Page 10

Not that he needed to hear it. I was fairly sure he could feel it from where he sat.

I cleaned the blood first, and that meant touching him and for the first time since my training, I faltered before doing my job. Then I pressed two fingers to his temple to tilt his face toward the light, and the second I made contact, something happened to him.

He closed his eyes.

Not in pain.

Because I knew pain.

I had seen it in a thousand faces, and this was nothing like that. It was slower than pain. Almost grateful. Like a man stepping out of a screaming building. One so loud he’d long since stopped hearing it and now he found himself somewhere blessedly quiet. The breath went out of him in a long, steady stream, and under my fingers I felt something enormous loosen. Some tension I hadn’t even known he had been holding onto.

And if I were honest, it was a tension that left me, too.

And I couldn’t explain it. A current, running the wrong way up my arm from the place where I touched him, settling in behind my ribs and refusing to leave. Whatever moved through him in that second moved through me right along with it, and neither of us had asked for it.

Yet he still didn’t move.

Not a single muscle.

And that frightened me more than the size of him, more than the ink, more than the eight broken men out in the corridor. Because a man can be undone right down to his foundations and not let one muscle give him away. As if somebody had trained the flinch right out of him at a young enough age. That wasn’t just calm.

It was control.

A man holding something enormous perfectly level and letting you see exactly how easily he could tip it. Mold it. Own every part of it.

Again, it was terrifying.

So, I did the only thing I knew how to do. I kept working. I cleaned the wound, and he let me, his eyes staying shut, and I told myself the tremor in my hands was nothing but adrenaline.

I got the first steri-strip on. My hands, bless them, did the job anyway.

And then it came. A low voice, one so quiet it was meant for me and me alone. A voice with something buried under the flat American vowels that I couldn’t place, as if each one was artificial. An accent built to order, one that could have come from anywhere and nowhere in the States all at once.

“You’re not afraid the way the others are.”

I froze with the second strip half-peeled.

“But you are afraid,” he went on, unhurried, those eyes moving over my face like hands.

“Your pulse is betraying you. But it is the wrong kind of fear. The others are afraid of what I might do to them.” A pause, then the smallest tilt of his head. Unnervingly so, as if he was trying to cut me open and make sense of what came spilling out.

“But you’re afraid of being seen, little nurse.”

Everything in me went cold and still all at once. Then I took a step back before I’d told my feet to move. The backs of my legs hit the supply cart and set every metal thing on it rattling. It was loud enough that it could have been a dropped tray in that dead-quiet room, and I flinched at the sound like a fool.

Which was when he smiled.

Not the almost-smile from before. A real one this time, slow, wide and wrong. A sadistic thing that spread across that beautiful, ruined face like a crack running across ice. It was the smile of a man who had taken aim at something and watched it fall. The smile of someone looking at a thing the rest of the world would call horrifying and finding it pretty instead. Just the way I imagine he might smile down at his own blood-soaked hands, or at a knife with someone still dripping off the end of it.

He had reached into me, found the one raw nerve I kept buried under everything else, and pressed it just to watch me jump.

And it had made him happy.

Of course it fucking had. He was a natural-born killer.

And I had never in my life been so frightened by a happy face. So, I did the only thing three years of running had taught me to do. I put the veil back up and smoothed it into place. One pleasant and blank, and utterly fake expression. Then I pressed the last strip into place a little harder than I strictly needed to.

“There,” I said far too brightly.