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“What?” he asked but I’d lost the last of my patience when a guard told me my nurse hadn’t turned up for work.

“Give. Me. Your. Fucking. Phone.” I said it slowly, the way you speak to something that has two seconds to comply before I start cutting off body parts.

Then I opened my hand and let him go so he could give me what I wanted. He went down on his heels and then he was patting at himself like a man on fire. Both pockets, then the desk, then the first pocket again, and the relief was evident when he came up with it. Then he held it out to me in both hands, the way you hand a thing to a priest.

I took it and turned my back on him, but then the second I heard him move toward the door, I grabbed the back of his neck and tossed him into the chair.

“Sit your ass down. You’re going nowhere,” I said, watching as he had to right himself in it before the whole thing toppled over.

I had her number for four days by then. It came to me in an envelope along with everything else she believed was hers. I hadn’t once used it, because a number like that was something you saved for when you really needed it.

She answered on the fourth ring, already talking.

“Dr. Halloran, I’m so sorry, I was just about to call…”

There she is.

The second I heard her voice it silenced the noise in my head like nothing else on this earth has ever managed. Just like that. Like a hand closing over a struck bell.

“Try again,” I told her, and the silence that came back was worth every hour of the night I had spent on that cot.

“How… how are you calling me… the number, it’s…” I couldn’t help but smile at the same time I was quick to cut her off,

“The good doctor was generous enough to give me his phone.”

“Is he…?” She couldn’t make herself say it, and I let her sit with it for a moment. Because it told me something I already knew about her. She had a murderer on the telephone at nine in the morning and she was worried about the doctor. About a lazy, useless man who had spent every day since she walked in handing her his work and taking the money for it.

That’s what she is. Good to the core and unwilling to change even after all life threw at her.

“He is busy at the moment,” I told her, making her stutter,

“Did… did you… you kill him?”

I laughed at that, which was most likely a startling response for her to hear.

“Not if he continues to be helpful, no.” I turned my head and looked at him while I said it and watched him understand every word. Then I saw him go very still in that chair with his hands flat on his knees like a schoolboy afraid of being scolded.

As for my girl, she tried the lie about being sick. But I already knew that she was a poor liar and always has been. Which was why I told her so, and I heard her stop breathing for a second when I said her name in reprimand.

Then I sent her to her window, and she went, which was when I knew how the rest of it was going to go. Not because she looked. Because she argued first, one small no, and then did it anyway. That wasn’t defiance. That was a woman finding out what she already suspected. That her body answered me before her head had even finished arguing.

Then I gave her an ultimatum where both choices led to me. One was to be taken by force, which would cost my men their lives if they displeased me and put so much as a hand on her. And the second was for her to come to me willingly.

She took the second, just like I knew she would.

Which meant that only minutes past nine o’clock that morning I believed I had won.

And it wasn’t often that I was wrong.

So, I was more than a little confident by the end of that phone call. Confident that in a little over twenty minutes my girl would be walking in here and I would be sitting her down to remind her of the rules. But I would also spend the time needed to reassure her that just because I knew her name wasn’t Vale, it didn’t mean I was going to do anything with that information.

I then took my own phone out of the inside of my jumpsuit and made the call. Yakov answered in Russian on the second ring.

“I have been waiting for your call,” he said, and I knew he would have been. Yakov never called me for the simple reason that he didn’t know who might be standing next to me, or whose hand that phone might end up in.

“I want an update,” I stated firmly.

“Our guys haven’t taken eyes off the apartment.”