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Then I heard a sound that filled me with even more dread. The sound you hear just before you know you’re going to get raped by a man who had done this before and had never been caught.

The sound of a belt buckle undoing before his pants followed. I felt him fumbling behind me, and the whole of me went somewhere very far away and very cold. I also couldn’t seem to get any air in past the mattress and my own blood, making me wonder if I wouldn’t be better off just choking myself to death. Especially when I felt the air hit my ass and legs as he ripped my scrubs down and I heard myself make a sound that I have never made before in my life.

But then I saw him put a hand to the bed next to my face to steady himself and the fight flew back into me. I turned my face and got my teeth into his hand, biting down hard enough that the blood in my mouth was finally somebody else’s.

“You bitch!” he snarled before he punched me in the ribs for it. Two, three times… enough that I stopped being able to do anything at all. And I could feel him back there, making me want to throw up the second it made the barest contact as I knew what was about to happen. But there was nothing left in me to stop it with as I was out of options.

“Fuck, but I hope you’re tight for me.” I felt his breath at my ear as he bent over my back, before licking up my face. I tried to squirm free and he laughed, telling me,

“Oh, I think a slut like you is going to enjoy this… time to feel a real man’s cock,” he told me and I held my breath and shut my eyes as I waited for the inevitable feel of him slamming into me.

Then something hit that door.

It wasn’t a knock, as there was no part of it that sounded like a person asking to come in. No, it was a single, enormous impact, and the whole wall shook from it. A vibration the rest of the room felt as even the instruments went off the cart and scattered onto the floor.

And underneath it, through the wood, there was a noise I had never heard come from a human being before.

It was fucking terrifying!

A roar of anger that went through that room and into the very marrow of my bones. It was by far the most frightening sound I have ever heard in my life.

And Briggs heard it too as he went very still on top of me.

“What the f…”

The second impact took the door clean off its hinges, as I heard the whole of it crash to the floor.

My eyes shot to the door. The frame had come out of the wall with it, and the whole thing went outward in a shower of splinters. It left a huge, dark silhouette standing there in the doorway like some demon had just broken out of the gates of Hell.

Less than half a second later the weight came off my back so suddenly, it knocked the breath out of me. It was there one second and then it was gone. Lifted clean off me, and I heard Briggs’s feet leave the floor and the sound he made when they did.

I got up off that bed and I turned around, reaching down as I dragged my scrub pants up with hands that didn’t feel as if they belonged to me, they were shaking that badly.

Then I looked to the reason I hadn’t just been raped and my eyes widened at the sight of my savior.

My ghost.

Who had Briggs hanging by the throat.

One fucking handed.

One.

He had a grown man of two hundred pounds lifted off the ground against the wall by his throat with one hand. And Briggs’s heels were kicking at the drywall, and both of his hands were up scrabbling at that wrist and making absolutely no difference to it whatsoever.

His pants were still around his thighs when his feet left the floor. They went down around his ankles with the weight of him, and he kicked out of them somewhere against the wall without ever seeming to notice he had done it.

And the murderer at his throat wasn’t even looking at him.

No… He was looking at my face.

At my mouth, at the blood on my chin, at the way I was standing cradling my ribs. I watched him read the whole assault on me in about a second and a half, the way he read everything else.

Then he did look at Briggs, and he did it slowly.

Deadly. Vicious. Murderous.

A natural-born killer who had just found his next victim.