Page 31

“I’ll form an opinion when I’ve seen it, not before.” That got me another amused twitch of his lips. I turned away from it and busied myself with the cart, gloves and swabs and a fresh dressing pack. I also made myself think of the chains again while I did it, because that helped when turning my back on him.

He isn’t going anywhere.

And that, right there, was a sentence that felt damning and one I would have liked to take back. Because as I reached across for the scissors, I remembered the door being shut. I remembered thinking, distantly, that the room was very quiet, and that quiet had recently developed a habit of meaning something in a place like this.

And then it landed.

I stopped with my hand still on the tray, and I looked at the closed door. Or should I say… the empty hallway.

But it looked like stupidity was on the menu today as I said it out loud like an idiot,

“Wait. Where’s the guard?”

Nobody had walked me here. Nobody had been outside. Nobody had brought him down, or stood at the wall, or leaned in the frame with their thumbs in their vest looking bored. Every shift I had worked in that building, there had been a uniform standing just outside the door. Every single time.

But today, there was no guard and the realization of it made my entire body freeze as I understood far too late that something was wrong.

A terrifying thought that was confirmed the second I turned around and saw the prisoner with no name was now…

Standing.

And as for the chains, he had just finished removing them with the key in his fingers. My eyes widened at the sight as he hadn’t even made a single sound… Not one. The chains that had been holding his wrists to that bed were sliding free and pooling on the mattress behind him with a soft, heavy clatter. And he was standing at the foot of the cot, rolling one shoulder, rubbing at his wrist with his thumb. A key. Somebody had put a key in that man’s hand, and I had no idea who, or what it had cost them, or how long ago he had decided exactly how this morning was going to go.

I went back a step, and my hip caught the cart before half the tray went over but I didn’t even hear it hit the floor. Not when panic was screaming at me to run.

“There’s no guard,” he said, far too calmly, and somehow the calm of it was the most frightening part. “I made certain we wouldn’t be disturbed.”

I sucked back a quick breath and did the only smart thing I had done since working here… I ran.

Not for the door, because he was too close for me to make it there. So, I ran for the desk. Or more specifically, the underside of it, and the little red button screwed there. The promise Jones had made me on my first day now ringing in my head. You hit this, and you don’t take your hand off it until we come through that door.

I made it all of three steps before he stopped me.

He didn’t lunge. He didn’t sprint. He simply moved, far too smoothly for a man built the way he was, and it put him right in front of me. His huge form filled the space between me and that desk like a wall put there overnight. I hit the front of him and bounced right back.

Then he tsked down at me.

That was the sound that chilled me to the bone. Out of everything in that room, out of everything that came after, that was the sound I still heard. A soft click of the tongue against his teeth, twice, patient and almost disappointed. Like the noise you make at a puppy that has gotten up onto the couch again.

And behind me, where he had been standing ten seconds earlier, the door was clear.

So I ran for it as fast as I could.

“Ah, ah,” he said.

His hand closed around my upper arm before I had covered a yard, and then the wall came up behind my back as he spun me against it in an effortless motion. Then before I knew what was happening, both of my wrists were shackled in his palms and pinned up above my head before he held me there long enough to transfer both into one large hand.

A heartbeat too late was when I fought him, although little good it did me. Yet still I twisted and kicked at his shins enough that I got a hand loose. I quickly drove my fist into his ribs, which was a great deal like punching a parked car. Which meant that it achieved nothing but teaching me that my knuckles were not built for it.

So, I went for his face with my nails next and caught him somewhere along the jaw, and he took that wrist back out of the air almost lazily and folded it back with the other. And I brought my knee up hard, the way a woman in a community center in another life had once taught a room full of us to do. Except it didn’t land where I wanted it to as he turned his hip a fraction and all I found was muscle.

But most shocking of all, through all of this,

He didn’t once hit me back.

In fact, he didn’t even look annoyed.

He just let me. That was the only word for it. He stood there with my wrists in one hand and let me exhaust myself against him the way the sea lets you swim before the waves take over.