Lights Out: A Dark Stalker Rom-Com

What do you mean it’s going to take a week?” I said.

I was three stories up from the ER in the hospital’s clinical forensic lab, calling in a favor.

Veronica, a whip-smart Latina lab tech with flaming pink hair, held up the two baggies I’d brought her. “You gave me three pieces of hair that may or may not have viable roots and some bloody rags. This isn’t like a fully automated paternity test that I can bang out in an hour, Aly. I have to follow a whole process of purification, quantitation, amplification, and capillary electrophoresis if you want the results to be accurate, and I’ll be squeezing you in between my other work.” She set the baggies on her counter and shot me a deadpan look. “You might have noticed; I have a lot of other work.”

I grimaced, knowing exactly how many thousands of hours our lab was overbooked. Vern and her coworkers had an entire backlog of evidence to process, including rape kits. I suddenly felt like an asshole for jumping the line, but I honestly didn’t realize how much work it would be for her. I thought she could pop my samples into a machine, and, beep-boop, I’d get my results.

I reached for the baggies. No way in hell could I put my desire to one-up Josh above identifying someone’s rapist. “I change my mind. Forget I asked.”

Vern slapped my hand away. Her pinup girl makeup was flawless tonight, and one perfectly arched brow climbed even higher as she eyed me. “Too late. I’m intrigued now. You want to tell me what this is all about?”

“Let’s just say it involves a boy I like,” I said.

Both brows went up. “You think he’s running around behind your back? I heard Greg down in the janitorial department has mob ties. Maybe he can disappear him for you.”

I forced a laugh, trying to act natural. Greg was a lanky Irish-Italian guy with black hair and freckles. He had a baby face but was also a relentless flirt, and he’d lured Vern in at the Holiday party. He was also, most definitely, in the mob.

Vern and I got along in a way that made me feel like we could be besties if we had any free time for things like friends. I’d only seen her a handful of times over the past month, but I knew she had it bad for Greg because she’d found a way to bring him up at least once in each conversation. Which meant I needed to figure out a way to ruin her crush. Immediately. Vern was a good person; she didn’t need to be associating with lowlifes.

“Greg?” I said. “Mallory told me he cheated on his last three girlfriends.”

Vern grimaced. “Seriously?”

“Yes. And bragged about it.”

“Ew. Never mind then,” she said, dragging the bag of bandages toward her.

“Vern, no. I can’t ask you to do this for me.” I tried to slide my hand under hers to get my samples, but she scooped them up and held them behind her back.

She gave me a stern look. “I said it’s too late. I’m invested now. And wipe that guilty look off your face. I’ll run the tests during my breaks, so you won’t feel like you’re line jumping.”

I scrunched my nose up. “But then I’ll be taking away your breaks.”

“Aly,” she said, gripping my arm with her free hand. “It’s okay to be selfish once in a while. You know that, right?”

“Yes?” I said, fighting the urge to squirm beneath her gaze.

She shook my arm. “Once more with conviction.”

“Yes,” I repeated. It still sounded more like a question than a statement.

Vern released me and huffed out a breath. “You trauma nurses and your bleeding hearts.” She turned away to hit a button on a machine, and I was contemplating snagging the baggies and running when she spun back around and caught me with my hand outstretched. The unimpressed look she gave me spoke volumes. “That’s it. Get out.”

I sheepishly made my way toward the door. “Thank you.”

“Yeah, yeah. I’ll let you know when I have the results,” she said, waving me away.

I left the lab feeling oddly deflated and more than a little guilty. Yes, I wanted the results, but I didn’t like that I was taking time from Vern. I knew how sacred breaks were when you were overworked, and the forensic lab was as short-staffed as the nurses.

My phone pinged in my pocket as I made my way back downstairs. I knew without looking that it would be Josh, and I was hesitant to check the text in public in case he’d said something especially incendiary. The man had a way of needling me that led to expletives spewing from my mouth, and I didn’t want to offend anyone who might overhear me.

I whipped my phone out of my pocket the second I stepped inside the breakroom. Yup. It was Josh.

On a scale of 1-10, how mad are you about the tracker? he asked. One being you need a day or two to cool off, and ten being we need to start drafting a joint custody agreement for Fred.

