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So, he could kiss my forehead like I was something precious.

That was the part I kept coming back to. It was such a small thing. Like the sort of thing you do to somebody you are going to see at breakfast. It was a thing you do to somebody you love. And it came from a man who had just held my legs apart while I begged him to stop before begging him not to.

And honestly, I had absolutely no idea what to do with the fact that both of those were the same person.

I have never once believed that gentleness and cruelty could live in the same body. Unfortunate life lessons had taught me that. The good version was the lie I fed myself and the other one was the frightening truth. A man with a switch, and he made me believe I was the one flipping it. That I was bringing it on myself.

But this man was both of them at the same time.

Deadly and tender.

He didn’t have a switch. I had pushed for one, stupidly, and more than once, and it was never there. No, instead he was the type of man who held my legs apart and called me filthy things. Then he put my clothes back on me with more care than anybody has ever taken over me in my entire life. And I knew that there wasn’t a single second that he ever considered those two things to be different.

And he was so much more dangerous than a monster, because a monster is the thing you run from, and he was the thing I found myself waiting for.

You are falling for him.

There it was.

I sat in a corridor outside a locked door with an observation chart on my knees and finally said it to myself, and everything in me went very quiet afterward.

Because every instinct I own was screaming at me to run. Every single one. Three years of training, every alarm I had, and all of it was going off at once. Hell, but it had been going off since I first saw him sitting on that bed in the prison treatment room.

“You are very quiet out there.”

His voice came through that door and I made a sound that I am not proud of. Something between a laugh and a hiccup. A small and slightly hysterical noise and I put my hand over my mouth about a second too late.

“Something on your mind, little nurse?”

“You could say that” I scoffed.

“Say it, then.”

I looked down the length of that empty corridor, and then at the chart on my knees, and then at nothing at all.

“We can’t ever do that again,” I told him, hoping it came out firm enough for him to take seriously.

Needless to say, it didn’t.

As he laughed.

“I’m serious,” I said. “This has to stop. You have to stop,” I tried again, and next came my name said in that soft reprimanding tone,

“Anna.”

“I mean it.”

“I know that you mean it.” The amusement was still in his voice but there was something else underneath it. Something that wasn’t amused at all.

“Now I want you to understand something, because I don’t think you’ve truly grasped it yet. This does not stop. Not today, not tomorrow… not ever. Not because you have decided it should, and not because I’ve had a taste of you and now you think I am somehow satisfied.” I swallowed hard.

“That’s not…”

“If you think that what happened in this room has taken the edge off anything, then you are very badly mistaken.” He paused a beat. “It has made it worse. Considerably worse. And you would do well to prepare yourself for that.”

I sat there with my heart going a million miles an hour and bit my lip trying to calm myself enough to speak.

“You are a prisoner,” I said. “You are a patient in a locked forensic hospital. What exactly do you imagine is going to happen here? Are we going to have a relationship? Are you going to take me to dinner?” He chuckled at that, and then assured,