Page 61

My gauze. Out of my own medic bag, out of the kit I had grabbed off the hook forty seconds after being told a man was bleeding on a floor. It had gone across the tile with everything else when I dropped it, and he had noted exactly where it landed and left it lying there until he wanted it.

He unwound it with one hand and his teeth, leaving me to watch wide-eyed as my panic grew.

“No. No, don’t… please don’t.” I begged, already knowing where he was going with this, seeing as he still had my hands restrained in front of him.

“This is your doing,” he said, as though I had asked for an explanation. “You could have been a good girl for me, little nurse.” My heart hammered at that. He was telling me there was a version of him I hadn’t met yet, and that I was walking dangerously close to it.

“Wait… I’ll be good.” I pleaded, but I knew it was far too late for that when he said,

“I have given you more patience today than I have ever given anybody before, but I see that you are determined to spend it very quickly.”

“No, I…” he was quick to cut me off, and he did this with a dark look before his words followed.

“Hold still. You have already made me put my hand on you once today in a way I did not enjoy.” His thumb moved once over the tender place at my wrist, and I flinched.

“Do not make it twice,” he warned me before he started wrapping my wrists. Something he did carefully. That’s what I couldn’t get past. The care he took with me.

He turned the gauze around them four or five times, over the bruises that would be showing there by morning, and then he checked it with a finger underneath. He adjusted it once because it had gone too tight on the left. And he did all of this as gently as I would have done to a patient.

Then he lifted my arms above my head and knotted the loose end around the pipes that connected the showers, being tall enough to do it with ease. It was exactly the right height that it rendered me at his mercy. High enough that I had to go up slightly onto the balls of my feet to take the strain off my shoulders, and low enough that I could stand there without hanging.

I pulled against it, testing it out of instinct, but it didn’t give.

“There.” He breathed the word out with something that sounded like satisfaction. Then he stepped back and looked down at me. As if he was appraising a piece of art he had just acquired. Oh, and he took his time about it too, which was somehow worse than if he had just rushed what happened next.

He stepped back into me, close enough that the water coming off his shoulders was landing on my chest. Then his hands found the front of my scrub top and like the last time in the infirmary, he tore it straight down the middle.

One swift movement with both fists and the fabric gave with a sound I felt through my ribs and with no resistance whatsoever. He then opened it out on either side of me like a man opening a coat and left it hanging off my shoulders.

“That’s better,” he said again, quieter this time, and my breathing was anything but calm. Thankfully, I wore a white tank top underneath, like I usually did. Although I quickly realized this wouldn’t mean much, but at least he didn’t tear this one.

Instead, he took the hem of it in both hands, and he gathered it slowly. He rolled it up my body an inch at a time, over my stomach, over my ribs and up over my breasts where my breath caught in my throat. Especially when the wet cotton of a bra came into view as he settled the roll of fabric high on my chest and left it there.

And then he looked, and I felt it happen like a caress. That bra had been white this morning and covering what it was meant to. Now, soaked through, the fabric might as well not have been there at all. He could see every single thing it was supposed to be hiding, and he took his time drinking in his fill.

“Look at you,” he said, and it came out rough, almost thick. Nothing like the voice he had been using on me since I stepped foot in here. His hand rose and he ran the back of his bent finger along the lace edge with a softness that was almost cruel. Because it was the type of touch that lured you into a false sense of security, even when it came from such a dangerous hand.

I have never in my life been so aware of my own skin as I was in that moment. Then he leaned down closer to my ear and whispered softly,

“Moya idealnaya kukolka.”

I didn’t understand a syllable of it, but it didn’t matter in the slightest. Because nobody has ever said anything to me in that tone in my entire life, and something at the base of my spine understood it perfectly well without any translation at all.

“My perfect little doll,” he murmured as his hands found my waist and made the slow journey upward. His hands were so large that his fingers nearly met as they framed my torso, until they reached the place his eyes had been fixed on the whole time. My breasts heaved and I sucked in a quick breath the second both hands cupped them. His thumbs moved once against my nipples that he could clearly see, making them pebble even in the heated room. My head went back against the tile before I had the slightest say in it and he no doubt watched as the lump in my throat was forced down my neck.

“There,” he said, and the American had gone clean out of it. As if in that moment he couldn’t hold back the truth of the man beneath the façade. Then as if someone had snapped their fingers, it was back as he added more,

“There she is.” I started shaking my head, even though I knew trying to hide what he was doing to me was futile by this point.

“No, I…”

“No?” he interrupted with a raise of his brow.

“No. Stop. Please stop, I don’t want…” again he was quick to silence me with his own thoughts on the matter,

“Your mouth says one thing.” His hands went completely still, which was so much worse than if he had gripped me. “Everything else in you is saying much more. And I am a patient man, little one, but I am not a stupid one.”

I gasped at this and uttered a plea I wasn’t entirely sure was for him to stop.