And just like that, I was grinning. I had no idea how he kept doing this to me: pissing me off one second and making me want to burst out laughing the next. I’d never met anyone quite like him, and his personality was addicting because of it. It didn’t take much imagination to picture life with him, going home after a horrible shift and having him find some way to turn my tears into laughter.

I’m at a 3, I wrote back. As in, I think I need a few days to regroup and form my next plan of attack.

Lie. What I really needed was time to talk myself out of the feelings I was starting to develop for this man. A kinky hookup? Fine. That was allowed. We all had one-night stands with strangers. But to want more from the man who had a) broken into my house, b) broken into my car, and c) was actively stalking me had to be the height of stupidity.

Only I didn’t feel like an idiot. I felt…right. He’d had countless opportunities to harm me, and he hadn’t. All he’d done so far was make my life better. Food, shoveling, rides home when I was too tired to drive, security updates, the best orgasm of my life. Sure, he drove me up a wall half the time and couldn’t cook for shit – the bacon was still raw in the middle, and I stopped eating the eggs after picking the third piece of shell out of my mouth – but no man was perfect.

I feared that I was getting too attached too quickly. It had only been a few days since he’d broken in the first time, but I’d spent almost every free moment since either obsessing over him or in his presence. If my disappointment at getting home yesterday and not finding him there was anything to go by, this man had the potential to hurt my feelings. I blamed all the time I’d spent obsessing over his videos. It made it feel like he’d been a part of my life for much longer than he actually had, like we’d been in a strange, one-sided sexual relationship since before Halloween.

Now I understood the female leads from all the sports romances I’d read. No wonder they were saying “I love you” by the halfway mark – their feelings for their famous counterparts had started months, sometimes years before they had their meet-cutes.

I snorted, remembering my own not-so-meet-cute, unable to keep from imagining someone years from now asking how Josh and I met. Somehow, I didn’t think “He broke into my car at three o’clock in the morning and waited there for me with a gun and a knife” would be the answer they anticipated, even if I added the part about the seat heater and the snacks.

My phone pinged, and I looked down to see another text.

I’m sorry if I went too far, he said. Both with the “LOL” and earlier.

Great. Now he was worried he’d crossed a line and either offended me or pushed me into doing something sexually that I hadn’t been ready for. This was what I got for being evasive.

I took a deep breath and started typing, pulling on my metaphorical big girl panties. You don’t have to apologize, and you didn’t go too far. I’m just trying to protect myself.

I would never hurt you, Aly, he wrote back.

I sighed. Why did he have to be so sweet? My stupid, fragile, love-starved heart wasn’t great at self-preservation to begin with, and this man was shredding what few defenses I’d erected around it.

Maybe not intentionally, I said. But I’ve been watching you a lot longer than you’ve been watching me, and I’m worried – Fuck. How did I say this without giving too much away? – that this is only kink fulfillment to you.

It’s not, he said. Watch my video later. Take some time if you need it. But Aly?

Yeah?

I’m only willing to allow you a few days. After that, I’m coming for you, baby, whether you’re ready or not. And until then, I’ll be watching.

Well, that wasn’t ominous or anything. And definitely not the hottest thing I’d ever read in my life. My panties were soaked not because of how achingly turned on I was but because I’d developed sudden-onset incontinence, and that was the story I was sticking to.

Not knowing how to respond to Josh’s sendoff, I set my phone in my locker and backed away like I’d just stowed a bomb in there. Of course, that’s when Tanya walked in.

“You doing okay, Aly?” She stood halfway inside, arm outstretched as she held the door open, glancing warily between me and my locker. “You didn’t leave Indian food in there again, did you?”

“No, I didn’t,” I said. “And that was one time!”

She stepped inside, letting the door close behind her. “Yeah, but that one time was enough to clear the whole floor. Four days, Aly. Four days of rotting curry in the middle of summer, the week the A/C was acting up. We sent Seth in here dressed in full PPE to dispose of it.” She shuddered. “He still has nightmares.”

I shook my head at her, oddly grateful for the familiar ribbing and the distraction it provided. “I’ll pay for his next therapy session.”

She strode toward the coffee maker. “Our therapy is free.”

“Yeah, well, I’ll buy him some wine,” I said, joining her.

Technically, our shift didn’t start for another half an hour, but Tanya and I always came in early to get the lay of the land. We chatted for a few minutes, catching up on life – mostly hers, as she actually had one with a husband and kids – before heading to the nurses’ station to get the gossip from the day and learn which patients we’d be inheriting.

