Page 135

I gave him a curt nod and wrote administered on the chart, lying just like everything else when it came to him. Not that I was bitter of course, I thought with an internal roll of my eyes.

“You’re going to make me ask, aren’t you?”

“Ask what?” I replied quietly, glancing over my shoulder to see Roz busy with the next lot of meds. He followed my worried gaze before leaning closer, so that he wouldn’t be overheard.

“You took a bath with no water in it, little bird… tell me… did you sing for me as you fucked yourself?” My hands went white on the edge of that shelf. Because he had just told me with that one question that there was a camera in my bathroom. And what was worse, I had convinced myself that he wouldn’t have crossed that line, which seemed almost laughable now. That was if I wasn’t already too busy being mortified.

“Next!” I shouted and he laughed at me. Quietly, and entirely without malice before stepping aside for the man behind him. Then he went back to his wall and stood there watching me, as my face turned crimson. But the second his eyes narrowed, I knew why as Briggs came in about a minute later.

He had two fingers strapped together that were taped flat and he held his hand slightly away from his body the way you do when a part of you is broken.

He came round the side of that hatch like he always does and I felt my body tense.

“Ladies.”

Neither of us said anything to this, which would have discouraged most people. But then Briggs was clearly a different breed of asshole. He looked over his shoulder into the day room and stopped on one figure against the wall. Because there was a man against the far wall who had put him on the floor of his own workplace in under three seconds. And he had done it in front of his peers and there was not one single thing he could do about it.

So, I wasn’t surprised when I saw his jaw go tight the second my ghost looked at that strapped hand and then back up at him with a grin. And it wasn’t one he had ever turned on me. No, this was pure malice, every bit of it, and none of it had ever been pointed in my direction before.

Briggs’s reaction to this was to grit his teeth before he turned around and walked out without another word. And from the far end of that room, my ghost smiled at me.

An amused one this time. Not the one that promised blood.

“Well,” Roz said, watching him go. “Would you look at that.”

I didn’t say anything at all. Because my focus was elsewhere as my ghost leaned forward ever so slightly, waved his hand toward the door and mouthed something at me across forty feet of day room.

‘Bye, bye Briggs.’

The rest of the day went the way days go. Blood work, vitals, paperwork, a review meeting I sat in and contributed almost nothing to. Oh, and not forgetting there was a man on Cedar who hadn’t slept in four nights and needed somebody to sit with him for twenty minutes.

Roz also told me a long story about the pizza delivery man she liked and still ended up getting his name wrong to his face, though she managed to get his number anyway.

And whenever he could, my ghost watched me work from wherever he was standing. Yet not once did he come near me. He also didn’t speak to me again after what he said to me at the hatch. He simply moved around the edges of that ward all afternoon with his eyes on me, and by about three o’clock I had given up trying to stop noticing it.

Roz and I came out of the far end of the corridor at four thirty laughing about the pizza man and what nickname we could come up with for him so she remembered. Unfortunately, we walked straight into Briggs.

He stepped aside to let us past, which he didn’t have to do, but it put him about four inches from my shoulder.

“Careful going home, Erin.” I froze at the threat in his tone, and Roz didn’t hear it. She was two steps ahead by then and still talking about pizza dude.

“Sorry?” I asked after jerking back from him and the venom in his voice. But despite my obvious need for space between us, he leaned in, and he was smiling the entire time when he did it.

“You won’t always have your guard dog watching you.”

Then he walked away.

I stood in that corridor and went cold. And the very first thought I had, before the fear even arrived, was… I should tell him.

Not report it. Not write it up, not go to Karen and none of the many things I had taught myself to do.

Instead, I wanted to tell my ghost.

And I stood there frozen, understanding exactly what that meant. That somewhere in the last two months my head had quietly decided that there was somebody in this world who would deal with people like Briggs for me… and that somebody was a killer on a locked ward.

Because I hadn’t felt that about another living person since my father.

“Erin?” Roz had stopped up ahead. “You coming?”