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After that, the room was quiet and for good this time, as there was no coming back from a broken neck.

He let go, and Briggs went down onto the floor in a broken heap that didn’t resemble him at all. His face, his mangled hands, and the raw open wet flesh in between his legs.

I was shaking. I couldn’t fucking stop. Nor could I stop looking at the dead man on the floor. So, I closed my eyes tight, hoping when I opened them again, I would find myself staring at the ceiling above my bed. That I would see the red line from the sign below stretched across the faded paint.

“Anna.”

My eyes snapped open at that. At my name, said so quietly by a murderer standing nine feet away from me with his shirt soaked in another man’s blood.

He was already coming toward me and every single thing in my body flinched. I didn’t decide to do it, but it happened, like a knee-jerk reaction. Like a survival reflex kicking in. One that continued as he reached out a hand toward me and I went back into that wall hard enough that it hurt my shoulder blades. Incredibly, I saw the moment confusion made him stop dead about four feet away. A frown marred his features before he gritted his teeth.

He looked down at his own hands, as if only just realizing what might be on them. And whatever he saw there was the first thing I had seen in him since that door came off its hinges that was recognizably human.

Then he turned around and went to the sink, and I remained where I was as he ran his hands under the water and washed them. I watched him do this and couldn’t help but wonder how many times he had done this. Because he looked like a surgeon, doing it properly, the way a person is either taught or has learned through practice.

Again, it was just another facet to add to the picture-perfect image of a natural killer. He washed up past the wrists, the way I have done ten thousand times in this very building, and the water went from red to pink to clear and he kept going for a while after that.

I watched him from the floor with my back against the wall, my hands still shaking in my lap. And he had barely dried his hands before he took a cell phone out of the pocket of his sweatpants.

A cell phone.

In a locked forensic hospital, on a ward where even I had to put my own in a metal locker every morning. He held it against his shoulder with his cheek as he kept drying his hands after pulling about half a roll of blue paper towels out of the dispenser. And he did this as I sat on the floor with a dead man a few feet away and watched him do it.

As for the call, this lasted about ten seconds.

“There has been a complication,” he said, waiting a few seconds before telling whoever was on the other end to,

“Bring it forward.” Another heartbeat later and he replied,

“Now.”

And then one more word was said in a language I didn’t speak before he hung up and put the phone back in his pocket. After that he pulled the bloodied sweater off his torso and with it, came the t-shirt underneath. Both were ruined as there was so much blood it had soaked through two layers and was still staining his skin. So, he went about washing that next.

Once clean, he came and crouched down in front of me.

“I am going to pick you up now.” He said it the way you would say it to a patient. Announcing it first, so you don’t startle them. I had said sentences like that and in that exact tone too many times to count in my career and I have never once been on this end of it.

I nodded.

He got one arm under my knees and one around my back and lifted me off that floor like I weighed nothing at all. He bypassed the bed the second he felt me tense in his hold on his way over to it. Of course, I didn’t need to say why, as it was fucking obvious by this point. So, he set me on the couch on the other side of the room instead. And as he lowered me, he did so with his hand behind my head the whole way down as if he was trying to take extra care when handling me.

He rose back up to his full intimidating height before leaving me to go back to the sink. Once there, I watched as he got a bowl and filled it with warm water. He grabbed a handful of gauze pads and came back to me, getting down on one knee in front of me.

“Your lip,” was all he said after tipping my head back so I was looking up at him.

And whatever went through him at the sight of it didn’t quite reach his voice, but I felt it in his hand. Because his thumb went absolutely still against my jaw for a second before it moved again. He then looked back at the man who had caused it, and he narrowed his eyes. Doing so in a way that looked as if he was very sorry that he was already dead and therefore couldn’t feel pain anymore.

After that, he turned back to me and cleaned me up.

I have been a nurse for years and I have never seen hands like that. He did my lip first, with gauze, and he tipped my chin with two fingers to get the light on it, and he was so gentle that I could barely feel him. Then my chin. Then my cheek, and my jaw, and the side of my neck where another man’s blood had dried on me in the four or five minutes since it landed there.

He didn’t say one word the entire time.

And I sat on that couch and watched the same hands that had done that to a man across the room move over my face like I was something that would come apart if he pressed too hard.

Then he stopped, with the gauze against my throat, and I watched him decide whether to say it.

“I told you to turn around, little bird,” he said softly. But there was no anger in it. That was what made the breath leave me. He wasn’t scolding me, nor was he making a point. He simply sounded like a man who had asked for one single thing and not gotten it and was now going to have to live with what that meant.