Josh’s parting words kept repeating themselves in the back of my mind, and it wasn’t until someone poked me in the ribs and asked if I was listening that I realized I’d been zoning out. Yup, I had it bad. Hopefully, I’d figure out some way to guard my heart in the next few days.

Several hours later, my hope went up in flames as I watched his latest video. It was darker than his others, not just in lighting but tone, with lyricless, haunting music playing in the background. He was shirtless in it, and the video opened with him grabbing the phone like he’d just wrapped his hand around someone’s throat – my throat – before a pan transition revealed him rising over the screen, one hand braced somewhere overhead, his dark jeans unbuttoned as he reached into them like he was getting ready to pull out his dick – and fuck it straight into my tits again. The camera panned once more, showing him lying on his side, one hand propping his head up, the other disappearing off-screen, forearm flexing deliciously as he pumped his arm like he was fucking that vibrator into me again.

This was the most overtly sexual video he’d ever posted, and watching him recreate what we’d done this morning made me fucking desperate for round two. What a devious bastard. Sure, take your time, Aly, but I’m going to torture you with my absence until you come to your senses. It made me want to be bratty again, hold out until his patience snapped and he hunted me down.

Oh, fuck, that sounded like a good plan. Yes, I was definitely going to do that. And…wait. His video had another caption.

I nearly dropped the phone when I read it, my laughter so instantaneous that I choked on air. It said: “Mommy and Daddy time.” How? Howww was he able to be so fucking hot and funny at the same time? It didn’t compute. Surely, one should cancel the other out, and I should either be turned on or amused and not both simultaneously.

My eyes skipped down to the comment section. It did not disappoint.

OMG is he married???

This just proves that all the good ones are taken.

I knew I’d been calling him Daddy for a reason.

@aly.aly.oxen.free GIRL, YOU WON.

Okay, but how are you going to tell your wife that this video just got me pregnant?

Are you accepting applications for a third?

If my future husband ain’t like this, I don’t want him.

I didn’t think I wanted kids until I just pictured this man holding a baby.

I all but threw my phone into my locker. No. Nope. I did not need the image that the last comment invoked filling up my head.

Oh, God. Too late. 6’4”, muscle-bound, heavily tattooed, shirtless Josh cradling a baby in his arms. I could feel my ovaries back at it again, opening the floodgates and screaming, “GO, GO, GO,” as they released every single egg in my body. If I had sex with this man in the near future, we’d have to double up on birth control.

My pager went off, and I was glad for the excuse to get out of there before the next kink I developed was a breeding one.

The next several days seemed to both fly by and drag, making me feel like I was in a time warp. Going back to my usual routine was weird, even though I hadn’t been out of it for that long. I half expected Josh not to honor my request for space, but the time stamps on my security cameras didn’t show any gaps indicating he’d hacked them and broken in again, and other than the pining video he posted halfway through my shift Thursday night, complete with a sad 80s hairband soundtrack, he hadn’t tried to contact me.

The comments on the video were priceless, with many wondering if Mommy and Daddy were fighting again. I’d gotten almost ten thousand follow requests since Josh had “claimed” me, which spoke volumes about the kind of pull he had online. No wonder he had such a big ego. All that power had gone to his head.

“Hey,” I said as I joined Tanya, Brinley, and a few other coworkers at the nurses’ station. Usually, I spent my downtime in the breakroom chugging coffee, but I didn’t trust myself near my phone right now.

A chorus of greetings welcomed me into the fold. We were midway through a late-night lull, but we’d pick up soon once the bars let out and all the football fans hit the streets. Our city’s team had made it to the final round of playoffs, and after games ended, we got an influx of shitfaced men who’d hurt themselves trying to flip cars or climb light poles.

The nurse station faced our fast-track area, where we had six narrow, open bay rooms, almost like stalls. It’s where we put patients with minor injuries and illnesses like sprains, fractures, lacerations, and sore throats. Three were occupied, but only two of the patients were being seen. The third bay contained an average-looking white man with light brown hair. He had one of those faces that were ambiguous, like he could have been anywhere from his early 20s to late 30s, and he’d blend in well in a crowd. Still, he looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place him. His shoulders were broad like he worked out, so maybe he went to my gym?

