Page 17

“What’s the matter, little nurse?” His voice dropped into something almost kind, which was so much worse.

“Don’t you want to be my friend?” And there it was. Said soft, said warm and said like an open hand offering me poisoned candy. The kind of question that isn’t a question at all, but a door being held open by somebody standing in the dark on the other side of it.

“Your friends give you knives,” I said, gathering up my ruined tray and my dignity… and what little was left of my blood sugar.

“And then I’m the one who sews you shut. So, no, you don’t want to be my friend and see me on a regular basis. Not in my line of work, anyway.” Now why did I say that like I wished I would be seeing him for a different reason? Damn it and my mouth but damn him more for the scoffed reply,

“Oh, we’ll see about that… Anna.”

It was the way he said it, like a man handing back something I had dropped without noticing. Like he had been holding onto it a while. I shuddered internally, trying to shake it off, like it was nothing more than an idle threat.

I then walked out of that infirmary on legs that didn’t quite belong to me, telling myself, with every single step, that I truly hoped I never had to lay eyes on him again.

But then again, I have never once in my life been a good liar…

Not even to myself.

5

THIS IS MY PRISON NOW

THE GHOST

Earlier that day…

There is a thing you learn in the first week of any cage they build for you.

Every prison already belongs to somebody.

Not the state and certainly not the warden, with his name painted in gold on the glass and three locked doors between himself and the men he owns on paper.

But it’s owned by somebody inside. There is always one man who decides which way the yard leans, who eats first, who gets touched and who gets left alone. And every other soul in that building spends his whole day arranging himself quietly around that fact.

At Ashlock, that man ran C wing.

I never learned his name.

But then, I didn’t need it… I never did.

He had spent three years making certain every man in that building knew whose house it was. But I knew the shape of him. Wide as a door, arms thicker than most men’s legs, a neck that had quit being a neck some years back. I knew he had seven men who fetched things for him and two guards who found somewhere else to look when he was working.

I also knew he collected from the weak ones, the small, frightened boys who owed him for cigarettes and calls home. Oh, and that a month before I came here, he had put one of them in the hospital with a plastic tray for the crime of being short on smokes.

So. Not an innocent, then.

Good. That made shit easier… barely.

Because it wasn’t like I needed the excuse to do what I did best.

I had been on his wing for one evening meal and one lockdown, and in all of it I had not once looked at him. Not a glance. Not the courtesy of a nod. I ate, I sat, I let the noise in my skull grind, and I paid him precisely the same attention a man pays the weather in a country he doesn’t intend to live in.

That was the offense.

And in here, that was a bigger insult than a fist.

But I want to be honest about that morning, because the fight was not the point of it. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I fully intended to make my mark on this place, but I had plenty of time for that. No, currently my time was spent thinking of her.

My little nurse.