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I had taken two of his. His index and middle finger. The exact two that had been in her hair.

I would have liked to have taken more.

I would have liked to have taken that hand apart joint by joint over the better part of an hour, somewhere quiet, with him awake for all of it. I had done exactly that to men who did less. Because there was a particular kind of man who puts his hands on a woman who has already stepped away from him. I had spent my whole adult life taking those men apart and sleeping soundly afterward.

But what I had was two and a half seconds and a room full of witnesses.

So, I took the fingers that touched her, and I let go. Then I stepped back with my hands open, and I let five men I could have broken without effort put me on a floor.

Two and a half seconds.

I had counted it out that morning while I stood against that wall watching her work. Twenty feet, the height of the hatch, the angle of his arm on that shelf and how long before the nearest tech got off his chair. I knew the number before he ever touched her.

They will call it a loss of control. It will go in a file somewhere with words like impulsive and unprovoked, and a doctor who has met me twice will write a confident little plan of action underneath it all.

When in reality, it was the most controlled thing I had done since I got here.

Because this room was precisely where I wanted to be.

I was always going to have to do something to get down here. I had known that since my second hour in this place, yet I hadn’t decided what it was going to be. Because there was no polite way to ask a hospital to lock you in its quietest room but there was certainly an obvious way to get there.

Then that asshole put his hand on her, and the question answered itself.

Two birds.

One stone.

And the stone had his name on it long before the room did.

That is the difference between this place and the last one. At Ashlock I owned the building. I had officers, I had a warden with a daughter at college, I had a doctor who signed whatever I put under his pen. It took time and it took money and by the end of it that place did what I told it to. But I have no such thing here. Two days wasn’t enough to buy anybody, and I didn’t intend to be here long enough to even try.

Which was why by the time I arrived here, I did so with other plans already in motion and I knew exactly how to get my little nurse to jump through my hoops… just like everybody else.

Manipulation was easy to do in a place like this. Making them put me where I want to go and making them think it was their idea had been child’s play. I didn’t even need to speak more than a few words. No, I just needed to refuse every man who came near me and be gently civil to exactly one woman. Because they take note of things like that and everything goes in a file. Which meant that a hospital full of intelligent, well-meaning professionals rearranged its entire staffing around me so they could then write it up as a care plan.

Then all I needed was to break two fingers in front of a room full of witnesses, and that put me exactly where I wanted to be. In a locked room with no cameras, no window, and a door somebody had to sit outside of. And it just so happened to be the only person in this entire hospital I have ever wanted to be alone with.

Because I had spent forty-one days looking for her.

I had been through that already and I didn’t intend to do it again… ever.

Then Yakov finally said the words I had been waiting forty-one days to hear. But it wasn’t just relief I felt, it was the noise in my head stopping completely. Six weeks of a roar inside my skull gone in seconds as soon as I knew where she was.

Of course, she had done everything right. New state, new name, no trail and a job that took her off the books entirely. She had bought herself a new life the second she left that store, with nothing but minutes and a pair of coveralls. And if I had been anybody else in this world, she would still have it.

Erin Shaw.

It was a terrible name for her, and I didn’t like it but that was most likely because to me she would always be Anna. As for her last name, well that I still didn’t know as it was much harder to find a three-year-old ghost.

But I had Erin Shaw and that was all it took to find out everything I needed. After that it took another thirteen days and two hundred thousand dollars to get to her. That was the most frustrating part about it. Forty-one days to find the woman and thirteen more standing still in a cell knowing exactly which building she walked into every morning. Which was a specific kind of hell I hadn’t ever encountered before.

There was a hearing. A lawyer who has never once had to ask me a single question. Two psychiatric assessments filed in the correct order by men who won’t remember writing them. And at the end of it a transfer order, signed by a judge, moving me into the exact building she works in.

I didn’t have to break in anywhere… I was sent.

That’s the part I enjoyed the most, knowing that this time, I wouldn’t just be her patient when I needed fixing. I would be her patient around the clock. The hardest part after that was waiting two days in a room with the door open, watching a corridor, while a hospital came and went around me.

Because she had been on her days off and that was in itself a new kind of torture to endure. But it had been unavoidable. Yakov had her schedule inside four hours of finding her, so I knew before I ever arrived that she wouldn’t be there. And still I watched that door every time it opened and gritted my teeth every time it was somebody else.