“What’s up with that guy?” I asked. It looked like he’d gotten into a fight, with one eye quickly swelling shut and a split lip. He held gauze to his forehead, no doubt putting pressure on a cut there. Someone should be helping him with that.

Tanya leaned in close, her voice low. “That’s the rapist from the other night.”

It felt like she’d dumped ice water over my head. I jerked my gaze from the guy, not wanting to make eye contact if he turned our way. “Why isn’t he in jail?” I asked. “Didn’t he get caught in the act?”

It was Deb, a white woman in her mid-50s and the most senior nurse on shift tonight, who answered. “He didn’t even get arrested. Some hotshot lawyer showed up before we could swab him, and he walked out of here scot-free an hour later.” She shook her head in disgust, her shoulder-length gray hair swaying with the motion.

I gripped the edge of the nurses’ desk to steady myself. “How. The fuck?” I couldn’t get any other words out. Felt like I was choking on the anger that threatened to bubble up.

Brinley let out a sound like an angry cat, and I felt better knowing I wasn’t the only one on the brink of going nuclear. “His family is loaded. The lawyer threatened to sue the shit out of the hospital and the cops for trying to coerce a DNA test out of him.”

“But he got caught in the act,” Erica, another junior nurse, said. “Why do they need DNA to arrest him?”

“Maybe because there was no video evidence?” someone said.

“Yeah, but the cops brought him in here,” another answered. “And the victim and a separate witness both identified him.”

We got into a heated whisper-debate about what happened that night, each of us sharing the knowledge we’d gleaned from the cops, hospital admin, and our own late-night Google searches and crime show binges. In the end, none of us had law degrees, so it was all speculation, and by the end of it, we only had more questions than the answers we’d been after.

“Okay, but why is he here?” I asked once we’d calmed down.

Erica clicked the computer mouse and leaned in to read the screen. “One of the victim’s brothers tracked him down in a bar after seeing a Snapchat.”

I shook my head. “No. I mean, why is he still here? The faster we treat him, the faster we can send him back out so the brother can finish him off.”

“No one wants to help him,” Tanya said.

I glanced around the station. All women. Usually, we had several male coworkers on each shift as patients sometimes had preferences for whom they wanted to treat them.

“It’s only Amit on shift right now,” Brinley said, catching my confusion. “Zach called in sick, and Kevin won’t be in for another hour.”

Amit was a squat, barrel-chested Indian-American man in his early 30s who could deadlift twice his body weight. He was great with our “problem patients” because they usually took one look at his straining muscles and thought better of their bad behavior.

Tanya leaned over the station desk to grab a clipboard off it. “We’re waiting for him to get done in room three, and then we’re sending him over.”

I shook my head. That would be a while. The patient in three was barely stable.

“I’ll do it,” I said.

Brinley sucked in a breath.

Tanya grabbed my arm. “Aly, no.”

I pulled out of her grip and turned to face my coworkers. “I’ll be fine. You guys can see me, and yesterday, I learned how to punch in someone’s windpipe in my martial arts class.” I grinned, wrapping myself in false bravado. “Maybe I’ll get a chance to test it out.”

Tanya didn’t look convinced. “I’m coming with you.”

I held up a hand, halting her when she made to take a step toward me. Tanya never treated sexual predators. Ever. There was a reason for her reticence that she’d only hinted at before, but it was enough for me to get the gist, and I’d be damned if that man got a chance to retraumatize her by saying or doing something terrible in her presence.

“I got this,” I said.

A line formed between Tanya’s brows as she frowned at me, and her dark eyes looked troubled. “You’ll step away if he gets inappropriate and let Amit handle him.”

I nodded. It wasn’t a question from my friend but an order from a superior.

She eyed me for a long moment before blowing out a breath. “Fine. But we’re watching.”

“Good,” I said, turning on my heel, glad I had backup ready to intervene.

The phone started ringing as I walked away, and I heard Erica answer it. “Wait, come back! There’s a man on the line for you!”

“Tell him I’m fine,” I called over my shoulder.

Josh must have hacked into the hospital again and saw what I was about to do. I almost smiled. He said he’d be watching me, but it was nice to have it confirmed. It was like having my very own guardian angel keeping tabs on my welfare, and it made me feel safe in a way that not even the hoard of co-workers at my back did.

