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And I stood there and I watched anyway.

Watched as he put Briggs down onto his feet, and the second the man’s weight came back under him, he tried to run. That was what I remember most about the beginning of it. Briggs went for the doorway, that huge empty splintered hole where the door used to be, and he got perhaps two steps.

Then he was face down, being smothered over the same bed I had been face down over ninety seconds earlier and I knew it was intentional. His head held in a bruising hold by his neck and one of Ghost’s knees dug into his spine to keep him there.

“Which hand?”

Briggs was making noises. Not words. He hadn’t managed a single word since the door came in. My ghost grabbed his hair in a fist and wrenched his head up.

“Which fucking hand touched her?” he growled and when Briggs started to plead for his life, Ghost grinned down at him with pure, untamed malice.

“Not going to tell me… then I will break every fucking bone!”

And then he started.

The first finger was the loudest.

After that they got quieter. Because after the first one, I think the screaming stops being about the pain and starts being about what you know is still coming.

He got as far as three before Briggs made a sound that might have carried down the hallway. Which was when my ghost did something to his throat.

I didn’t see what it was, I only knew that one moment he was screaming and the next he was making choking sounds. Like he couldn’t get the air out. As though somebody had put a hand over a speaker. He kept trying though, that was the horror of it. His mouth kept going and his body kept convulsing, but nothing came out of him at all except a thin wet clicking.

And he carried on.

I couldn’t say how long it went on for, but I knew for Briggs it must have felt like an eternity.

As for his torturer, it was just another day at work. That was the worst of it. He was methodical about every part of it. Like he had done this a thousand times before and knew exactly the right way to break a man down to nothing.

He wasn’t in a hurry about it either. Even his breathing never changed, and at no point did he say anything that a person says when they are enjoying themselves. He simply did one thing and then decided on the next one, over and over, with his whole attention on it.

And every so often he checked on me.

That was the part I couldn’t explain to myself. In the middle of it, twice, he lifted his head and looked over at me to see how I was doing. The same look he gives me when he is watching my hands shake and working out my blood sugar.

Checking to see how broken I was.

The only emotion I saw in him other than quiet rage was a tic in his jaw when he saw how afraid of him I looked. How horrified. How much the sight sickened me. Yet despite this he didn’t once order me to turn around again. As if he had resigned himself to the fact that I had chosen to watch and whether he questioned why, I didn’t know.

Because even I didn’t know.

After he had finished breaking all of his fingers, even going so far as to do more damage to the two he had already broken, he then picked up the scalpel off the floor.

I felt my stomach bottom out.

It had come off the cart when Briggs threw me into that bed, still in its sterile packet. He tore the corner off it with his teeth and let the little curl of blue paper fall onto the tiles. There was something about the ordinariness of that which broke whatever was left in me.

And I moved.

I don’t know what I thought I was going to do. I got two steps toward him with my hand out and I think I was saying please again, but never got to finish it.

Not when he forced Briggs’s head back and opened his brow with the scalpel, straight across and down to the bone.

There is more blood in a face than people ever expect. I have watched grown men panic over a split eyebrow and I have told about forty of them that it looks a great deal worse than it is.

However, it doesn’t look worse than it is when it comes at you from less than four feet away. Not when it went across that room and hit my skin. Something hot, that smelled of copper, and enough of it to make me jerk backward. I felt it land on my cheek, on my jaw and the side of my neck. I stood there with my hand still up and put my fingers to it, before they came away red.

It wasn’t my blood. I knew that. But seeing my hand covered like that catapulted me straight into a past memory when it had belonged to me. When someone else had been the cause.