual. "Listen, Raphael, it's past two in the morning and I just got home. I'm tired. I don't want to deal with your questions and chitchat." He turns his back to me, pulling more of the covers off my body and onto his. I shudder, both at the effects of his words and the encroaching cold. I can't stand wintertime for this exact reason: the colder the temperature outside gets, the colder the walls he throws between us.

"I'm sorry," I tell him softly.

He isn't awake to listen. He is stretched out on his side of the bed, ignoring me completely. For a moment, I think he might be playing possum, and I sit up to study him. I can tell when Azrael is lying, awake or not.

He is asleep.

I can't bring myself to lay down again, so I remain sitting and study him quietly. In the nearly pure darkness of the room, his hair fans out beneath him, like ink tinting our white sheets black. It is sleek, like oil, and with the shadows cast on him, helps to make him look like he has glossy, dark wings rising from his shoulders. I reach down to stroke a few wisps of hair from his face. In sleep, the hard angles soften, and his frown is gone, replaced by such an expression of peace that I can't bring myself to wake him in the mornings. Not that I would ever try, for Azrael is a dangerous person in the mornings.

"Azrael, it's eight o'clock. You should be waking up for work," I said, standing at the side of the bed nearest him. The alarm clock had gone off two hours before, waking me to greet the sun, and I was showered and dressed long before I returned to the bedroom. I was hoping to spur him into joining me for once rather than rushing through the morning routine with barely time for a goodbye kiss at the door.

He was always in a hurry, it seemed, when it came to work. He couldn't talk to me when I called him, which was a rare occasion in itself. He never got home earlier than seven, and by that time, I had given up waiting up for him with dinner on the table. He didn't bother to call me when he would be even later; some evenings, he stalked into the house at nine or even ten, scowling in that way of his that clearly meant, "Don't you dare ask." I never did. I cowered away from him, maybe whispering a quick, "Dinner is in the refrigerator, Azrael," before retreating.

I made the mistake this morning of standing too close to the bed. "Azrael, wake up," I said. I grasped his shoulder, meaning to shake him awake, and then he grabbed me. I felt his hands close around my wrists before I could even scream, and when I did, he paid no mind. He had already pulled the knife from beneath his pillow and brandished it as he straddled me, holding me beneath him.

I screamed and struggled against him when I felt the knife against my chest, and then his eyes cleared of madness and sleep and he stared at me as though I were a stranger to him. He threw the knife aside and wrapped me in his arms. I was sobbing, he shaking and wide-eyed. He rarely cried, yet as he held me crushingly close to him, rocking me back and forth with a little trickle of my blood between us, he had a tear in his eyes. I know, because I felt it as it dropped off his cheek and left a temporary warm spot on my shoulder. Then it cooled, and I shivered. "Raphael, I'm so, so sorry, baby," he whispered, running his fingers through my hair. I was still sobbing, the whimpers wrenching themselves from my throat. I choked on them, like taking bad-tasting medicine too quickly. My whimpers were like horrible medicine; I rarely had to taste them, but when I did, they made me flinch to hear them. "Can you forgive me, baby? I saw that it was you and I thought... I thought I-I... I was so sure I killed you."

Putting my arms around him, I nodded, though I knew not why, and I said nothing. I pressed my cheek against his, my tears touching the single trail that had been his. He tangled his fingers in my hair and pulled me back to kiss me gratefully. His lips worked hungrily against mine, bringing another whimper from my throat, which he ignored. He pressed his tongue into my mouth when my lips parted to break out another sob. The entire time he kissed me, I wept against him, and when he had taken what he wanted from my mouth, he pulled away from me and went in search of bandages.

It was the only day he ever missed work. He spent the long hours bandaging me up, promising me that he would never do such a thing again. He picked up the knife again and put it in a new place, not under his pillow - "I might hurt you again someday, Raphael, and I couldn't live with myself if I did," he assured me - but beneath the mattress, which was only halfway an improvement. I didn't protest. I pulled him close to me and held him for what felt like hours, such a short time in the span of our lives, but such a long time considering that he rarely wanted contact like this.

"Why did you use the knife on me, Azrael?" I asked that weekend, on Sunday. It was his only other day off.

"Don't pry!" he snapped.

He never missed work again, and he never let me hold him for more than an hour. Two weeks later, I saw that our first aid kit was gone. I supposed it meant that he had used up the supplies in treating me, but he never bought another, and I never dared do it myself.

