“Years of nightly patrols had made each street familiar beneath his boots, a home as beautiful as it was deadly. On one street, he had shyly kissed Bina Laska when he was sixteen. On the next, he had held an elderly woman in his arms as life drained from her body, blood pooling onto the cobblestones like rainwater. Prague did not know Domek, did not need him, but his life was overlaid on the ancient streets in watercolor, the patterns sheer and impermanent.”
