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“Now, I would have preferred you took the offer. It would have been simpler. But he told you to run instead, didn’t he?” I didn’t answer this, but my silence said all he needed to know.

“Perhaps I will just have to ask him about it.”

“Don’t.” It was out before I thought about it. “Don’t hurt him, he was only…”

“Trying to be kind to you, yes, I know.” Something moved behind his eyes as he said this. “In fact, it’s the only reason he is going to keep breathing.” The terrifying way he said this was enough of a reminder of who stood before me. A killer. A murderer, whose hands had just brought me more pleasure than I’d even know in my entire life and there was something so wrong in that. But it meant that this was when the last of the fog cleared out of my head and all it took was the threat of taking yet another life.

But I couldn’t shove him. I couldn’t put my hands on him at all. Couldn’t fight against him. So, I did the only thing left to me, which was to lift my chin and look him straight in the face.

“You don’t own everybody,” I stated with as much venom as I could muster.

“Don’t I?” he asked in a smug tone that told me exactly what he thought about that declaration.

“You don’t own me.” My voice came up out of somewhere I hadn’t used in three years, out of the girl who used to fill a room. “You can lock the doors and buy the guards. You can crush my alarm and do whatever the hell it is you just did to me, but at the end of this shift, I am going to walk out of that gate. And you are not. You will be back in your cell, and I’ll be on my way home and there is not a single thing you can do about it, because I get to leave and you don’t.” I told him with every spark of fire I possessed, and boy did I ever hit a nerve.

I had never seen a man’s jaw do what his did then. Even if it was there and then gone in less than a second. A flicker, right at the hinge, and then nothing. His control was back in place, as if it had never slipped at all.

But I’d seen it. And I understood, with a small savage flare of joy, that I had hit something true.

“That may be so,” he conceded quietly before he stepped back into me and put one hand on the tile beside my head.

“But not for much longer. Because there is something I have been saving, little one, and I think this is the moment for it.” I frowned at that, hating the fear that quickly built up inside me. As I knew that a man like him always had a plan, that much had been obvious from the start.

“You are quite right. You will walk out of that gate today. And you will get into your little car, and you will drive nineteen minutes, and you will let yourself into a two-room apartment with a broken buzzer on the second floor, and you will put your keys in the cracked ceramic bowl by the door.”

My heart seemed to hollow out as my breath left me.

The bowl.

Not the car. Not the buzzer. Not the second floor. Those were things a man could get from a parking lot. But the bowl was in my hallway. It was on the other side of a locked door. Such a simple thing yet it landed like an anvil on my chest. I had bought it at a yard sale for four dollars three states ago and it had a crack in the glaze you couldn’t see from the door. And every night since I moved in I had dropped my keys into it, and every night I had believed I was alone when I did it.

Which meant only one thing. Somebody had stood inside my apartment and cracked the seal on my new life. And the man in front of me had been the cause.

My legs went out from under me, and he caught me before the gauze got tight. And so help me, I let him, and I don’t know why.

“I know where you live, little bird,” he said, even though we both knew that he didn’t need to. Not now he had proved it in the most terrifying of ways.

I couldn’t make a sound. My mouth just seemed to open but nothing came out but a stolen breath. But unfortunately for me, he wasn’t done.

“And one more thing you should know.” He leaned in until there was nothing else in the world but that brutally handsome face and those startling pale eyes. “When it comes to you, I collect the things you try to hide from me. And this one I’ve had for a while.”

Oh no… no… Please. Please don’t say it.

He said it.

“I know your last name is not really Vale.”

After that, I swear, I just came apart. There was no better way to describe it. Three years of holding a shape held together by absolutely nothing but the belief that nobody knew. And he took it away in nine words, and the whole thing went crumbling down at once.

I don’t remember deciding to fight. I just remember screaming at him to let me go, to open the door, to get away from me. I remember the noise coming out of me. A high and awful sound, like an animal makes when it’s trapped.

And I remember pulling.

I threw my whole weight against my restraints. Over and over again, wrenching, twisting, hauling down on it with everything I had. Yet the gauze didn’t give, and all that happened was that soft cotton went around and around on wet skin until the wet skin stopped being smooth.

I knew what I was doing. Of course I did, seeing as I was a nurse. I knew exactly what friction, water and four turns of gauze do to the inside of a wrist, yet I did it anyway. Because at that point I wasn’t really in the room. But he was and he quickly had enough of my outburst.

“Stop!” he shouted down at me with enough authority that it worked. That and the fact he got one arm around my waist and lifted, instantly taking away the strain. He then reached up with his free hand, took hold of the knot and looked at what I had done to myself underneath it. The gauze had gone pink in two places and was going red in one. Pink droplets were running down my forearms with the water, and he watched its journey with a grit of his teeth. Then he looked at me, and I have never in my life seen anything as frightening as his face in that moment.