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There was a band on his left ring finger. Not a real one. Just black lines, worn smooth at the edges from age, and I had absolutely no idea what it meant except that somebody had put it there a very long time ago.

And as for the rest… I looked.

Of course I looked.

I would like to blame the steam or the shock of him standing there in the middle of all that white like something out of a story parents tell children to keep them indoors at night. But the truth was, my eyes went where they went. Drawn to what was between his thighs, and let’s just say, what was there was in proportion to the rest of him.

Jesus… quite frankly it was obscene and should have come with its own warning label! It was heavy and thick even when soft, and I understood in one horrible instant that this was a man who had never once in his life had to be careful about anything. And I don’t know why, but just the sight of all that raw power had me swallowing hard for a very different reason.

A shameful one, as I asked myself… what could a man like that do to me? Most likely ruin me in the best and worst of ways.

In fact, the only ordinary thing on him was my own dressing, still taped to his forearm, gone gray and lifting at one corner from the water.

Eight more days and those sutures come out.

That was what my brain offered me. Standing in a locked shower block with a naked killer ten feet away. My mind had focused on some small, professional part of me that looked at him and started counting days. It would scar and leave a lifelong reminder of that single moment of us in that room together. Perhaps that was why he did it. Perhaps this man collected scars instead of notches on a bedpost. Because he certainly wasn’t without them. A man who had erased himself off every database on earth, and he was carrying the whole of it around on his skin instead. Like his body was a battlefield map of the brutal life he had lived.

And for some reason it was the sight of those scars that finally got through to me. Not the locked door. Not the steam, or the size of him, or the fact that nobody was coming. It was a body that had been opened up that many times and had simply kept going. And what that told me was how hard it was to stop him.

Which was why both bags hit the floor.

I didn’t decide to drop them. My hands simply shook enough that I couldn’t hold on to anything. The medic bag went over on its side, the zipper gaping, and both the tape and the gauze went sliding away across the wet tile. My own bag landed beside it and tipped, with half its contents now spilling out across the floor between us. My coat slid off my arm and went down into the wet with the rest of it.

My insulin. My keys. My glucose chews, scattering like beads.

And a folded square of white cotton, right there between his feet and mine. I looked at it lying in the steam for a long moment before my wide eyes lifted to his.

And he was already smiling.

Not the small thing at the corner of his mouth I had seen before, the place where a smile would go. An actual smile this time. A slow, knowing type of smile. One that was pure delight spreading across that beautiful, cruel face of his. A grin that grew while he looked down at his own undershirt lying at my feet in the middle of my whole spilled life.

“Oh, little bird,” he said with a slight shake of his head, his smile turning to one of sadistic pleasure as he warned…

“You’re in trouble now.”

16

NOBODY IS COMING

ANNA

No.

No, no, no. This was not part of the plan.

“You kept it,” he stated, nodding down to his shirt, smirking.

“It’s… it’s not what you think.” My voice came out sounding like somebody else’s. “I… I was… was going to give it back to you.” I continued to stammer.

“Were you now,” he said arrogantly and utterly unconvinced.

“Yes.”

“You were going to give it back to me,” he said it slowly, turning it over as if tasting the lie he believed it to be. Then his eyes came up off the floor and onto my face and stayed there.

“You carry my shirt into a prison to hand it back to a man you are terrified of. In a bag, on your shoulder… Folded.”

I couldn’t think of one single thing to say to that. Not even when he tipped his head, and the smile didn’t leave him.