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“You’re standing too close,” I tell him.

“What?”

My hand shoots through the bars and catches his shirt at the chest. I fist the fabric and yank him forward hard enough that his breath punches out.

His eyes widen, shocked, then angry.

“Get your hands off me,” he spits, grabbing my forearm.

He’s stronger than he looks. Or maybe he’s desperate to prove himself. He twists my arm, using the bar for leverage. A cheap trick.

My shoulder gives.

A hot, sickening jolt shoots up my arm and into my skull. My vision flashes white, and a sound tears out of me that I don’t recognize.

He yanks again, harder. Pain blooms so intensely it nearly knocks me out of my own body. My shoulder screams. My fingers go numb. My grip slips.

He shoves me back, satisfied with himself. I slam into the wall behind me. Stone digs into my spine. I stand here, breathing hard, looking down at my arm hanging wrong and useless, throbbing like it’s full of molten iron.

The guard laughs once. “That’s what you get. Fucking animal.”

I blink to disperse the tears in my eyes. Only a biological reaction to the pain. I would hate for him to think he had affected me.

Then her face rises again, clear in my mind. The way she held herself when she chose to go. The way she wanted me to feel it.

I swallow. I let the pain exist. I let it tear through me.

The guard rolls his shoulder, loosening up. “You want another lesson?”

I straighten from the wall. My breath shudders out. My bad arm doesn’t look like it belongs to me. Nothing more than meat and nerves.

Then I lift my head. And I stare at him again, unblinking, waiting for him to falter.

“Back up,” he says, pointing a finger at me.

I step closer to the bars anyway, giving him time to realize his mistake.

My good hand wraps around a bar. I pull myself closer, pressing my body to the iron, forcing my face into the narrow space between bars. My jaw clenches. The pain in my bad arm makes my eyeballs pulse.

Arrogance makes him careless.

He steps closer. Close enough that I can smell the sweat on him, see the faint stubble on his chin.

He starts to say something stupid. “You think—”

I move my good arm through the bars and grab him by the back of the neck. I yank him forward and slam his forehead into the iron. The sound is awful. A dull crack. His mouth opens in soundless shock.

I don’t stop.

I drag him back a few inches and slam him again. And again. Because anger is the only thing holding me together.

His hands flail, grabbing at my wrist, at the bars, trying to push away. Now he’s choking on panic. Now he understands.

His knees buckle.

I slam him one more time, and his body goes slack like a puppet with the strings cut. He drops, hits the stone floor face-first, and doesn’t move. The keys land next to his body.

The corridor is silent.