Page 8

Boring was the goal, remember. I’d been telling myself that like a mantra all week, but little good it did me this time. Because right now, I didn’t feel boring. I felt the way a rabbit feels when the field goes silent.

I had four days of warnings by then. Mick’s uneasy face. Jones’s lowered voice. A chart on my desk with a number on it and a blank where the name should be, one that had watched me all morning like an open mouth.

And now I was about to find out if it had teeth.

Which meant that I knew what was coming down that corridor before the doors ever hit the wall.

He was here.

I just hadn’t understood, until then, that knowing and being ready are two entirely different things. I set the gauze down just as the doors came open hard enough to bounce, and the room filled with men, making me gasp. Of course, this hadn’t been the first time officers had brought in an inmate by force but this… this was something else entirely.

This was an all-out brawl against one man.

There was no other way to describe it. Not given how many of them there were, and what a state they were in. Guards seemed to be everywhere. Six of them, eight of them, I lost count. But it wasn’t the number that concerned me. No, it was the state they entered that truly terrified me.

Each looked wrong… broken. All of them beaten by something that clearly didn’t stop. A nose streaming red, a man with his arm clamped to his ribs, a kid barely out of his teens with his lip split fat and shiny. Bruises, red and angry, mottled skin, and all of them looked to be in need of a stitch or two… or twenty.

They came in like the survivors of a battle. And in the middle of them, folded in chains and a mesh hood, was the reason. Yet even bound as he was, still somehow, he managed to take up all the air in the room.

His presence was suffocating.

Something made worse as he wasn’t even struggling. That was the thing that turned my stomach to stone. Eight grown men had just been dragged through hell to bring him here, and he wasn’t even struggling. He was simply letting them. The way the sea lets you think you’re swimming right up until the point where it decides otherwise.

When it decides to drown you.

“On the bed… get him on the bed now!” someone with a bruised cheek barked, making the prisoner chuckle darkly, and I would have been lying if I said that it didn’t chill me to the bone. They got him down onto it, and chains threaded through the frame and clanged tight. A sound that had never affected me before, but this time seemed to make me shudder as it hit me in the back of my teeth.

As for the chained man who now occupied my infirmary, it was only once he was secured on the bed that any of them seemed to breathe easier. My hands were already moving but then, that was the mercy of the job. The hands know what to do while the rest of you is still busy being terrified. I snapped a fresh pair of gloves on, and I turned to the guards, because they were bleeding and for the moment, the monster in the room was contained.

“Okay, who’s worst? You, with the arm, sit down and let me take a look. Anyone light-headed? That nose looks broken. Can you breathe through it…” Most of them seemed to wave me off, telling me they could wait or they would get it checked out at the hospital as their shift was now over. But as I watched the fear in their eyes dart nervously to the prisoner, I got the distinct impression that none of them wanted to remain in the room with him any longer than necessary.

“Leave it.” The kid with the lip waved me off, eyes not on me but on the man on the bed.

“Just see to him…” He swallowed. “Oh, and don’t… just don’t get too close to his hands.” I frowned at this, looking back at the hooded man and for some reason, feeling his eyes intently on me in a way that made me feel like he was grinning.

“His hands are chained, what’s he gonna do?” I asked, feeling like a fool the second I said it as I took in the carnage he had managed to inflict.

“Yeah.” He said it like I was very naive or just very, very stupid.

“They were chained last time, too,” he said before instantly looking like he regretted it, as if he had said too much.

Last time.

I didn’t ask. Not because I didn’t want to know, because God help me, I always want to know. But because I already did. After all, I’d heard the rumors of what happened to nurses like me. That there’d been a last time, and a last nurse, and that nobody at Ashlock ever finished that particular sentence for a reason. Because in the last four days that’s all there seemed to be. Whispers of a new monster that even a prison was afraid of containing. About the people he’d hurt, some of them nearly to death, back at the last prison. The one that held him while he awaited trial.

One of them…

A nurse.

And now that he’d been convicted and sentenced, they’d shipped him here to Ashlock to serve it out, his reputation riding shotgun the whole way.

So, with a hard and fearful swallow, I turned to my patient.

And that was my mistake, because up to that second, he’d been a shape. A problem in restraints. A gash I had to close and then never think about again. Then somebody pulled the hood off him, and he stopped being just a shape.

The legend had a face.

And honestly, I am not even going to pretend I was above it. Above how much he affected me. I looked at him and my stupid, traitorous body did a slow, humiliating thing that had nothing to do with fear, and I hated it instantly and completely.