I lay down again, keeping to my side of the bed. There is no telling what he might do if he woke with me curled against him. Such behavior is only permissible when he instigates it, and I know that well. I remember nights spent in tears, sleeping on the couch - trying to sleep, rather - because Azrael shouted at me for getting too close to him as he slept. He hates being vulnerable, I think, even if it's only me. I have worked so hard to earn his trust over these years, yet he refuses to completely believe that I would never hurt him. He knows that I would never take advantage of him, yet he also refuses to accept it. He would rather find me guilty.

Azrael stirs lightly in his sleep. I tense, waiting for him to say something to me; sometimes, I find it hard to believe that he even can sleep, knowing how opposed to wasting time he is. But he does nothing, only relaxes again. In his movement, he has taken all but the sheet away from me. I wrap that more tightly around myself and let the blanket of silence enfold me in its arms once again.

I wake, shower, and get dressed. I go through the motions of my morning routine - cooking breakfast, leaving a plate for Azrael to eat when he wakes up, cleaning up the kitchen, bringing in the newspaper - and head outside to watch the sunrise. It is halfway done by now, but this is a ritual that I could never pass up. Even when Azrael and I lived in the midst of the city, in a condominium, I went out on the balcony every morning to see the sun in its first glory.

It is glowing golden now, lighting our neighborhood with comfort and tinting it rosy with peace. I smile and relax, the tension in my shoulders fading. I let the new warmth melt away my worries like it melts away the heavy snow on the ground; slowly, steadily, it repairs me. When the sun is at last coming into the sky, I know that it is high time I went back inside to check on Azrael.

He is still asleep. Frowning, I keep away from the bed as I call, "It's eight thirty."

Azrael doesn't budge. I open the curtains, letting in some of the new morning light; it reaches across the room to brush against him, lighting his black hair and making his face look paler than usual. "Azrael," I try again. "It's eight thirty-one now."

He leaps from bed and throws himself over to the closet, grabs a few things, and hurtles into the bathroom without so much as a good morning. I frown and sigh. He will never find time for me.

I go to the kitchen and pack his breakfast into a brown sack, and I place it beside his lunch. When he arrives from the shower, hair leaving streaks of water down his back, I hand him the bags. "You ought to dry your hair, love," I tell him. "It's below freezing outside."

"And you would know," he says angrily as he takes the bags and pecks me on the cheek. It isn't truly a peck, not when he kisses me so hard, but I suppose it is his version of one. Azrael isn't the kind to give feathery little brushes of his lips and call them kisses. "I'll see you later, baby." He dashes outside. The last I hear of him for the next fourteen hours is the car pulling out of the driveway and racing down the street at least thirty miles over the speed limit.

I put his unused plate in the dishwasher, tie back my hair, and get to cleaning the house. I am glad to be like his housewife, staying home and doing the chores, because scrubbing the bathroom tiles helps me to keep unhappy thoughts from my mind. I used to think that it would help me get Azrael off my mind, but that's hardly true. I see a strand of his hair on the floor of the shower stall and I pick it up, rolling it into a little ball before tossing it in the toilet. Even things like hair make me think of Azrael, just as I think of him later as I change the sheets on the bed. The ones that I take off are the same ones I bled on once, that morning when he stabbed me by accident. The ones that I put on are darker, more concealing. It would take a black light to see evidence of what we have done between these sheets. I pride myself on washing things well, but some evidence will always remain. Our bedroom is like a crime scene; fortunately, it isn't a crime scene in the typical sense.

I go through the motions all day. I eat a meager lunch, and I cook an enormous dinner. I eat in silence; the stereo that I play as I cook is turned off, and all I can hear is the sound of the neighborhood children playing outside until their nanny calls them in to wash up. We live in a nice enough neighborhood that there are nannies; it's something that I pride Azrael on. He really has risen in the corporate world. He works more than his share of hours every day so that we can live in comfort that I've never truly deserved. And yet ours is one of the smallest houses on the block.

Putting his dinner away in separate Tupperware dishes, I clean the kitchen. I'm not even aware that I'm crying until the tears splash against the newly-cleaned surface of the stove, and I have to wipe them off like splattered grease. I break down sobbing on the floor with an unrinsed sponge in my hands and my hair still tied back in a kerchief like some peasant matron of the past.

