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And then there was the one I kept coming back to. The moment I had turned over more than all the rest of it put together.

Behave… For me.

She said it all breathy and desperate, like something she regretted the moment it was out, and I watched her regret it, enjoying every second of her mistake. And her reward for giving it to me was something I gave no one.

My compliance.

So, I had put one hand on that rail and wound the other into my own chain until the arm couldn’t move. I tied myself down for her, and I stayed that way like a dog told to sit.

For an hour.

Nobody has ever made me do a thing. Not with a gun. Not with a fist. My father spent my childhood carving the word obedience into me and got a weapon out of it. But not one person in thirty years has told me to hold still and had me do it because I wanted to please them.

Yet she asked.

In a shaking voice, holding a tray.

And I gripped the rails until my knuckles went white, and what’s more… I fucking liked it.

But truth be told… I like touching her a great deal more.

I sat on that bunk a long while with thoughts of her consuming my mind. Yet this was not something I discovered on a prison bunk. I had known it a long time.

Only one thing in my life had ever kept me from sleeping.

Not money. My father has enough of it to make greedy gods envious. So did I, and not one coin of mine came out of his pocket. I earned every last one of them with these scarred hands. Because I was very good at my work, and there was a great deal of satisfaction in doing a thing you were built to do, even if your profession was spilling blood. And sleepless nights had never come from women, even if there had been plenty of them. More than I could name, and I wouldn’t want to.

Playthings, all of them, because that was exactly what they had always been. Nothing but a night. A week at most. Marks on their skin they would find in a mirror three days later and press with their fingers and tell nobody about them. I sent them home wrecked in the way they had asked to be wrecked, and I never once wondered where any of them went afterward.

I have never cared for a woman since that day. That was decided in a room I don’t ever go back into, when I was young enough that the decision got made for me.

The door on that room stays shut and sealed tight.

But one appetite came out of it, and that one lasted beyond all else.

Revenge.

The only thing that ever kept me up at night. The only thing I have ever crossed an ocean for.

That was the whole reason I was in America. Not business. Not my father’s expansion, whatever the men around his table tell each other. I came for one man, and I was patient about it the way I am patient about everything else… right up until I was not.

Once. In my whole life… just once I lost all control.

I saw a face I had been waiting most of my life to see, and everything my father had built into me simply stopped working. I did in one room what should have taken me six months, and I did it in the wrong room. All in front of a fat man with a badge and a lap full of cheap glitter who had no business being within a hundred miles of that place. The chief of their police, as it turned out, with a cell phone in hand and half his department just a phone call away. That is the whole reason they have me. Not detective work. Not one clever man in a laboratory. A senior officer with his pants undone and a clear view of the room.

He had a name. It was filed where I file everything that needs killing. And the man I actually came here for went out the back while I was too busy killing the rest of his men. He was still breathing that morning, and that was the second time I had ever failed in my life. As for the first, that belongs in the room I don’t go back into.

Revenge had been my only focus in life.

One hunger that had lasted from my youth all the way to a doorway in a prison infirmary, and I had never once needed another.

Then a woman with freckles asked a room full of bleeding guards whether any of them needed her first, and thirty years of noise went out of me between one breath and the next. There was no name for that, and I didn’t care for a thing I couldn’t name.

I only knew that I would open my arm again tomorrow to be in a room with her for an hour, and that an hour would never be enough. From the moment they processed me into that building, everything in me should have been pointed at one thing.

A way out.

That was never a hope. It was a certainty. There were men in three countries already spending money on my behalf, and a route, and a date, and none of them needed me to lift a finger except to be standing in the right corridor at the right hour. A prison was a building, and buildings had men in them, and men… well, they all had a price. It was as simple as that. Not one command of mine had ever failed to be accomplished for the small matter of a locked door.