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“There has been a vehicle on your street since three o’clock this morning,” he said. “There was one there last night, and one there the night before. You have walked past it four times.”

Four times.

I thought about carrying my groceries in the night before. I thought about standing at my own front door two nights ago, fumbling with the lock in the dark with my arms full. I then thought about somebody sitting forty yards away watching a woman who thought she was alone.

“I tell you this, not to frighten you. I tell you because I have decided that you should know what the reality of your situation really is, rather than what you would like it to be. You have spent three years running and have been successful at it… but that ends today. Because you can’t run from me.” The way he said this last part, caused a shiver to run down my spine.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked in what I knew was a hopeless tone.

“Because you are mine, even if you haven’t accepted it yet.” He said it as if it were obvious. Like I should have known this would happen and it was pointless to continue to lie to myself.

“That is all this is, Anna. It’s the gap between what is true and what you have accepted. I am simply waiting for you to catch up, little bird.”

I put my forehead against the window frame. The wood was cold, and I pressed into it hard enough to try to snap me back into my reality. Or should I say… his reality.

“So, what happens now?” I asked, knowing this was going to make my plan of escape more challenging.

“Now you have two options, and I am going to give you both of them, because I want you to choose.”

My mouth dropped, but no sound came out. Because that was the thing about him that was so chilling. He wanted me to choose what he most likely considered the lesser of two evils, despite neither of them being what I wanted. As if he had built a world with exactly two doors in it and both of them opened leading me right back to him. And what was worse, he genuinely believed he was being generous by letting me pick.

“The first,” he said. “You stay where you are and in ten minutes, the men in that van will come up to your apartment, and they will take you somewhere of my choosing. It will not be unpleasant. They will not hurt you.” He paused then, as if to let me digest this fully.

“I want to be very clear about that part, so listen to me. Those men will not lay a hand on you because they know what happens if they do.” The way he said it, God help me, I believed him.

“And if I don’t go with them?”

“Then they will carry you, and they will be as gentle about it as carrying a person allows.” His voice didn’t change at all. “But if you fight them, Anna, they will have to hold you… subdue you and I will not like that. I will not like them touching you.” Then something happened to his voice. The patience went out of it entirely, and what came out was so flat and cold, it barely sounded like the same man. It was the first time I heard the murderer underneath.

“And then I would have to kill them for it. Both of them. Which would be a waste of two good men who have done nothing wrong except follow an order I gave them.” I gasped at that, and at the easy-spoken brutality of it all. A gasp that was muffled by the hand I held over my mouth.

Because he meant it, and that was the horror of it. He wasn’t threatening me. He was just telling me the cost, and he was leaving it entirely up to me whether two men lived through the morning.

“That’s not a choice,” I said. “You know that’s not a choice.”

“No,” he agreed. “Which is why I would prefer you took the second.”

“Which is what?” I asked after swallowing hard.

“You put on your scrubs,” he said. “You do your insulin, because I know you have most likely not eaten yet and I know exactly what you sound like when your sugar is low, just as you do now.”

I gritted my teeth at that, hating that he knew that about me. But what he said next I hated even more.

“Then you pick up your keys, you get in your car, and you drive to work like a woman who understands her situation. The van follows you. Nobody speaks to you. Nobody touches you. You do your shift, and I get to see my little nurse whenever I please.”

Whenever I please.

Not when he was brought to me. Not when he was injured, or scheduled, or escorted down a corridor by two guards on either side of him. Because somewhere in the last eight days that building had stopped being a place where he was kept and turned into a place where he lived. And as for me, I had gone from being the nurse who worked there to being one of the things he owned inside his house.

“And that’s it?” I asked through gritted teeth.

“That’s it… for today.”

The way he said ‘for today’ went through me like cold water. I then looked down at the van. Somebody had started the engine, and a thin curl of exhaust came out of the back of it into the cold. Which was when it occurred to me that they’d been told to be ready ten minutes ago, before he’d even called.

Because he’d never expected me to pick the first one.

“Now.” His voice came back gentler, and that was worse than everything that had come before it. Because it was the voice from the shower stall. The one he’d used on me right at the end, when he was tying the drawstring at my waist.