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“I know,” I finally answered on a sigh, and it came out of me heavier than any before it.

“You were not supposed to see that,” he admitted it as though he regretted it, and I understood, sitting there with a dead man still staining the floor, exactly what he had been trying to protect.

It was the version of himself that would forever haunt me.

And I had gone and looked anyway.

I lowered my face and heard myself say it, quietly, to the floor.

“You killed him.”

A finger hooked under my chin and lifted it, and I was looking up at him again whether I wanted to or not.

“It is already done,” he said. “And I will not apologize for killing a man in your name.”

“But you didn’t have to kill him,” I argued, although I wasn’t sure why I even bothered trying with a man who was the very definition of violence.

“Oh, I did,” he confirmed as his thumb moved along my jaw. “And I have never in my life had a better reason.”

I shuddered at that. And it went through the whole of me, and he felt it. But either way, he didn’t let go of my chin.

“Nobody touches what is mine,” he stated firmly as he ran one finger, very lightly, across my split lip. And then along my cheekbone where it had already started to throb.

“And nobody breaks the skin I own.”

Then he put the gauze down and took hold of the hem of my top making me tense.

“What… what are… you… you doing?” I stammered as my voice came out of me in four pieces.

“No other man gets to leave his mark on you.” He said it quietly, lifting it off me and folding the ruined thing over his arm without once looking at it.

“Not ever again,” he added and then looked at my stomach.

Not at my chest. Not anywhere a man looks at a woman standing in front of him in her bra. He looked at the four raised white lines across the lower part of my belly, and he let his eyes stay there long enough for me to be absolutely certain that was what he meant.

I couldn’t breathe for a second.

Because he had not forgotten them.

That is what that look meant. Whatever had passed between us about those four lines in a shower block two months ago, he had carried it with him every single day since. And it hadn’t gotten any smaller with time.

He stood after this and put the ruined top in the biohazard container with his foot on the pedal and went to the cabinet I had been counting gauze in before this nightmare began. He then took out a folded set of scrubs in the wrong size and shook them out.

After that he came back to me, and I was once again back to being his patient as he dressed me. Arms first, then over my head, and he lifted my hair out of the collar with two fingers and smoothed it down my back.

He crouched and straightened the waist of my scrub pants where I had dragged them up myself with shaking hands and tugged the hem of the top down over it.

All of it careful. All of it quick. All of it done like a man handling something that had already been broken once and was not going to be broken ever again on his watch. And I sat on that couch with my heart going like a racehorse and my hands still shaking and could not make any of it fit together.

Because nobody had ever taken that much care of me. Not once in twenty-six years. Not even my father, who loved me and just didn’t know how to show it. Not the man I gave years to. Nobody has ever put me back together the way this man had just done. One inch at a time, gently and without once needing to be asked.

And he had done it with the same hands I had watched dismantle another human being minutes ago. That was what I couldn’t get past. There was no version of this where one of them was a lie and the other one was the real him. Because I had watched both of them happen in the same room and he hadn’t changed in any way at all in between.

The only thing that had changed was who he was looking at and how I now felt about his violent darkness.

Because in all of it, in a prison and a hospital and a shower block and two states, not one single piece of that has ever been pointed at me. I had fought him. I had scratched and punched and kicked and tried to get away but he had never once done to me what Briggs had. He had taken what he wanted yes, but only because deep down he knew I wanted it too.

I had just been fighting myself right along with him.