I was sure I would have been okay, even without such close supervision. The man I was about to treat wasn’t even the worst I’d ever seen. Something most “civilians” didn’t realize was that when people in jail got hurt or sick, they went to the hospital just like everyone else. Last year, I’d treated a man with a stab wound who’d been convicted of brutally murdering two women. He’d been strapped to the bed, and there had been two correctional officers in the room with me the whole time I’d seen him, but I still felt unsafe in his presence.

I would never forget the look in his eyes when he’d caught sight of me. It was inhuman, something I’d never seen before that was somehow completely dead and feverishly alive at the same time. He looked like he was starving, but not for food. It was the gnawing kind of starvation that hollowed you out until all that was left was the hunger.

The second I’d stepped out of his room, I’d turned toward the cop guarding the door and told him I didn’t think that man had only killed two women. The cop looked me dead in the eye and said, “Neither do we.”

I had nightmares for weeks afterward.

Nothing could get worse than that man, I thought. But as I approached the accused rapist and he turned to look at me, I wondered if I was about to be proven wrong.

Up close, he had the same eyes as the suspected serial killer, even though his were brown and the murderer’s had been blue. They were dead and alive and wholly inhuman. I knew with certainty that I was looking into the eyes of a predator, the eyes of someone who didn’t see me as a being with agency of my own but as a plaything put on this earth for their entertainment. It made me want to crawl out of my skin, but I pulled my professional façade on and brandished it like a shield. The faster I treated him and sent him on his way, the better.

I skipped the usual pleasantries and got straight to business, giving the bed he reclined on a wide birth as I went to the pulse oximeter, keeping myself half turned toward him so if he tried to make a move, I’d see it coming.

“Hello, I’m treating you tonight,” I said, with almost no inflection because fuck him.

“And your name would be?” he asked, his voice low and pleasant and all the more unnerving because of who it was coming out of.

“Nurse Hanover,” I said. It was the generic name we gave patients when we didn’t feel comfortable offering them our real ones, and it would even go on his discharge paperwork when he was released, so he couldn’t track me down afterward. We’d had a few incidents after patients found their nurses outside of work, one of which ended very badly, and now the hospital did its best to try and protect us.

“Do you have a first name?” he asked, a teasing note in his voice.

“Nope,” I shot back. “Just Hanover. Like Madonna or Cher.”

He chuckled, and the sound made me want to puke. Because it was infectious. If I’d heard it in a bar, I would have turned to see who was laughing, and it made me think of how charming some people with personality disorders could be.

I lifted the pulse reader from the machine and asked him to hold out his finger, careful not to touch him when I clamped it on. I let it work its magic, stepping away to pull his chart up on the nearby computer. Amit’s name was on it, so he must have been the one to settle this creep in before getting called away to help the patient in room three.

The rapist’s name was Bradley Bluhm, and if he was of any relation to the Bluhms that one of the tallest skyscrapers in the city was named after, he didn’t just come from money; his family was worth billions. No wonder they found some way to bribe, coerce, or pay for him to avoid arrest. Laws didn’t apply to the uber-rich, only to those without the money or means to subvert them.

Brad’s chart told me he’d probably need stitches on his forehead and an x-ray of his ribs, but I still had to ask him what happened and get him to describe his injuries. I really didn’t want to, so I clicked around on the computer for a while longer as the heart monitor pinged out a slow, steady rhythm. The bastard was staring straight at me. Hadn’t stopped since I’d approached. I could see him turned my way out of the corner of my eye and feel his gaze tracing over me like it was corporeal.

Your co-workers are watching you, I told myself. Josh is watching you. If he was so unhinged when a couple of strange men catcalled you, just imagine what he’ll do if this guy lays hands on you.

The thought almost made me smile. It wasn’t that I needed a big, strong man to protect me or fight my battles – I’d kick-flipped a dude fifty pounds heavier than I was halfway across a judo mat yesterday afternoon – but it was nice to know that Josh was more than willing to. Part of me almost hoped that Brad tried something so I could learn how far Josh would go, and how far I’d be ready to go with him, because if he went after Brad, there was no way I wouldn’t be along for the ride.

I stepped away from the computer and wheeled over the sphygmomanometer. “Can you hold out your arm? I need to take your blood pressure.”

