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I quickly averted my eyes, looking at a chart trying to ignore Briggs and his seemingly never-ending pursuit of a date. But I felt the change come off him the way you feel a draft up your spine, and when I glanced up his jaw had gone tight. He was staring directly at the far wall and the man standing against it.

Then he did something so utterly foolish that I found myself wondering how long it would be before he was a patient here himself. He turned back to me, and then he glanced over his shoulder one more time.

Right at him.

And he smirked.

And only then, once he was certain of his audience, did he turn back to me. He put his hand up and took a piece of hair that had come loose at my temple, and tucked it behind my ear, and let his knuckles come down the side of my face on the way past.

“There,” he said. “That’s better.” However, everything in me went still. My reflex kicked in and I stepped back, like it wasn’t entirely my decision. My body simply removed itself as I took one step straight backward, and my hip hit the edge of the counter.

And his hand came out and closed around my forearm to stop me.

“Whoa. Easy. I’m only being nice to you.”

I spent three years promising myself what I would do the next time a man touched me without being asked, and in that moment all of it fled me. Which was a fine thing to promise yourself, twenty-four hours after standing in a treatment room letting a killer put his hands on your waist and doing absolutely nothing about it.

But this was not that.

Which was why I froze.

I saw Roz’s head come up but she wasn’t looking at Briggs or where his hand was. She was looking past us both, which was when my eyes followed. Because I hadn’t seen my ghost move at all.

One second there was a hand around my forearm, and then the next, there wasn’t. It was gone so fast that I felt the absence before I understood the removal of it. My own arm suddenly light and free and still held out in front of me like an idiot.

Then the sound came. A small, dry snap, like a pencil snapping in somebody’s fist, before Briggs started screaming. Because the ghost had crossed twenty feet of day room floor in seconds. Twenty feet, past three patients and a table, and I had not heard him do it and neither had Briggs. He had simply reached over the lip of that hatch and taken the hand off my arm and put it somewhere it was never designed to go.

Two fingers broken.

The index and the middle one bent back flat against the back of Briggs’s own hand, and by the time my brain had caught up with any of it he had already let go.

It had taken him mere seconds to inflict the damage and he had moved like… well, like a ghost.

There was no follow-up, no second blow and no lunge for his throat. But more frightening than that, there had also not been a single flicker of anything in his face at all. He simply put a man’s fingers where he wanted them and let go. Then he stepped back with both hands coming up open at his sides while Briggs went down onto one knee against the wall, holding his own hand and making a noise I have only ever heard from men who had been in car wrecks.

But my ghost didn’t look at him.

No… He looked at me.

And then the room came apart. Alarms, boots, somebody shouting for the shutter. Roz’s hand came down flat on the emergency button and I watched as eighteen men in the room started doing eighteen different things at once. Some of them backing into corners. Some of them not moving at all. A good few of them laughing at the violence.

Sandy was shrieking somewhere behind the chairs as five staff members came through those doors at a dead run, with a sixth barking orders out on the radio.

And all through this my ghost stood perfectly still in the middle of all of it with his hands up so he could let them take him.

Let being the operative word for it.

Because five men got hold of him and I knew without a shred of doubt that he could have gone through any of them without even breaking a sweat. Instead, he simply went down onto the floor the way you would lie down on a beach, and I watched a tech half his size put a knee in his back and shout instructions at him that he was already complying with.

“He’s not resisting.” It came out of me before I could think better of it and more foolishly, it came out sounding worried. Which was ridiculous, seeing as it had been said in a room full of people who had every reason to be worried about something else entirely. Namely the man on the floor who could have gone through every one of them if he had wanted to.

And he had only gone down because he chose to.

And down on that floor, under a knee and three sets of hands, he lifted his head about an inch off the linoleum and looked straight at me.

And smirked.

Because he had heard it.