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“You are not permitted to hurt yourself.” Every word bitten off with a darkness I took seriously.

“Do you understand me? Not ever. Not once, Anna.”

“Please… just let me go,” I begged on a broken sob, and he pulled me closer to him and with his forehead pressed against mine he vowed,

“Only I get to break you.”

Then he pulled back enough so he could bury a fist in my wet hair at the top of my head. So close to the scalp that it stung, as if to prove a point. Then he pulled my head back, so I had nowhere to go but to look up at him, as he brought his face back down to mine.

“Now you are going to listen to me, and I am only going to say this once, little nurse. If you run from me, I will find you. I do not care how many names you have worn or how good the man who built them was. I have money you cannot imagine, and men in places you have never seen hiding in your shadows. But you should know that I have nothing in this world to spend either on except you,” he said, his tone as hard as steel and just as cold, causing my breath to catch on another sob. He ignored the tears. He was too busy wanting to tell me exactly how much trouble I was in, and exactly how deep his obsession had already grown its roots.

“You are mine now. Whether you like it is irrelevant, and whether you understand it changes nothing. Whether you fight me every single day for the rest of your life is entirely acceptable to me, because I will still have you at the end of it.”

My eyes widened as the gravity of his words hit me and I started to shake and couldn’t stop. But what was worse was that he wasn’t finished.

“I will never let you go. Not once, not ever, not for anything. And the sooner you make peace with that, the easier this becomes for you.

“Because I own every inch of you, Anna. Including the parts you have not shown me yet.” His grip tightened then, as if fueled by this dark and terrifying declaration.

Then before I could try to argue against this, a timer seemed to echo somewhere behind us. As if this was a signal to let him know our time was up as I felt him register it before he let go of my hair.

Then he smoothed it down where he had pulled it, which somehow made it worse, like I was some doll he had played with and made messy in his anger. After which he then reached up over my head and worked the knot loose and unwound the gauze from my wrists one careful turn at a time. He caught me around the waist when my arms came down and the rest of me went with them.

He turned both my hands over and looked at what was underneath, making him scoff. But it looked worse than it felt. Two raw rings with the skin gone in three or four places that were already welling. The sort of thing I would have cleaned and dressed and told a patient to keep dry for a couple of days.

But he looked at them for a long time.

Then he pressed his thumb flat over the worst of it, holding it closed, the way you would if you actually gave a damn.

“Velvet-lined cuffs next time,” he mused, almost to himself. It was enough to make my breath stutter, because it wasn’t the velvet that frightened me.

It was the next time.

“Time’s up again, little bird,” he said. “You sang so beautifully for me but that was only the first verse,” he said before his eyes focused solely on my lips as if he were being drawn in.

Then he dipped his head slowly and all the way down, until his mouth was perhaps an inch from mine. I felt his breath on my lips as I held mine captive. I saw his eyes drop to the source of his fascination and stay there as if he too was held captive. Every part of that enormous body went still in a way I had felt once already that day, in this same stall, when I put my arms around him.

He was going to kiss me.

And as I stood there with my ruined wrists in his hands and my whole life on the floor, I would never understand why I didn’t turn my face away.

Why I would have let him kiss me.

Yet it never came.

He simply stopped dead and held himself there for one second… two… three… every one close enough that it would have taken nothing at all to bridge the gap and make the connection. But then something crossed his face that I didn’t recognize before he pulled back.

“No,” he said, almost to himself. “Not here.”

Then he let go of my hands and I thought that was the end of it. That was until he went down onto one knee in front of me. And honestly, I didn’t have the first idea what he was doing. He knelt on the wet tile at my feet, a man who still looked huge even folded down before me. I also couldn’t help but ask myself if he had ever before been in that position for anybody else before me and if not, then why did that thought want to stay with me.

But then it soon became clear why, starting with his large hands coming to my waist as if to hold me steady.

“Stand still,” he ordered before he drew my scrub pants down. I was honestly too shocked to react quickly enough as he brought them to rest barely past the tops of my thighs. But it was just enough for what he needed. He didn’t even look up at my face while he did it. He just took hold of my underwear at one hip and pulled hard enough that it caused the seam to tear.

I flinched at the sound and held myself still, as he did the same on the other side. Then he took hold of my ruined panties at the front and pulled them back between my legs.

Slowly and with purpose.