Page 11

“All done. Try not to headbutt anyone for a day or two.”

But it was the half-second after I said it that stopped my breath. Something had flickered behind those glacier eyes that had no business on the face of a man like him.

Surprise.

Real, unguarded surprise.

There and gone so fast I would have missed it if I hadn’t spent three years learning to read the things people work the hardest to hide. I had thrown a stupid little joke at a monster, and for the length of one heartbeat I had genuinely caught him off guard. And I got the distinct, cold sense that almost nothing in this world managed that anymore.

Then he put it calmly away and I watched him do it. Watched him draw his own blankness back over it, smooth and deliberate. A well-practiced move, like one mask recognizing another across two feet of ruined air.

And that there… was so much worse than the grin that followed it.

Because a killer who finds you insignificant is one thing. But a killer who finds you interesting is another thing entirely. And with one flippant joke about headbutting, I had just made myself the most interesting thing in his very small, very dangerous world.

I didn’t want to be interesting. Interesting got you remembered. Interesting got you found. It gave the hunter something it wanted to chase.

And this man hunted for a living.

And interesting was exactly what I’d just become.

I cleared my throat, but it was too late to pretend I wasn’t now on his radar. Especially not when his eyes dropped, slow and measured, to the ID badge clipped to my scrubs. The ‘ANNA VALE, RN’ easy to see.

“Anna,” he said, in a way that sounded more like a threat. Or a vow as I had never heard my name said like that before, or any name at that.

Just Anna. Not nurse. Not Vale. As if he’d looked at the whole of the little false life I’d laminated onto a strip of plastic and reached past it, straight to the first name underneath. The one true thing I’d never been able to make myself give up, and he handed it back to me like he’d decided it belonged to him now.

Anyone could have read it. That’s what I told myself. It was pinned to my chest. A child could have read it.

But no one had ever said it like that.

Like a man reading a title off the spine of a book he already owned.

I didn’t let a single scrap of my panic show. Three years had made me good at that, if nothing else. I stripped my gloves off, dropped them in the trash, and busied my hands packing the cart back up so they couldn’t do anything humiliating like shake.

I turned my back on him. Every instinct I owned howled at me not to, yet I did it anyway, as I walked to the door. I didn’t run. Anna Vale didn’t run, because running is a thing people remember.

It was what sadists like him wanted me to do.

Instead, I rapped twice on the steel, because that was the only way out of a room like this. Then I heard the bolt draw back, and freedom was suddenly the thickness of a door away.

And I almost made it.

Almost made it before his voice came from behind me.

Low… Warm… Absolutely certain.

It reached the whole way across that room and closed a hand around the back of my neck without ever once touching me.

A promise and a threat all rolled into one…

“Until tomorrow, my little nurse.”

4

THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE

ANNA