Page 9

Because he wasn’t what a monster was supposed to look like. Of course he was intimidating. That much was obvious. But monsters were supposed to be easy to spot. Easy to see, like demons lurking in the dark. But he…

He was fucking God.

There wasn’t a better word for it. There wasn’t any word for a being like that, not even if I was trying to be clinical about it. Not even if I was trying to describe him in a way that didn’t make me sound like a swooning heroine falling for the bad boy in one of those dark romance stories. He was symmetrical. Brutally so. A hard, beautiful face made brutal by the blood that coated one side of it from the split in his brow. A jawline that looked cut rather than grown, and lips that smirked with startling knowledge. As if he knew every inch of my soul and could see every dirty little secret it held within. But then there were his eyes.

And it was his eyes that were the problem.

They were of the palest blue I had ever seen, ringed with a dark navy that made them all the more startling. The blue of ice over deep water, and they were already on me. Not roaming. Not wild.

But on me.

Fixed and steady, with the type of attention so total it was like standing under a spotlight in an empty theater. Everyone else in that room was looking at him but he was looking at me like the rest of them weren’t there at all.

Boring, Anna. I reminded myself, a little hysterically. Be furniture. Be a lamp. Lamps don’t make eye contact with murderers. They simply exist.

I cleared my throat and got to work, gathering the things I needed, trying not to panic when the guards started to file out of the room, most of whom limped. Jesus, but just how did one man in chains cause so much damage… I didn’t want to know.

But what I wanted to know even less was what he thought of me, as those cold eyes seemed to devour me whole.

“Wait… where are you going?” It came out of me in a frantic whisper, and my hand went with it, catching the sleeve of the last officer before he made the door. He looked down at where I had hold of him for dear life, then out at the corridor, where half his men needed a hospital and the other half needed to write up how they got that way.

“He’s chained, and you’ve got your panic button,” he said. “I’ll be right outside.” My gaze cut to it, over at the desk, thinking it might as well be a cat bell for all the good it would do me against this man. It also made me wish, for the first time in my life, that the cameras didn’t stop at the door. He was supposed to stay in the room with me. I knew it, and so did he. But he looked once more at the man on the bed, and then he was gone, and the door shut behind him. Which meant that dangerous man or not, it was just the two of us in here.

Me, and the biggest, stillest, most dangerous man I had ever stood in a room with, and a door that had shut the rest of the world out on the wrong side of it. The guards were a shout away, out in the corridor and close enough to hear me scream, this was true. But they were still too far to stop the thing that made me cry out to begin with.

Yet that being said, I knew the drill. Hit the button, hold it and wait… oh and pray.

Let’s not forget that part.

Except the button was screwed under that desk, right where Jones had shown me and a good half-room away from where I stood now. I had never in my life wanted to be near something so badly, and I hadn’t even crossed the room to him yet.

So, I forced myself to cross it.

One step, then another, my soft soles too loud on the linoleum and the little supply cart rattling along at my side because my hands needed something to hold that wasn’t shaking.

But fuck me, up close, he was worse.

Or better.

I still didn’t know.

I also still didn’t have the right word for what he was. His hair was as black as a raven’s wing, cropped close at the sides and longer on top, stiff and matted down one side where the blood had run and dried. It made his eyes even more startling to look at. Those long dark lashes doing nothing to lead me into a false sense of security, no matter how beautiful they were.

Ink climbed up the side of his throat and vanished under the collar of his jumpsuit, black lines curling up over the tendons of his neck like something was growing there. Like something that wanted out… a darkness within.

And as for those unnerving eyes of his, they never left me. Not once. They tracked me across that room the way a wolf watches a deer wander closer, patient and unblinking and completely certain it was dinnertime. In response, every animal instinct I owned stood up at the same time and begged me to run.

Instead of giving in to my fight-or-flight response, I swallowed hard again and introduced myself. Because that was the job, and the job was the only thing holding me together.

“I… I’m Nurse… Vale,” I said, and I hated the little catch in it. A calm professional voice I’d practiced in a hundred rooms, coming out one size too small. I cleared my throat and tried again, steadier this time.

“Nurse Vale.” I had given him the title on purpose. The surname and nothing under it, like a thin wall of professional distance I could stand behind.

And his look said it all… nice try.

“I’m going to clean that cut and close it for you. You’ll feel a sting, but I’ll be as quick and as gentle as I can be… all right?”

He didn’t answer. No, instead he just cracked his neck to the side and then went back to watching me silently. As if he was quietly plotting my death and questioning the quickest way for him to get my blood on his hands. Because the not-answering was so much worse than anything he could have said as it meant I had to close that last bit of distance into his silence with nothing but a swab in my hand. Each movement an act so he didn’t know that my heart was currently trying to beat its way out of my chest.