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So, I turned around smiling only for it to drop the second I saw who it actually was…

Briggs.

He had his back against the door and a key in his hand… my key. The one off the board in the office where the spares live, and he was turning it over between the two fingers that still worked.

“Expecting somebody else?” he asked with that same venom from in the hallway earlier and everything in me stopped.

“Officer Briggs,” I forced myself to say in a steady tone.

“Oh, don’t do that.” He pushed off the door. “Don’t do the voice. You’ve done the voice at me for six weeks and I’ve been very patient about it, and I think we’re past that now, don’t you?” I frowned so hard, I almost felt it ache. Then I put the suture packs down and told him,

“I need you to unlock that door.”

“Nobody’s around.” He said it almost nonchalantly. “That’s the thing about this time of night down this end. There’s nobody on this corridor until six thirty and I checked. In fact, I made sure of it.”

Now that chilled me to the bone, as I heard the threat loud and clear.

“I will scream.”

“Yeah,” And he smiled at me. “You go ahead and try that.”

This was when I went for the door. I got about four feet before he caught me, because he was faster than I expected. But he grabbed me around the waist from behind and spun to the side, throwing me across the room.

I hit the exam bed side on, hard enough to fold me over it, and the paper tore under my hands as I scrambled against it. The whole frame slid about six inches across the floor before I felt him come up behind me.

And then I fought him.

I fought him hard. I got a hand up into his face and I felt my nails dig into skin. He made a grunting, wounded sound before stepping back enough to punch me across the face.

There is a specific thing that happens to a room when you take a hit like that, and it had been a long time since I had felt it.

The space around you goes sideways and there is a high ringing sound in your ears that has nothing to do with the room at all. And by the time any of it has finished happening you have already lost about four seconds that you badly needed.

My mouth filled up with blood as I felt my lip go.

But it was too late as when the room came back to me I was face down over that bed with his weight across my back and my cheek pressed painfully into the paper, soaking it with blood. I tried to fight my way free when my arms were grabbed and bent up behind me, held to the base of my spine with his one good hand.

“Now,” he said, right in my ear, breathing hard. “Let’s have some fun, shall we?”

I screamed at that, which didn’t last long as he grabbed my hair and stuffed my face into the mattress and held it there until I stopped screaming. Then he let me up about an inch, enough to breathe, and not one bit more.

“I told you,” he rumbled, panting heavily. Then he started talking, and he kept talking the whole way through it, in the same tone he used in the staff room, and every single word of it went into me and stayed there like a knife in my chest.

He told me I had been asking for it for six weeks. He told me what he thought I had been doing in that seclusion corridor, and that everybody knew what a dirty slut I was for spreading my legs for a patient. That a nurse who has been fucking one doesn’t get to walk into an office and make a complaint about anybody. He told me this was going to be our arrangement now, and that I would be a good girl about it, and that I would find it easier if I stopped making it difficult.

And then he said the thing that filled my veins with ice.

“Just like the last one.”

I stopped moving.

Because there was a woman before me.

Whoever she was, it happened to her in this building, and either she never told anybody or nobody believed her.

“There we go,” he said, almost approvingly, when I went still.

“That’s better.”