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I raised my tear-filled eyes to the horror in front of me and I saw all of it.

I couldn’t stop fucking looking.

It was like a car crash. You knew you should keep your eyes on the road in front of you, but you couldn’t help yourself. And I knew, even while it was happening, that I was never going to be rid of the sight. That it would stay with me forever and I fucking hated it!

It wasn’t just the sound of it or the bloody sight as it covered his face. But it was him. My ghost standing over him with his sleeves pushed up and his face working like this was what he had been born to do. All the while a man screamed with no voice left at all, which meant any chance of help coming had been taken away from him. Because no one was going to save him from this personal hell. No one was going to save his face, as my ghost cut it up into ribbons, exposing pieces of what lay beneath. Parts of the human anatomy very few people could look at without gagging.

Ghost didn’t gag.

He didn’t look disgusted in the slightest.

I was a nurse and even I couldn’t look at it without wanting to be sick. But then he suddenly stopped, leaving the bloody mess he had made alone.

No, now he was moving on to the next piece of him he wanted to take. He straightened up and using a fist in his shirt, he held him up so he was barely standing. He then looked down the side of him from his much greater height, and the second I followed where his gaze traveled to, I knew it was only going to get worse.

Because he was only just getting started.

And this time, he wanted to take a piece and discard it like trash. I knew it the moment he spoke.

“You were going to put this in her.” He practically growled the words, as if the idea of him getting anywhere near me with it physically pained him.

Briggs started shaking his blood-soaked head. Frantically, over and over again with no sound coming out of him at all.

“How many women have you forced this pathetic thing on inside this building?”

Briggs went still at this, or it could have been when the scalpel in his hand lowered to a rapist’s weapon of choice.

He closed his eyes and I wished I could have done the same.

But his body had answered for him. Because my ghost must have known men like this. That there was always a first and he knew it didn’t start with me.

Briggs didn’t even shake his head or try to deny it, he simply shut his eyes like a man who had finally met his end, and it was time to face judgment for all his sins.

Not by God.

But by the Devil.

“Mm,” my ghost said and I understood, standing against that wall, that this wasn’t just about me any longer. This was about justice. This was about the safety of every woman who walked through the doors of this hospital. This was vengeance for all the broken ones that had already walked out of them for the last time.

“Then let us make certain it never happens again, shall we,” he hummed darkly and this time,

I turned my face into the wall.

As the next lot of horrific sounds filled the room, my legs gave out on me. I went down that wall about halfway and stayed there with my hand over my mouth, and I closed my eyes because there was nothing else left that I could do.

The sounds went on.

There was a wet gurgling that I couldn’t stop hearing and didn’t need to identify. And it went on longer than I could bear. I stood with my eyes shut and my own blood roaring in my ears and waited for it to stop. Waited for the end as I heard pieces of him hitting the floor with a wet slap.

He was fucking butchering him!

It was only when it finally stopped that I forced my eyes open and what I saw this time, only added to the nightmare.

He had Briggs’s head in both hands.

There was a moment where he adjusted his grip. That was what finished me. A small, practical adjustment, the way you shift your hands on something heavy before you lift it properly.

And then he turned them, his huge body twisting in one swift movement I knew I would never get out of my head. It was a small sound. Nothing at all, really, not after everything that had come before it.