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There was one more thing I bought that morning, and for once, it didn’t cost blood.

It was a link in the chain.

There was always a man in any building, in any uniform, in any country who wanted something. Who needed something… desperately. Who would do anything to get it, erase it, fix it or spend it. There was always one man carrying something he couldn’t pay for, and you found him the way you found water. His wife’s treatment. A bookmaker in the next county. Three months behind on a mortgage he lied about on the application. You never have to ask. He tells you with his hands and his eyes and the way he looks down the corridor before he speaks.

I had found mine on day one.

It didn’t take a fortune, just a simple number moved between two people who will never meet, in a country neither of us was born in. And the man never had to do a single thing that would show up on a form. No key. No door. No favor anyone could name.

Just eighteen inches.

The restraint chain that runs from the wrist to the bed frame in that infirmary comes in lengths, you see, and nobody on God’s earth has ever audited which one is on the cot.

So, when they walked me down to medical with my arm wrapped in a shirt and a guard on each shoulder, I already knew, to the inch, how far I would be able to reach.

And I knew just what I intended to do with it.

One touch. That was all I wanted.

After all, I was not a greedy man.

Although with her I had a feeling that particular trait would change.

The noise in my head, which had been howling since the second she walked out of that room the day before, began to go quiet somewhere around the second locked door.

Because I could smell sugar.

An hour later…

They put me back in my cell at twenty to eleven in the morning with nine of her stitches in my arm and her fingerprints all over a life as black as mine.

I sat on the bunk and didn’t lie down. Instead, I put my back to the wall and my forearm across my knee where I could look at the dressing she had smoothed into place with her thumbs. Then I ran the entire hour back again from the beginning, the way other men run through a hand of cards they lost.

The chocolate hitting the floor. That was the first thing I kept. She had come through that door with her bag still on her shoulder and her mouth full of sweetness. Walked into my domain with no defenses at all, and then she had seen me and dropped her little treat. Then she had picked it up and put it in the trash like the bar had insulted her personally.

A bar I had finished off after plucking it right out of the trash, just because it had once had her lips around it. The guard allowed it, because he was mine now. The first link in my chain.

I grinned to myself.

My frightened little bird, furious with a half-eaten candy bar.

The tray she held up between us, as though six inches of steel dish were a wall. The pulse jumping in her throat that she thought I couldn’t see. The way her eyes came up to mine for exactly half a second when I asked her where she lived. She answered me, she simply didn’t know it.

The spark, when it came. Did you tell that to the last nurse?

I’ve had grown men, armed men, men with reputations, lose control of their own bladders in front of me. And a woman who weighed nothing at all, in a room where I was the most dangerous thing standing, looked me in the face and put a live wire in my hand to see what I would do with it.

I nearly laughed and I had not laughed in a very long time.

And then there was the little device on her arm, under the sleeve she didn’t think I could see. The chews in her pocket. The chocolate on an empty stomach before eight in the morning, and the shake in her hands that arrived too late to be fear and stayed too long.

Her body was on a leash.

Something in her runs low and takes her down with it, and she manages it in bathrooms and parking lots and hopes nobody notices.

But I noticed.

She had no idea yet what she handed me when she came through that door eating candy for breakfast. Not a threat… A key. Every locked thing in a person has a latch somewhere on the outside, and hers was a sugar packet. And I hadn’t learned it in order to hurt her. That was the part worth being frightened of. Because being wanted by me had never once been a gift. It was a curse, and she had already caught it.