Page 24

As for her sugary needs, she threw the wrapper away.

I did not.

“And this pressing business,” he said carefully. “Does it have a name?”

I looked at the wrapper and grinned.

“Anna Vale,” I said. “A nurse, an agency contract, Ashlock Medical. I want everything there is. Where she came from, what her name was before that one, who is looking for her, and why she is good enough at hiding to be here at all.” I paused a beat before making my demands more final.

“And Yakov, I want it all yesterday, understood.”

“It will be done.” He answered like I knew he would. Like he always did.

“I also want the names of the guards who have been bought… I will have my uses for them before my escape.” There was a pause while he went to find them, and then he reeled off the names and assured me he would include all this in his report. The one that would feature my new obsession.

Once he had finished, I cut the call, hiding the phone under the bunk, knowing I had no worries of it being discovered. Not now I had bought foot soldiers on the inside. I also didn’t need to worry about a cellmate, as the warden hadn’t been foolish enough to give me another body to kill.

I lay back on that bunk in the dark with a chocolate wrapper still in my fist and knew I would soon replace it with something that smelled of her. I also thought about how small the world was about to become for her. Because if my suspicions were right, then she no doubt thought she had built herself something. A laminated name, a town nobody would think to look in, a packed bag by the door she probably told herself she no longer needed. A woman that careful always believed she was safe, right up until the moment she was not.

Until the moment something had her.

Or should I say… someone.

Soon, little bird.

Soon there wouldn’t be a single fact about her that I did not own. And that was the joke of it, the one thing in that whole ruined place that made me smile in the dark.

She walked out of those gates every evening believing she was free, and every morning she walked back in and stood beside a man in chains. Only one of us was in a cage, and it was not going to be me for very much longer. Because I knew next time, she would ask me again. Sweetly, in that shaking voice of hers, with her tray held up in front of her like armor.

Behave for me… Please.

But next time, there would be no obeying her wishes. No, next time, I was going to touch her. I was going to put my hands on her despite her polite little requests.

I gave her my word once and I kept it. But I also knew the exact moment I intended to break it, as that promise would not carry on to the next time we met. Not like she no doubt thought it would. She could ask me as prettily as she liked. She could ask me with those big doll eyes of hers and that breath she took before she was brave, and I would enjoy every syllable of it.

But I would not yield to it again.

Because I would simply listen, and then I would ignore it before touching her, claiming what I have already declared in my mind to belong to me. And in the end, she would learn what I have known since I first laid eyes on her. Which is that there is no version of this where she walks away from me… ever.

Because I am getting out. That was never in question. It is only a date now, on a calendar nobody else can see. And when I walked out of Ashlock, she was coming with me.

I have been in need of a new plaything for a long while.

And who knows.

Maybe this one I would keep… forever.

7

PAPER GHOSTS

ANNA

Ididn’t sleep that night, but I also didn’t spend it reading tabloids about him either, which I considered enormous personal growth.

I just lay there instead, my laptop mocking me from the living room. Flat on my back in a rented bed, listening to a fridge I didn’t own hum in a kitchen I hadn’t unpacked, running one sentence around in my head like a coin in a dryer.

Oh, we’ll see about that… Anna.