That is where Azrael finds me when he comes home, his briefcase in hand.

"What the hell is it now?" he demands, standing over me.

I sniff and rise from my place leaning against the counters. "I'm sorry, Azrael," I mutter, wiping my eyes with my free hand. I take off the kerchief and use it to dry the tears from my face and neck. There is a wet little ring around the collar of my shirt where they dripped from my chin to the cloth and were absorbed, using my shirt as a towel of sorts. "I don't know what came over me."

"Get over it already, Raphael," Azrael says as he goes to the refrigerator and gets out the Tupperware that holds his dinner. "Every time I come home, you're crying or in a panic." His expression softens as he puts everything on a plate and heats it in the microwave. While his food is heating, he comes over to me and wraps me in his arms, disregarding the wet sponge that I hold in my right hand, and the tears that are still streaking down my face. "What is it, baby?"

"I'm worried about you," I say.

"Why should you be worried?" He lets me go abruptly, tossing me away from him. My back hits the edge of the counter and I flinch in pain. He softens again. "Shit, Raphael, I'm sorry." He holds me close again and kisses me, one of those hard kisses of his. I open my mouth obediently, knowing what he wants. Behind him, the microwave beeps, yet for once, he disregards the distraction. He continues kissing me until I feel like all of me has somehow been washed away, replaced by a clone of Azrael. I toughen myself up and force a small, small smile.

I keep forcing it as I watch him eat, keep forcing it when he complains that the pasta tastes strange, keep forcing it as I take his plate to put it in the dishwasher. Only then do I wipe the fake smile away and retreat to our bedroom. I collapse into bed the minute my clothes are in the hamper.

Tonight, I wake again to the sound of sirens. It is past four thirty in the morning; our neighborhood is fast asleep, wallowing in financial security that I doubt many of them deserve. I shoot out of bed and find that I have been crying in my sleep. This is no surprise; it happens often enough that I have only to wipe the tears away against the back of my hand and go to the front door to look for the source of the sirens, just as I did last night.

And just as it was last night, I go to open the door when Azrael throws it open, almost hitting me in the face with it. He slams the door behind him and shoves me out of the way. "Azrael, what's going on?" I cry, running after him up the stairs to our bedroom. He goes into the closet, gets out his suitcases, and starts throwing clothes into them haphazardly, more of a blizzard than would ever hit outside. "Azrael?"

"Shut the hell up and pack your shit," he orders.

I get out my own suitcases and start taking my carefully folded clothes from the dresser, packing them away neatly. As I get the rest from the closet, Azrael gets fed up with me. "I said pack your shit! Come on, hurry it up!" He grabs a pile of clothes from me and tosses them into the suitcase, then gives up in disgust and goes back to his own packing. I don't ask questions. I don't speak. I only let the tears fall, and grab all my belongings that can fit in a suitcase. Azrael rolls his eyes in disgust as I pack pictures and the photo albums, but he doesn't bother to yell at me again. As I am leaving the room to go to the living room for more of our pictures, Azrael shouts, "Hurry up, dammit, we don't have time!"

I come back into the room to face him. "Why are we packing like this?"

Azrael arrived home from work early; it was a Friday, the night he usually stayed at work till at least midnight, yet he was home at four o'clock. I knew when I heard him unlocking the front door that something had to be dreadfully wrong. Someone we knew had died, or something else terrible had happened. I left the bedroom, where I managed to get the time to read something, and went to greet him at the front door. Azrael's face was blank, a mask without any paint on it. I saw the faintest glimmer in his eyes, but I was sure that it wasn't the kind of glimmer I liked to see. "What are you doing home so early, love?" I asked him tentatively.

After all, it wouldn't be the first time he had slapped me for being sappy when I greeted him. Azrael didn't like me calling him "love;" he said it was a girly term. He told me that I was a fag, not a woman, and then he would slap me. Sometimes. But I could never blame him for it. I did act effeminate, and I was a sap.

"It's nothing, Raphael," he told me.

"It must be something, or you wouldn't be home at four." It was stupid to press him, even stupider to bring up the time he was wasting in coming home early. He did slap me then, not for being a sap, but for being stupid. I cringed and began to cry as I always did whenever he hit me.

His eyes took on the pained look that meant he was sorry. Azrael never really had to tell me that he was sorry; I knew from looking at him that he was. The glimmer, though, was still there, a little spark behind the curtain of remorse that had dropped over his visage. "Remember how I told you we'd be getting more money soon?" He spoke slowly, as if to a child.

