No Safe Haven

Deflect

Bishop woke with a start to a silent apartment. Unsure of what had woken him, he quietly rolled over from his stomach - only to stop when he reached his side. 

There was someone else in the apartment; he could feel it.  

Slowly reaching toward the nightstand where he kept his gun, Bishop squinted against the dark, trying to locate the intruder. 

A man's voice came from the shadows. "The gun isn't there anymore."  

Bishop froze in place. At least whoever was in the apartment wasn't here to kill him - that would have been much easier to do before he woke up. 

"You seem to have me at a disadvantage," Bishop said before he quickly introduced a question intended to keep the intruder talking. "What can I do for you?"  

The importance of the question was actually two-fold. While it would keep the intruder talking - which would give Bishop a way to locate him in the dark - it also had the added advantage of getting Bishop into the intruder's good graces. Statistically, victims of home-invasion had a much higher chance of survival when they found ways to placate the intruders. 

"Trying to get on my good side, Bishop?" 

Bishop felt his blood go cold; the fact that whoever was speaking knew his name was worrisome.  

"It's ok, I get it." The voice in the darkness seemed to come from everywhere at once. 

"You can turn on the light if you'd like. This might be easier face-to-face, as it were."  

Bishop willed his hand to the light switch located near the head of his bed and closed his eyes in preparation for the light. When he opened them again, he found a man seated at the kitchen table. Whoever the man was, he hadn't lied about Bishop's weapon; it lay on the table, well within reach of the stranger.  

From head to toe, the man wore white. If not for the fact that the man had broken into Bishop's house, he would have seemed angelic. His hands were currently resting at the top of a light-brown cane which appeared to be topped off by a simple knob of amber. An intricate gold-and-maroon piece of metalwork kept the amber fastened to the cane. From where Bishop sat on his bed, the collar of the cane looked almost like a crown. 

"I have no intention of hurting you, Bishop." The man at the table reached out to Bishop's gun and lightly ran his fingers up and down the top of the grip. "I just wanted you to know that I could have if I had wanted to. When it comes down to it, I don't think you have any bigger admirer than me, truly."  

The intruder stared at Bishop without blinking his light-blue eyes.  

He seemed familiar, though Bishop couldn't remember where he had seen the man. 

"Oh, you've never seen me, Bishop, don't waste your time." 

Bishop's emotional status changed from scared to scared and annoyed as this man stayed a step ahead in this one-sided conversation. Bishop decided to change the flow and find a way to get back on top of their verbal exchange. 

"You haven't told me what I can do for you, Mr..." Bishop let the end of the sentence hang in the air, hoping to get a name from the man at the table; while the clarification from the intruder that there was no intent to harm Bishop was calming, familiarity would also increase Bishop's odds of survival. 

"Oh, you'd like a name? I suppose that would help wouldn't it? I like yours, Bishop. How about you call me King?" 

"Okay, Mr. King, wha-" 

"Just King," the man said abruptly. "Now, as for what you can do for me..." The man slowly retracted his fingers from the grip of the gun. "I would like you to take a break."