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It should also be noted that I hadn’t done that with any particular urgency in fifteen years. There has never been a need. Women have always been available to me, and I have used them the way you use a thing that is available. Afterward I felt precisely nothing, which was exactly the point of the arrangement.

There was nothing available to me in that cell but cotton and the delicious dark memory of her mouth.

It was enough.

God help her, it was more than enough.

I thought about her lips closing around my thumb. Then the tears coming off her jaw, and the fact that I had not needed to hurt her for one second of it, and that she looked at me the entire time.

Then my mind did what a mind does with a picture like that.

It went further.

Because there was not a great deal of distance between a woman gagging on my thumb and a woman gagging on something else. I thought about how perfect she would look on her knees before me. On her knees on that infirmary floor with her hands still above her head and my fist in all that chestnut hair. Oh, and I wasn’t gentle about it. Not when in my head she looked up at me with those enormous wet eyes exactly the way she had against the wall.

Good girl. There it is. All the way down.

I finished with her scent in my mouth and her name behind my teeth and my own blood roaring in a room that had been silent for days.

Then I lay there in the dark, breathing hard, and felt the whole of it settle into me.

Not shame. I have no use for that and never have. Something worse, and considerably more inconvenient.

Now that I knew what it felt like to have even a small piece of her, I also knew I would never stop. Not when she was my first obsession that didn’t include pain or blood or revenge. But actually, someone I wanted to keep. Someone who had the power to stop the screaming in my head and replace it with something infinitely better. The sound of her submission. Of her forced pleasure. Of her fearful little noises and sweet voice begging me please.

I wiped away my release, wishing it had been spent on her, coating her skin and marking her as mine in the most primal way. Well, not the most primal, as there were always my teeth. Teeth marks that she would soon wear at her neck, a scar I wanted to stay there forever.

This thought made me grin in the dark as I lay on that bunk with a torn scrub top folded under my head. Then I thought about what I would need to take next, and how long I could reasonably wait before I took it.

The answer was simple…

Not long, little nurse.

11

THE WARDEN

THE GHOST

They came for me at eleven the following morning.

Two of them, and the older one did the talking. It should also be mentioned that he couldn’t get through the sentence without clearing his throat twice.

“Warden wants to see you.”

And there it was.

I stood, and put my wrists out, and let them go through the theater of it. Waist chain. Cuffs. That whole ceremony they perform to convince themselves the building was still theirs. The only time I hesitated was when looking back at my prize I had under my pillow, one I admit I was loath to be parted with, if only for a short time.

My obsession was already growing to new heights, even for a madman like me.

We walked, and I read the corridor on the way.

That is the part nobody understands about men like me. Everyone believes it is only the violence that drives us. But in actual fact, the violence is the least of it. The violence is a tool you use twice and then never need again if you have used it correctly. It is the ability to read the space around you that keeps you alive. Doors, distances, hands, eyes, who looks at you and who has decided very carefully not to.

Which meant that by the third gate I knew exactly how that meeting was going to go.

Two officers passed us going the other way and both found something interesting on the floor. A man on the gate had his keys out and the door open before we reached him, which was not procedure. He also didn’t look at my face while we went through, and his hands were anything but steady. Somebody had left a door propped on a wing where doors do not get propped.