<i>Wait them out. Can't enter unless invited. <br/>
<br/>
I'm going to kill him.</i><br/><br/>Katya felt her eye jaw clench in protest, but said nothing. Despite it being the most idiotic thing she'd been told in her lifetime. She continued to seethe inwardly while the room collected itself. Leaning against a wall furthest from the door and watching through peripheral for anything as it might've moved against the door, its brace and the makeshift barricade-work they'd hastily put in place. The throbbing in her ears was settling and she felt moisture return to her tongue where before only the cling of true, reeking death had reduced her not much more than bitter syllables for her would be saviours.<br/><br/><i>Settle down. You're alright. Just ...nearly dead.</i><br/><br/>"We're alive. That's what matter." She said flatly.<br/><br/><i>Barely! That walking draft-horse of a man was too stupid and too slow. And that's why he's dead. And you're <b>not!</b></i><br/><br/>"I am ...sorry." She started, blinking back what began as artificial tears that had threatened a bit too tactfully to turn real. "For shouting at you all. Ismark?" She extended fingertips to him in an olive branch gesture; a wild shift from the violent shoves she'd rained on him only seconds before. It dawned on her then -and she couldn't say<i>why</i>, exactly- that they all seemed intimately more familiar with each other than even a small, dreary region would suggest. Leaving her, her strange little twin and the recently departed boulder as strangers. Strange, by comparison, seemed a flexible word given their current situation. Lord she hoped she'd said his name right. The tavern seemed like an eternity ago. "Ismark, you did save us all." She forced a dry chuckle. "So, thank you." Turning to address those she'd only begun to form opinions on, she'd offer a curt nod at Bucren.<br/><br/>If she hoped to survive this and be rid of Barovia by sunup, he was her best bet. Even if she had to ride his corpse down a hill to safety.<br/><br/>She properly hated Ismark in those minutes between death and the drink that he frolicked so effortlessly between. It would have been anyone's guess, the way she turned her porcelain features and wide, glassy eyes to the pale woman and her bulwark of a man across the open space. "Lady Ireena," her mouth twitched into a frown that she corrected almost instantly. "fortunate enough. We may have been left to be..." she hesitated, not wanting or not caring to find the proper, flowery analogy for whatever had happened to Xavier. She brushed it away with a befitting shake of her head. "We're alive." She repeated, hitting hard on this point to hopefully sell it as the major takeaway from this endeavor. Her mind was racing, and she found it difficult to reign her thoughts away from dashing off.<br/><br/>"I..." forcing herself to look anywhere Ireena wasn't, Katya felt at the hidden pocket along her jerkin front. "I received a letter." Dark eyes went to Esperanza again but only briefly. "Begging that I return here. To Barovia." She'd say nothing more then, feigning helpless confusion about as well any anyone who'd lied through their teeth in halves for every breath they took. Besides, they ought to know the rest anyhow. What<i>had </i>been so urgent that she'd needed to quite literally hike to her own funeral? She wanted to scream. To hurl herself fist, claw or dagger first into any and all of them if it bought her even another minute toward daybreak.<br/><br/>"We're ...strangers to this place. We mean no harm -to any of you!" Finally, she'd work her attention to her hardest sell: the Gypsy woman. "But it looks like we're in this together."