Page 57

So, I stopped counting somewhere past thirty.

In fact, I don’t know how long I stood there with my thumb on that button after I understood it meant nothing. It might have been only seconds more or full minutes. The sound went from being a rescue to being just a noise, and then to being a cruel, obscene joke. A small plastic thing screaming its heart out in an empty room. And my hand came down slowly off my collar and I looked at it.

“Are you quite finished?” he asked, not in anger or even in frustration. It was just the calm of a man who knew what was going to happen before I did. A voice that came from a man who knew now was the time to step out into the open and show himself.

The casual way he leaned one large shoulder against the tile with his arms folded just made him look even more intimidating. His muscles bunched with the steam moving around him like some god of war. The way he watched me was with silent amusement, the way you observe someone still fighting even though the battle had been lost long ago.

“You can press that all you like, little bird.” He said it gently. Almost as though he felt sorry for me.

“Nobody is coming.”

“They have to come.” I was still holding it up between us like it was a crucifix.

“Someone… someone will have heard it,” I argued, but even to my own ears it sounded weak.

“I’m sure they have, and if they’re smart, they will have ignored it and gone back to their coffee.” He straightened off the tile as he started to prowl toward me.

“But just in case you’re still not getting it, here is your current reality. There are fourteen officers on this wing today and I own twelve of them. The other two are nowhere near here, I made sure of that.”

I couldn’t breathe properly. His words had done exactly as he intended and played their part beautifully. Exactly as he knew they would as he didn’t look surprised when my fingers fell away from the alarm that felt like nothing more than a cheap plastic kid’s toy.

“Do you understand what I am telling you, little nurse?” I swallowed hard before making myself lie.

“No.”

“Yes, you do.” He was closer now and I had barely seen him move.

“You have understood it since the day the guard didn’t come back into that infirmary. You have been very brave about not saying it out loud, and I have let you have that, because I like watching you be brave.”

Then he held out his tattooed hand, his palm up, waiting.

As though I had been playing with something at the dinner table.

“Give it to me.” I started to shake my head before sliding further along the wall away from him.

“No.” My voice cracked all the way through.

“It’s mine. They gave it to me, it’s…”

“Anna,” he said my name in reprimand. Just my name, quietly and patiently and said the way you would chastise a child who had been told once already.

“You can hand it to me,” he said, “or I can come and take it from you. There are only two ways this goes, little bird, and only one of them ends with my hands staying where they are… for now.”

It was those last two words that terrified me the most. Like a dark promise of a future he dictated down to the last second. He was also close enough now that I could feel the heat coming off him through the steam. As for that open hand, it hadn’t moved an inch the whole time he was speaking. It waited, as if he knew all along that he would get what he wanted.

“I would rather you gave it to me,” he added. “But I wouldn’t mind if you choose for me to get my hands on you sooner.”

This did it. It was enough of a threat to get me to hold it out as far as my reach would go and drop it into his hand.

A hand that closed around it and simply squeezed.

He didn’t throw it or stomp on it or make any kind of show. He just closed his hand, creating a small dull crunch, like stepping on a beetle. Then when he opened his fingers, the pieces went down into the water at our feet and skated away across the tile.

A hundred dollars of hardened plastic, made to survive being dropped on concrete, and he had ended it with one hand while looking at my face the entire time. And it was the sight of him breaking something with such ease that made me react, and not in the way he wanted.

I ran again.

I ran because there was nothing else left to do with my body.