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He could have had it out of there in half a second and he didn’t. He gathered the cotton up in his fist first, bunched it tight so it was held against every sensitive nerve. Then he drew it back through me with the whole weight of his hand behind it, and I felt every inch of it. The wet fabric pulling through my wet folds with his knuckles behind it. The unhurried, deliberate pressure of a man taking something and making sure he got all of what he wanted on the way through.

My hips jerked and a sound came out of me that was a raw whimper.

He looked up at me then and for the first time since he’d gone down there.

“I did say I was not a greedy man.” His voice had gone thick again.

“But I didn’t say I would leave any of it behind.” Then he closed his fist around it, and I watched him bring it up to his face and breathe in, with his eyes shut, and whatever crossed his face while he did it was not something I was supposed to see.

Because I knew I would play back that moment over and over again. In my dreams, in my fantasies and in my nightmares combined.

Only then did he take hold of my scrubs and draw them back up over my hips and tie the drawstring for me.

That was the part that really did me. The way he knelt there tying the bow at my waist like a man dressing a body he owned. Christ, but he even checked it wasn’t too tight and then smoothed the wet fabric flat over my hips with both hands.

Only then did he stand, rising to his imposing height and reminding me of why being afraid of him was the only sensible thing left to me.

“I took your shirt last time… but this one is better,” he said with a smirk, and I couldn’t speak. Not even when he lifted his fist between us and opened it enough for me to see the cotton inside before then closing it again.

Then he walked away across the wet tile without hurrying, picked a towel off a hook, and knotted it around his waist. He didn’t look back at me… not once. He simply went to the door I had come through. He didn’t knock on it, nor did he call out, yet somehow, it unlocked from the other side at exactly the moment he reached it.

Of course it did.

The door swung open onto a corridor, and there was an officer standing there with his eyes on the floor, like he wasn’t permitted to look at me. Then my captor walked out of that shower block like a man leaving his own house. And the door closed behind him and this time, it didn’t lock.

I stayed where I was for a long time.

I stood in a cooling shower block with my back against the tile as if he was still in the room and hadn’t yet given me permission to leave. My top still pushed up over my breasts, with my hand bleeding and my whole body still shaking.

I listened to the drains, and I didn’t cry.

Because I was past crying. Past the emotional breakdown. No, now it was time for the aftermath and that didn’t need my tears.

It needed me to plan. To do what I did best. To focus on the clarity of my situation.

He knows where you live.

He knows the name is fake.

He owns the guards and the doctor and the warden and every locked door between you and the parking lot.

And the only reason you are standing here on your own two feet right now is that he decided to let you.

So, I rolled down my top and pulled the sides of my torn scrubs across my torso like this would help protect me from the truth of what happened. Then I bent down and I picked up my glucose chews off the wet floor and everything else in my life that had come spilling out of my bag. I picked them up one by one, my keys, and my insulin. I put the tape and the gauze back in the medic bag and zipped it. I did all of it very calmly, the way you do at the end of a bad shift, because the hands know what to do while the rest of you is somewhere else entirely.

Then I picked up my coat. It had been lying in the wet the whole time and it came up heavy with it, one sleeve dark to the elbow. The burner phone was still in the pocket where it had always been. I stood there with it dripping onto my shoes and felt something in me settle, because it was the one thing in that room he had not put his hands on.

And then I picked up the last thing.

It had gone into a puddle by the wall. Soaked through, dirty at one corner, the folds gone out of it.

I stood there with his shirt in my hand with water running off it onto my shoes, and I understood with total clarity that there was only one thing left in the world that I could still choose.

Because he could buy every man in that building. He could open every door. But he was still inside it, and soon I wouldn’t be. That was my only lifeline here. Although for however many hours that stayed true, I didn’t know. But I knew one thing, I was still the only person alive who got to decide where Anna went next.

Not him.

Tonight, I thought. Not in five days, not at the end of any pay cycle. Not one more shift… Tonight.