I nodded fearfully. He was about to tell me that it wasn't going to happen, that we had to sell the condominium. I was sure of it. I began to cry even more, brushing fruitlessly at my stinging, hot tears.

"Don't cry, baby," Azrael murmured, enfolding me in his arms. "I got the money." Turning my eyes up to him, I saw that he wasn't lying. Azrael was smiling, a genuine smile. "We can buy a house in a fancy neighborhood. We can buy whatever we want, really." That didn't quite sink in, so he added, "We're millionaires, baby."

"You mustn't joke about that," I told him, hiccoughing. "Don't tell me we're millionaires if you don't mean it."

"I do mean it. We can get out of this condo once and for all. I might even be able to work fewer hours, come home and eat dinner with you more often." He kissed me, long and hard, and I moaned against him. Azrael knew me too well. He knew what I wanted to hear, what would turn me on more than any kiss or foreplay. "Come on, Raphael, stop crying and let's celebrate."

He led me to the bedroom and laid me down on the bed, gently and slowly. It was such an unusual display for him - he generally hated "making love," and he would tell me that it was only sex and I needn't be so emotional about it - that I blinked in shock for a few seconds. He stopped me from speaking by planting his lips on mine again, his tongue sliding into my open mouth to draw mine into action alongside it. I wrapped my arms around his neck as he unbuttoned my shirt, pulling it off me carefully. I blinked at him again when he broke the kiss. "I don't think we've ever done it this way before, Azrael," I remarked.

"I know." With another smile, he took off his own shirt, tossing over onto the chair where mine was now strewn. "But it's a momentous occasion, Raphael. We have to take advantage of it."

We did take advantage of it. Azrael's lips latched onto my neck and he bit down like some kind of lustful vampire, making me groan as he left a dark love bite against my skin. My skin was darker than his, but he always managed to make marks that would show as if I were paler than he was. I threaded my fingers through his hair, pulling on it as he bit down on my neck again. "Azrael, you can't tease..." I began. He licked my collarbone before biting down again. I hissed and tried to speak; all that came out were little incoherent noises. They were the equivalent of what I said next, upon him finding his way to my nipples. "God, Azrael... Oh, God, please...please..." I was unsure exactly why I degraded myself by begging; all I knew was the torturous pleasure he was giving me. For all that he behaved brusquely and rarely spent time at home, it was obvious in moments like these that he did care.

"I told you, we're celebrating. I don't want to spoil it by making it go by too -" he kissed me again, his tongue in my mouth making me moan into the kiss "- quickly."

"Please, God, just do it already, I can't take it..." I whimpered when he went back to biting me, this time on my shoulder. It was one of his favorite things to do, though I hadn't a clue why. All I knew was that it made me gasp and buck my hips up against him. "Please, Azrael!"

He said nothing. He never had to say anything while we had sex; he would always take what he needed and give me what I wanted, and that was it. He unfastened my jeans and slid them off me, letting them join our shirts. I blushed when he took off my underwear as well, leaving me entirely naked.

Azrael was never patient, and it showed. He took mere seconds before he went down on me, and the entire world turned to white.

That was his version of celebration. Effective, to be sure, but rare. We never had sex quite like that again, no matter what good befell him at work. The last thing he said to me before he took me that evening was, "You'd better start packing your things, Raphael. We're moving soon."

Azrael glares at me, dark eyes fierce and burning into me. I shy away a bit, cowering as I always have in the face of his anger. "We're going because we have to get out of here," he snarls. "Now hurry the fuck up!" He clenches his fist as if to hit me, and I get the message. I get moving, running to put things in my suitcases.

"What about the furniture? Our money? What about everything else?" I ask desperately as he drags me bodily out of the bedroom, hauling our suitcases with us. "What about the house?"

"Shut the fuck up!" Azrael snaps. He hits me, hard, and I stumble back, my wrist breaking free of his grip. I hit the wall behind me - a corner. With a wince, I straighten myself back up and follow Azrael doggedly, watching him throw our lives into the trunk of the car. "Get in." I do. I say nothing, my lips sealed more effectively than any gag or duct tape used to silence me. I sit in misery, my hair in disarray, my clothes rumpled, my life thrown carelessly into bags, only to be forgotten by my lover.

