Page 54

So, I went in preparing myself for the worst, as it is always easier that way. My head already full of scalp lacerations and cervical spine precautions, because that is my job, and because a person was hurt. And honestly, after three years of running it was the only thing I had left that was actually mine and I was good at it.

But then the door closed behind me, which didn’t bother me at all. It was the sound of it locking that did.

It’s a particular sound, a security door engaging. There is the clunk of the bolt, and then a half-second later there is a second, smaller sound, a kind of settling, as the lock beds itself in.

I turned around and looked at it for what felt like a very long time before I reacted.

“Hey.” I hit the door with the flat of my hand. “Hey. The door’s locked.”

Nothing.

“It’s locked. Can you…” My words died when I heard boots, three sets of them, going away up the corridor at a walk. I frowned in confusion before I hit the door with the side of my fist, hard enough to hurt.

“Hey! The door is locked; I need you to open it right now. Open the door!” I yelled, but the boots didn’t change their rhythm by a single step.

“HELP!” I screamed it with everything I had, feeling the chill fill my veins despite the heat of the room curling around me. Because I knew then that something was wrong… the deadly kind of wrong.

“Somebody help me! I’m locked in, HELP!”

I stood with my ear against cold steel and listened to them walk the whole length of that corridor, through the gate at the end of it, and then gone. Not running. Not called away. Just leaving, at a walk, the way men leave when they have finished doing the thing they came there to do.

The steam had already found me. It was that thick wet heat that gets into your clothes in about four seconds, and my hair was sticking to my forehead. The whole room was white with it, rolling in slow banks under the lights, and somewhere further in, the water was running.

Not one shower. Several of them, all going at once. There was no reason on earth to run six showers for a man lying unconscious on the floor. But more unsettling than that, they were the type that worked on a timer… and unconscious men didn’t turn on showers.

Get out. Get out, get out, get out. Get out now!

“Hello?” My voice went out into all that white and came back flat off the tile. “Sir? My name’s Anna, I’m the nurse. Can you tell me where you are?” I asked, acting the part and hoping we were still in the same play.

And then the water began to stop. One valve at a time, cutting out in the order someone had pushed them. Four small clunks somewhere in the fog with a gap between each one, until there was nothing left but the sound of dripping.

Then a voice followed it and every part of me went cold in a room that was ninety degrees.

“You want your patient, little nurse?”

No, no, no, no… this couldn’t be happening.

“He’s right here,” he said before he stepped out of the steam the way a ghost ship comes out of fog.

It was the size of him that got me first. It always was, and it did it again even then. Even after a wall and a thumb and a bite that had taken four days to fade. The dark shape resolving out of all that white, and my brain working out what it was and refusing to accept it. But then he was simply there, ten feet away… oh and he hadn’t bothered with a towel.

I would like to say I looked away.

Yet that would have made me a liar, because I looked regardless. My wide eyes drinking in their fill from head to toe and back up again. Because there was a certain amount that a woman simply can’t be blamed for, and I had been given no warning at all. The man I secretly fantasized about was standing right there in front of me. Wet from the shower, his hair pushed back off his face, water running down every carved, hard inch of him.

And he was, God forgive me, the most beautiful and most terrifying thing I had ever seen in my life.

Tattoos I had never seen the whole of, black and dense over his chest and down both arms, shining with the water. Muscle laid over muscle in a way that no gym on earth produces, the kind you only get from a life of using them.

I had known he was big. I had been standing next to him in a room with my hands beating on him, so I had known. But every time before that he had been sitting or chained to a cot. Which meant nothing at all had prepared me for the whole of him upright and six inches from the ceiling of that stall. He was six foot seven of nothing but raw, brutal function.

Shoulders so big he would have had to turn sideways through most doorways I have walked through in my life. A chest and a stomach cut into hard, shallow blocks that moved when he breathed, and not one soft inch anywhere on him. Not one place where a normal man carries a little of what he ate last winter.

I had been looking at the top of that inked throat piece without ever seeing what it belonged to. It was wings belonging to the warrior on his chest. An armored figure that was kneeling, as demons tried to swallow him whole from all directions. Demons that swirled like living smoke across his body, so real they looked as though they were tearing their way out of him to consume the heavenly warrior on his chest. One who had his head bowed and two hands holding the hilt of his sword directly in front of him, the positioning putting the blade at his heart.

Foreign words were woven into the design, like a prayer I couldn’t read, and a part of me was desperate to ask what it meant.

As for the rest of him, the ink continued down over both thighs. A mix of black bands, old foreign script and a stag skull wound up in wild, deadly thorns. Even his hands were inked, though I had seen those already. Small squares and crosses across the finger joints like rings he could never take off, and a star in the web of each thumb.