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And before I had so much as touched the scissors, he lifted his hand and simply tore the sleeve himself. One clean pull, straight down the seam, the fabric parting like wet paper, his arm reaching clear across the space between us to do it. But it wasn’t his strength that startled me. No, it was the fact that he could reach me at all.

Far more than yesterday.

An easy killing reach.

I stepped back before I had decided to. Because the chain that ran from his wrist to the bedframe uncoiled after his hand, long and loose, giving him a reach no restrained man was supposed to have. The last nurse who had tended him, the one nobody at Ashlock would finish a sentence about, had almost certainly stood exactly this close to him.

“Your… your restraints.” My voice came out thinner than I would have liked.

“They’ve changed today.” The obvious statement made him grin for a fluttering heartbeat. Then he settled the arm back along the cot, unhurried, and the corner of his mouth moved to form words this time.

“What can I say?” A small shrug, chains whispering with it.

“I make friends quickly.” He let the words hang there, and my heart started up a slow, heavy knocking against my ribs, because the pause felt loaded somehow, a held breath before a sheer drop.

“Speaking of friends…” He let this hang there. Open and unfinished. And something about the way he left it incomplete was worse than anything he could have actually said.

I shook my head, once, and didn’t take the bait. But my mind had already gone exactly where he wanted it to go. To a chained man with a reach like that. To a nurse who had stood too close. To every sentence in this place that nobody would finish.

My pulse climbed, and I knew he could see it, because he saw everything else.

“You have nothing to fear from me,” he said finally and before I could stop it, before three years of learning to keep my mouth shut could reach up and clap a hand over it, it was out.

“Did you tell that to the last nurse?”

The room went very still, and I felt the regret land the same instant the words did, cold and final. That was not boring, Anna. That was not furniture. That was a girl with a temper and a death wish handing a monster a live wire and hoping he wouldn’t take it.

But he didn’t lunge. He didn’t darken. He simply tilted his head and looked at me like I had just done something delightful and completely unexpected. Like a cat that turned out, after all, to have claws.

“Ah,” he said, soft… far too soft for a man like him.

“So, there is a spark in you after all.”

I made myself breathe. I made myself pick the tray back up and hold it between us like a small metal shield.

“I’m not here to hurt you,” I said, and I was proud of how level I sounded.

“And I would appreciate the same in return. I’m only here to help you. That’s all. Let me clean it, stitch it and you will be on your way.”

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he laid the torn arm out along the rail, open and offered. The very picture of cooperation from a man who was nothing of the kind.

“Then go ahead, little nurse. Sew me up.” I swallowed hard once more, biting back the fake name I would have preferred him to use. Not little nurse, a nickname that spiked my pulse and most definitely not Anna, that sounded far too personal… intimately his.

So, I didn’t say anything at all. I hooked the little wheeled stool out from under the counter with my foot and sat down on it. Because a wound that long was not a thirty-second job and my legs had already made their feelings on the morning perfectly clear. I set out what I needed. Saline, gauze, a suture pack still sealed in its wrapper, and the yellow sharps container dragged over close enough that I wouldn’t have to reach across him for it.

Then I rolled myself in close enough to work, and that was my second mistake of the morning, because close enough to work was close enough for him to make his move. He wasted no time leaning in closer so he could breathe me in, right there at the side of my head. An unhurried pull of breath I felt more than heard and he made no attempt at all to hide what he was doing.

“Mmm, you smell delicious,” he hummed and every hair on my arms stood up. I kept my eyes on the wound.

“I’m going to flush this out now. It will feel cold, and it will take a while, because I need it clean before anything else happens. I’ll try and be gentle,” I stated trying to ignore the way my heart was pounding a frantic beat.

He scoffed, low in his chest.

“You’d be the first.”

Do not respond. Do not follow that sentence anywhere at all. Clean the cut, Anna. Concentrate on your job.

Which is precisely what I did. I told my hands to behave, and I put half a liter of saline through that arm, syringe after syringe, watching the water run pink into the emesis basin and go slowly clearer. The wound opened as I worked, the way they do once the blood lets go, and I got my first honest look at the inside of it.