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You have done this fifteen times, I told myself. It’s just a building. It’s just a job. It is six weeks and that’s it. Six weeks and then I can move on to the next one.

But despite this, I sat there a while longer.

Because I have walked into places like this before and told myself the very same thing. Then four days into the last one a man came through a door in chains with eight guards bleeding around him, and by the end of it there was nothing left of Anna Vale at all.

Only the memory of his hands and his voice.

And this time there were four hundred and six men in one building, and I would be walking among them entirely on my own. Because there was nobody in that building who owned it from the inside of a cell. No ghost to ensure I was safe. No monster of mine sitting quietly in the dark, deciding who was allowed to touch me.

And for the first time in over three years…

I had never felt so alone.

25

FORTY-ONE DAYS

THE GHOST

Forty-one days.

That is what I have. Not weeks but days. Because weeks are a thing you say when you have stopped counting, and I have never stopped. I have counted every hour since she put a cell phone in the back of a stranger’s truck and walked out of my life in a pair of men’s coveralls.

Forty-one days was close to a thousand hours, and the noise hadn’t once gone quiet for a single minute of them.

As for what caused it, I didn’t need a psychiatrist to tell me why. But what I didn’t know was why her presence was the one thing that switched it off. That gave me a sense of peace I hadn’t known since before the day my entire world was taken from me. I called it a noise, as I wasn’t sure what else to name the voice of violence in my mind. I just knew that it was one I had convinced myself would only leave me the moment I got my revenge.

But I was wrong.

It was her.

It was when I met someone worth more to me than vengeance. And now I was addicted to the silence. Now I knew what the quiet sounded like.

And now she was fucking gone!

The result of this was simple…I lost my fucking mind!

There is a man on the second tier who will be eating through a straw for the next four months. And his crime was as simple as putting his hand on my tray. That was the whole of it. That was the entire offense. A man reaching across a table for something that was not his. So, I broke his jaw in two places before any part of me had decided not to.

There was another one in the medical wing with a shoulder that came out of its socket and didn’t go back in cleanly, because he laughed at something in a corridor and I decided the laugh was about me.

It wasn’t.

And honestly, I knew that even while I was doing it.

Two officers went on stress leave, and only one of them came back. And yet I had never touched either of them, not once, which was the whole point. A man who hits you can be written up. There was no form for a man who simply watched you.

But this wasn’t me. It wasn’t who I had trained myself to be. I had spent my entire adult life being the most controlled man in any room I have ever stood in. A control that had never been a performance. It was the only thing holding the line my father drew, and for forty-one days it has been coming off me in strips.

My code was still standing… Barely. Nobody has died and nobody innocent has been touched. But I honestly didn’t know how long that would last.

And every last piece of it came back to the same thing.

She was out there somewhere, and nobody could find her.

Naturally, I had gone over that morning more times than any sane man would. I always started in the same place, which was the moment I picked up Halloran’s phone and called her the second Yakov told me she was gone.

She even let it ring twice.