This Azrael is not the man I consider my husband. And yet he is so similar to him. They have the same rage, the same hate within them that frightens me like it is a constant death threat. They look the same, have the same malice sparkling in their eyes. The Azrael whom I fell in love with, though... He has been buried for the moment, and all I can do is cry for him, nailed into his coffin alive. Nailed into this man who hits me and yells at me and makes me cry more than he ever did. The man who is making me leave the place I have called home for two years.

He pulls out of the garage silently, stealthily. The blanket of silence that I used to comfort myself back inside the house has fallen over the car in soft folds of darkness. I begin to cry anew as Azrael pulls away from our house and speeds down the street, careening around a turn and heading directly for the expressway.

"Azrael?" I whisper.

He glances over at me. "What is it, baby?"

My voice breaks as I ask, "Where are we going?"

"Somewhere safe." And with that, he glares at me, silencing me, warning me that the next word I say might well be my last. He would throw me out of the car and think nothing of it, I think. My heart thunders wildly in my throat with nervousness. What if he really would? What if he tossed me out like I toss out my worn out cleaning rags?

I don't know how long we drive. I have no concept of time, since I refuse to look at the clock. I refuse to look anywhere but out the window as Azrael speeds down the expressway, in the lane that leads to the airport exit. I sigh and wrap my arms around myself. We are running away from something, I know, but Azrael has never told me that we might be in any danger.

Somewhere safe. It echoes in my mind and I repeat it like a mantra. Wherever we go, Azrael will protect me, will make sure that things are better for us. He knows what he is doing, I suppose, though I begin to doubt him when he starts running red lights to get to the airport after he pulls off the exit ramp.

I doubt him even more when we arrive, when he leaves the car in the parking garage and hurries me inside with all our suitcases. He snaps at security and very nearly screams at the women behind the desk when they take more than five minutes to sell us our tickets. "Move it, Goddamn you, we're in a hurry!" he shouts. "Come on, come on!"

The woman who is serving us has a horrified look on her face. She is typing something into the computer as fast as she can, watching Azrael all the while as though she expects to be shot.

And then...

And then...

There are sirens outside the airport. I turn to Azrael. "What's going on?"

Somewhere safe. We're going somewhere safe. Whatever this is, it doesn't apply to us, it couldn't apply to us. We aren't those kind of people.

Azrael reaches into the front pocket of his largest suitcase and pulls something out.

A gun.

He points it at the woman. "All right, you listen to me," he says. "You're giving me those tickets whether you like it or not, and you're doing it right fucking now, or I blow your head off -"

He never does get the chance to finish. There are police and security officers everywhere before I know it, all their uniforms closing in on us like a barrier. I scream and begin crying harder, my tears glittering bright and obstructing my vision as I look skyward, the fluorescent lights beaming down on me like some semblance of heaven. It's the closest to heaven that I'll ever be. I hug myself, as Azrael won't do it for me.

I feel his arm come around my waist, and I collapse onto him, sobbing.

It's only when I feel his gun against the side of my head that I start panicking again.

"Azrael, what are you doing?"

"Be quiet, baby," he growls. To the officers, he yells, "You move closer, and I'll shoot him!"

"Azrael, no, don't -"

"Shut up, Raphael. Let me do this."

"Azrael -"

Everything is spinning around me, swimming in my tear-blurred vision. I see blurs of black police uniforms, and the glass sliding doors to the airport gleaming in the morning sun. It is the first time I have not been outside to greet the sunrise, and I feel fresh tears begin. I never knew that the human body could produce so many tears. I am all but drowning in them. Azrael's arm tightens around me protectively. I feel the gun press harder against the side of my head. Then, miraculously, I feel him take it away. "Azrael -"

"Shh, baby, we're going somewhere safe," he says. He puts the gun up against my chest.

I scream. I can see myself below, trapped in Azrael's clutching arms, pain and horror and utter betrayal mixing on my flushed face. I can see, as if in slow motion, his pale, long finger pulling the trigger, and I can see the bullet bursting my chest and going through me to him, tearing us both, ripping flesh aside on its way to the wall beyond. I hear the gunshot explosion, see us crumple to the ground as one, both of us falling for a moment of eternity, and finally, I hear myself choking on what looks like dark red blood.

I hear myself try to say my last words, and Azrael coughing up blood that stains my hair red as it trails from his mouth down onto me.

Somewhere safe.

I should have known.