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“I don’t think you want to find out what I am capable of.” My pulse kicked up a beat faster at this, at the same time my breath left me because the threat was plain as day.

“So… so you will… hurt me?” It was barely a whisper.

“I don’t need my hands to hurt you, little bird.” My mouth actually dropped at that before I was able to form words,

“What is that supposed to mean?”

He looked at me for a long moment, and then he said it. And when he did, he said it kindly, which was more frightening than if he had screamed it,

“I have a feeling you really do not want the people in this building finding out who you are.” Everything in me went cold at that. My hands first, then my face, and then the rest all at once, and I had to lock my knees to stay upright. The room went far away in that strange way it does before you faint, and for a second or two I could hear my own pulse instead of his voice.

Because he had not threatened to hurt me.

No, instead he had gone straight past my body and put his hand on my new identity. The only thing keeping me alive.

“You’re… you’re blackmailing me?” I asked in a quiet, almost pained way, as if I was shocked that he would. Which was stupid, and I knew it was stupid even while my mouth was forming the question. This was a man who paid officers to leave a door unwatched so that he could bind my wrists and take me apart in a shower stall. A man who, when I ran, spent two months finding me and then had himself committed to a locked hospital for the criminally insane. And all so that I would have to walk into this room and take his blood pressure.

Blackmail was the least of what he was capable of.

“If it gets me your compliance.” He shrugged one enormous shoulder. “Then yes, I most certainly am.”

And it was in that moment that I fully understood what he was. He was the impossible choice. To give myself over to a master manipulator who would do anything to get what he wanted or to call his bluff and walk away. A bluff that could catch up to me and end up costing me my life.

Meaning it wasn’t much of a choice at all. Which was why I released a beaten sigh and let my shoulders drop before I asked in a small, defeated voice,

“So, what do you want?”

“Apart from the obvious?” he replied, and I turned my face from his and closed my eyes for a few seconds. He let that sit there a moment, and he enjoyed it.

“It’s simple… You are going to be my nurse.” He finally answered me and I jerked back a little. I could not help it, because it was the last thing I expected to hear.

“That’s it?” I asked incredulously.

“For now.” He tilted his head. “Although I have a feeling that the way you treat me as a patient is going to be vastly different from the way you treat the others.” Heat went up my neck and across my face at that. A traitorous reaction that took me straight back to that day and I wasn’t the only one.

“Or has our time in that shower already been forgotten?” he asked and I wisely said nothing. Instead, I looked at his collarbone and kept my mouth shut before his hands closed tighter on my waist.

“I asked you a question, little bird,” he pushed in a hard tone.

“I…I haven’t forgotten,” I admitted after first needing to clear my throat.

“Good girl,” he praised, and those two weighted words were all it took. All it took for something in me to feel warm and comforted, and I stood there hating every cell I owned as it took hold.

“As for me, well I have thought of little else,” he admitted freely, before he brought his head down until his mouth was near my ear,

“Though I have had only my souvenir of you for company.”

I shivered again and he hummed at that, clearly satisfied. Then he straightened up.

“Now. I think this is a good time to go over the ground rules.”

“Rules?” I asked making him smirk.

“Rules,” he repeated with amusement.

“The first one you have no doubt already worked out. There will be no running, Anna.” The way he said this last part was most definitely a threat. The voice of a man reading out a sentence that had already been passed, and I understood that whatever this was, it had stopped being a conversation some time ago.

It was an order, plain and simple, one I still tried to argue against,