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“No, no, no, no!” I let my head hang down as I panted short staggering breaths which was when I saw it. A wooden wedge a short distance from the door, like it had been used to prop it open, and I didn’t want to think about the reasons why right then.

Not when all I could think about was that I had come through that doorway at a dead run and I was the reason that wedge had scattered.

So instead, I pulled on that handle until my hands hurt.

“Roz. Roz, I’m here. Hold on.” But then after desperately tugging down on it, reality started to seep in like an ugly thing trying to taint my hope. In my anger and frustration, I then put my fist into it once, and all that did was hurt my hand, leaving me with nothing to show for it but bruises.

Because it was useless. There was no going back for her. There was no way out of this. And with my keys in the pocket of a man who had asked me for them so gently, that only added a bitter taste to my mouth. One that I was forced to swallow down. Another fucking mistake on an ever-growing list that was already drowning me.

So, I put my forehead against the oak.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Roz, I am so sorry.”

And then I heard them on the other side of it.

Boots, voices, and somebody shouting something with the dark, powerful authority of a man who had done this before. And underneath all of it there was my friend, still going, still fighting them, and no way on this earth for me to reach her.

I stood there with my hands flat on that door for far longer than I should have. I knew that.

And then I made myself take them off it.

Because this was it. My last chance at making it out of here as a free woman. The one way out of this building that wasn’t just a door, but a direct route to somewhere beyond those fences.

So, I turned and started running in the darkness, with only a faint eerie green glow to guide me. Then I went past the seclusion suite and winced the second I saw that door with the hatch in it. Because I had sat outside it only yesterday and had talked a man to sleep.

I told him about a tree, and a boy named Michael Prentice, and a kitchen towel I set on fire when I was nine. He had asked me about my favorite movie and I had told him. I had laughed, out loud, on a chair in a corridor, and I wrote patient settled on a chart and meant it.

And the entire time, every single minute of it, this was already arranged. His men were already coming. The vehicles were already somewhere close by. And what he had said into that phone tonight, he had obviously been waiting days to say. An order that had been sitting there the whole time I was telling him about falling from a rope swing.

“You let me worry about that,” he had said when I asked him what he thought was going to happen here. When I reminded him that he was a prisoner.

You let me worry about that.

Fuck, but how those words now haunted me.

Because I had left it to him. That was the part I can’t forgive myself for. I went home, and I didn’t once ask myself what a man like that would have to worry about.

Then I gave him my fucking keys.

He put his hand out and I unclipped them and put them into his palm like the fucking puppet I was. I didn’t even ask why, and now he was moving through a building hunting me and if that power came on right now, he would still have access to all of it.

I wasn’t stupid. I had been keeping myself alive for three years and I hadn’t gotten this far by making foolish decisions.

But God help me… I was stupid about him.

The tunnel door was at the end of that corridor, past the storerooms and on my way, I grabbed the only thing I needed to get out of it. I picked up the fire extinguisher I knew was mounted on the wall not far from the seclusion suite. It was there in case one of the patients managed to slip something in that could set the bed alight, because apparently that had happened twice now. Hence the need for one so close.

But right now, it was about to serve a very different purpose as I got to the end of that corridor with it. My plan had been simple enough, as it involved putting it through a padlock that had been rusted shut since before I was born.

However, following the theme of the night, the padlock was already off, and I was stupidly asking myself why. Why it was lying on the floor about a foot from the frame with the metal loop cut clean through.

And the door was open about two inches.

I stood there in the cold with a fire extinguisher in my arms and I couldn’t seem to make my brain work. Because that was my way out.

Mine.

But somebody had been through this door recently.