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Eight of them to walk me the last stretch, the other three having found somewhere quieter to be.

Eight.

For one man in chains. Oh, and every last one of them was marked and would be going home tonight sore and cursing my existence. A nose pouring a very pretty crimson down a gray shirt. An arm held at the wrong angle, cradled like something already broken. A boy of maybe twenty years, with his sleeve pressed to a split lip, working hard not to let me see his hands shake. There were limps, bruises and cuts, each giving me cause to grin. And I liked it. Bright and familiar, the way it always was. Good, said the noise.

This is what we’re made for.

Making them bleed.

Then they opened the last door.

And every thought in my head went out like a snuffed match.

I smelled her before I saw her.

I couldn’t explain it, and I quickly gave up trying. The hood was still on my face. There was blood in my eye, disinfectant thick enough to choke on, and the animal reek of eight terrified men crushed in around me. And under all of it, cutting right through, something reached me that had no business surviving the journey.

Sugar.

Warm sugar, and something clean beneath it. Something soft. A scent without one thread of danger to it. It slid into me the way a needle finds the vein, straight past every wall I own, and struck a place so deep I’d forgotten I was built around it.

And the noise stopped.

Not softened. Not quieted.

Simply stopped.

Thirty years of that roar, gone between one breath and the next. As though a hand I couldn’t see had reached into my skull and shut a door on the whole of it.

The silence was fucking enormous.

In fact, it was the loudest thing I had ever heard.

Somewhere in that silence, a guard was barking at the others to get me on the bed.

I could have taken his throat out for the tone of it alone. Instead, I laughed, low and quiet behind the mesh, and let him wonder what it meant.

And then I let them do it.

Eleven men it had taken to move me, and now a handful of them shoved me down onto the bed and threaded my chains through the frame, and I let them. Me. A man who could have painted that little room with their blood and whistled while he did it. God help me. God help us both.

I let them put me down. Not because they were strong enough to make me. Because she was in the room. And for the first time in my life, I wanted to stop.

So, I did the only thing left to a chained and hooded man.

I watched her.

Even half-blind through the mesh, I watched her move. She snapped a fresh pair of gloves onto her hands, but she didn’t come to me. Instead, she turned her back on the most dangerous thing that had ever been dragged through that door, and she went to the men who had dragged it into her domain. The bleeding, the broken. And in a voice that was still shaking, she asked them if they were hurt. If anyone needed her hands before I did.

Kindness.

In a place built to burn the last of it out of you.

Kindness, spent on the men who had just dragged a nightmare through three locked doors. Spent by the one soul in that room with every reason on God’s earth to hoard it for herself.

She was perfection.

And I wanted, instantly and completely, to ruin her.