Slowly We Die. Emelie Schepp

asleep, but she didn’t want to know where, whether on the sofa, the floor or the chaise longue.

      How had he gotten in? Through a window? Or had he been able to pick the front-door lock without her ever noticing?

      Irritated, she fastened the top button on her jacket and adjusted her hair to cover her neck. She thought about how she should have been more aware, should have seen something, heard something. But she had been taken completely by surprise, and she hated it. Hated that he was unpredictable, that his movements were always so difficult to anticipate, that he could always get past whatever defense she put up. She hated his bold, competent, hostile, intense manner. Hated that he was the one who always made up the rules of the game. Hated their shared past.

      Danilo was, in a way, uneducated—he had learned from experience, from practice. He had learned to navigate in his reality. He had no normal boundaries.

      But then, she didn’t, either.

      Because of that, her reaction had already exposed her. That she hadn’t killed him showed exactly how important it was for her to get the boxes back.

      And he knew it.

      She sighed, turned off the light and left her room.

      * * *

      “Philip!” Sandra said. “Wake up!”

      “I am awake!” he shouted in the ambulance cab.

      He met Sandra’s serious gaze and knew that she had yelled at him more than once. They were already in Eneby.

      “Bring the bag,” she said, getting out of the cab.

      Philip rubbed both hands over his mouth and eyes, grabbed the medical bag, and with the stretcher between them, they ascended the stairs to the second floor.

      On the top step sat a teenager, her cell phone pressed to her ear. She was wearing a gray T-shirt and ripped jeans. Her hair was black, and she had a wing tattooed on her right lower arm. It began around her wrist and ended at her elbow.

      When she saw Philip and Sandra, she pulled the phone from her ear and got up. Her shirt was bloody and her face pale; she was clearly upset.

      “Hurry. My mom’s in there,” she said, pointing toward the open door. “You have to help her. Her hands... They said that I should try and lay her down, but her arms are tied to the chair and I don’t know how to free them. I tried, but I can’t do it.”

      The girl’s body was shaking.

      “What’s your mom’s name?” Philip asked, examining the girl’s face.

      “Shirin.”

      “And yours?”

      “Aida.”

      Philip and Sandra followed her into a room furnished with a leather sofa, round rug and long drapes. Tied to a chair in a sitting position was an attractive, middle-aged woman, wearing a black top and leopard-print pants. She seemed barely alive.

      “What the hell...” said Philip, exchanging glances with Sandra. They heard Aida’s voice behind her.

      “She was like this when I came home,” she said. “There’s so much blood...oh god, I can’t look...”

      Both of the woman’s hands had been cut off and lay a couple of feet from the chair she’d been tied to. Around each arm was a white zip tie, both pulled so tightly that they were cutting into her skin. The blood dripped slowly from her wrists. Judging from the amount of blood on the floor, Philip quickly surmised that the woman was in shock from extreme blood loss.

      He rushed forward, lifted her head up and confirmed that her airway was free. He placed one hand on her forehead, two fingers under her chin, and gently tilted her head farther back. At the same time, he thought there was something familiar about her face. Had he met her before? When? Where?

      “Shirin,” he said. “Can you hear me?”

      She didn’t answer.

      He leaned over so one ear was near the woman’s mouth, looked at her rib cage and saw she was breathing.

      “What happened? Who did this to you?” he said.

      As he tried to find her pulse, he continued talking to her. He pressed his fingers to her neck and tried to establish the strength and frequency of her pulse, but he could hardly feel it.

      “Shirin,” he said, but she didn’t answer. Only when he took her shoulders and carefully shook her did she react.

      “We have to cut her loose,” he said to Sandra, who was standing behind him. “Quickly.”

      “How should we do that?” she asked.

      “I can’t cut the zip ties without first stopping the flow of blood.”

      Philip opened the medical bag, pulled out the blood pressure cuff, placed it on the woman’s upper arm. He closed the air valve and pumped it up as much as possible.

      The blood flow stopped in that arm.

      Now he had to stop the arterial flow in the other arm, but he didn’t have another cuff with him.

      “Shit, I need...” he began, but he faltered when he saw that Aida stood near the doorway with her back to them.

      “God, god, god,” she was whispering.

      For the first time in ages, Philip felt his heart pounding.

      The metallic scent of blood filled his nose as he thought about how he needed one more bandage to stem the blood flow. He stood up.

      “Philip,” Sandra said, but he had already left the room. He ran down the steps out to the ambulance. He found a tourniquet and ran back up the stairs with the strap in one hand. When he returned to the room, he saw that Aida had crawled into the fetal position in one corner of the sofa and was hugging a pillow so hard that her knuckles were white.

      He placed the tourniquet around the woman’s left arm and began to twist it to tie it more tightly. Just as he was about to tie it off, he heard a voice.

      “Mommy...”

      The voice didn’t belong to the teenager. It was softer.

      Philip lost his concentration when he glanced up and saw a little girl standing in the doorway, a scared look on her face. Her bangs were swept to the side, and her hair was messy. She was wearing a light blue nightgown with Princess Elsa from Frozen on the front.

      “You were supposed to stay in our room,” Aida said, getting up. “Go back in there, Sara!”

      Aida pulled the girl’s arm, but she resisted.

      Philip and Sandra exchanged glances again before returning to the woman.

      Philip was resolute as he released the zip tie.

      “Help me now,” he said, signaling to Sandra to get hold of Shirin’s limp, heavy body.

      They counted to three.

      “One, two, three.”

      They placed her carefully on the stretcher, working silently, knowing what was at stake. Her condition was critical.

      “The hands...” Sandra said, nodding toward the severed body parts still lying on the floor.

      “We need to bag them and put them in an ice water bath,” Philip said.

      He opened the medical bag, pulled out two resealable bags. “Here, see if you can fill these in the kitchen.”

      He slipped on a pair of latex gloves, then reached for the hands. But because of all the blood, he lost his grip on one of them and it slipped to the floor.

      “Shit, shit, shit,” he said quietly and tried again as Sandra came back into the room with the bags filled with ice water.

      His face was stony as he placed each hand into its icy bath and sealed the bag, then laid the