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And just like that, my good mood went out of me the way a light goes out. Every muscle I owned went tight and I rolled my neck until it cracked.

“Come again.” My jaw was locked so hard the words had to fight their way out and the guard was wisely moving before I had finished them.

“She… she’s not in. Her shift started at seven, and she didn’t call in and didn’t answer when the office called her. That’s all I know.”

He shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

“You said to tell you if anything changed with her.”

I didn’t have a response to this, as it didn’t require one. But what I did do was think about where her mind was at. Was she frightened? Was she sitting in that apartment of hers with her arms around her knees, unable to make herself walk back into the building where she knew I was. Where a man had threatened her life not with his hands, but with nothing but a name.

One that wasn’t hers.

I released a sigh that sounded more like a growl. Because now I knew that she would need to be spoken to gently and told that this was one of the things she was not allowed to decide for herself. There would be no flying away for my little bird, and it was time for her to learn exactly that.

“Take me to the infirmary,” I demanded, making the guard jerk back.

“Now?” he asked, and this time my answer came out through gritted teeth.

“Now.”

He swallowed hard and nodded down the corridor for my door to be opened. Then he held the restraints out to me, and I straightened up to my full height and looked down at him.

There is always a moment when I do that. The man in front of me works out where my shoulders sit against his own, and figures the length of his reach against mine, and you can watch it arrive on his face. I have watched it happen for most of my life, and it has never once gotten old.

“It’s… it’s protocol,” he stammered as he was forced to look up.

“Not for me it isn’t,” I stated firmly, reminding him of who owned him, and unsurprisingly, his restraints found their way back to his belt.

Then we went down through the wing, and the corridor emptied ahead of us like water going out of a sink. But then this was hardly a shock, as news moves faster inside a prison than it moves anywhere else on this earth. And clearly news about me had made its rounds twice over.

A trusty with a mop looked up, found my face, and discovered something fascinating about the floor. Two men arguing at the gate stopped arguing. An officer came the other way with a clipboard and put his shoulder to the wall to let me by. Then he kept his eyes down the entire time, and I watched his throat move as I went past him.

Good.

That’s what a reputation is for. I haven’t had to explain myself in that building since the day I walked into it and I wasn’t going to start now.

I soon made my way to the infirmary, with the guard having to nearly jog to keep up with my longer stride. I walked past the treatment rooms and went straight to Halloran’s door, which was shut.

Naturally, I didn’t knock.

He was behind that desk with a cup halfway to his mouth and his chair rocked back on its spring. Then his eyes came up and found me in the doorway, and I watched them go wide.

He came out of that chair fast enough to wear his own drink down the front of his shirt, and his hands went up like I had a gun on him.

For the damage I could do him, it may as well have been.

“You can’t be in…”

I had him against the wall before he finished that particular line of stupidity. One hand gathered in the front of that cheap shirt, still hot and wet with his own coffee, and I lifted until his heels came off the floor. The soaked cotton wrung out over my knuckles as I twisted, and I felt him try to twist away from the heat of it. Because a man gets quicker with the truth once the ground stops being his.

“Where is she?” It came out as a furious hiss, and I was sure the man was going to piss himself.

“I… I… called.” It came out of him in pieces, stammered and far too fast. “I called her… I swear to God… I called twice and I… I left a message but there… there was no answer! I don’t… what is it you want me to do… she just hasn’t…”

He kept going but I had stopped being interested the second he said she never answered.

“Your phone.” I cut off his pathetic rambling.