Brad leaned forward, trying to meet my gaze, but I avoided it. I had a habit of wearing my emotions for everyone to see, and I didn’t want this piece of shit to learn just how much I both feared and reviled him. The fear wasn’t because of what he might do to me; it was more from knowing that people like him lived and walked amongst everyone else – ones who were so broken inside that no amount of therapy or medication would ever make them “safe” for the rest of us. People like Bundy and Kemper and that one handsome guy from the recent Netflix documentary my co-workers kept talking about. What was his stupid nickname? The Ken Doll Killer?

“You seem uncomfortable,” Brad said, voice low and cajoling as I wrapped the pressure cuff around his bicep. I noted the healing scratches on his arm and wondered if the cops had been able to photograph them. “Is this about the unfortunate mix-up from the other night?”

I kept my mouth shut, tightening the cuff more than necessary before stepping away and turning the machine on. Mix-up. The fucking nerve of this piece of shit.

“I know how it must look,” Brad said, his tone almost bashful. “But if I’d really done what they said, wouldn’t I be in jail right now?”

I didn’t respond, refusing to be goaded by him. Instead, I clenched my jaw and half turned away to watch the machines. His pulse was steady at 61 beats per minute, and his blood pressure read a healthy 115/70. The fact that even his readings showed a man at ease made me want to scream. He wasn’t nervous or elevated while discussing raping someone, which told me that he was either incapable of emotions like empathy or the woman from the other night wasn’t his first victim. Part of me worried both were true.

I girded myself as I pulled his cuff off, trying to keep my breath steady while my heart beat nearly double the rate of his, and my blood pressure went through the roof.

“I’ll need to look at your head before you’re wheeled down to radiology for your ribs,” I said.

“Oh, of course. I’d make that joke about how the other guy was worse, but that would be a lie,” he said with a self-deprecating laugh.

The hair on the back of my neck stood on end. Despite my repulsion, I could see how someone might be charmed by him. But my lizard brain wasn’t buying it. It was screaming at me to get away from Brad as fast as I could.

I took my time pushing the machines back into the corner, trying to gather my unraveling resolve to treat him.

“Did my chart tell you what happened?” he asked, not pausing long enough for me to get an answer out. “That man stalked me through social media so he could attack me from behind in a bar. Good thing there were so many witnesses, and the cops were close enough to make a quick arrest.”

I said absolutely nothing again, but inside I was seething. How fucked was our justice system that a devastated family member sat in jail while a rapist walked free?

I couldn’t take much more of this, but maybe if I stayed quiet long enough, Brad would get the hint and shut up. I sure as shit wasn’t about to argue with a potential psychopath or play into whatever false narrative he was creating for himself.

Unfortunately, this monster was a chatty one.

Brad leaned toward me, attempting to catch my eye. “I tried to tell him it was a misunderstanding, and his sister had been more than willing, but he wouldn’t listen.”

My ears rang as my temper started to get away from me. From the amount of ketamine we’d found in her system, Brad’s victim wasn’t anywhere near being able to consent, if she was even conscious at the time.

Just do your job and get out, I told myself, pulling on a fresh pair of nitrile gloves.

“But I come from the kind of family that sees attacks like this all the time,” Brad said. “You’d be amazed at the things people do looking for a payout.”

Don’t, I told myself. Do not rise to the bait. A response was clearly what he was after.

I kept my eyes trained on a small riser of shelves as I strode past the foot of Brad’s bed, careful not to let him out of my periphery. My pulse was pounding in my ears, and I had so much adrenaline sluicing through my veins that I was starting to tremble. I could do this. I just had to clean his head and call an orderly to take him downstairs for his X-rays. After that, it would be a doctor’s responsibility to stitch him up.

I glanced at the nurse’s station to see Erica and Tanya standing behind it, watching me with stony expressions. Could they hear Brad all the way over there? Or was it just that they could see him talking that had them on guard? Either way, I was grateful for their vigilance. The sight of them buoyed me some, reminded me that I wasn’t alone with this piece of shit.

“I should have expected something like that from her,” Brad said while I pulled open the top drawer. “She wasn’t exactly a high-quality woman, if you know what I mean. You think she would have been grateful for the attention of someone with my pedigree, but instead, she turned around and accused me of attacking her.”

My fingers shook as I lifted the things I’d need from the drawer. Gauze. Cleaning supplies. Butterfly stitches to hold his wound closed until the doctor could see him. I focused on every single item to keep myself from turning around and punching Brad in the face. I’d never wanted to hurt someone like this before, and the violence screaming to get out of me was terrifying.

Movement caught the corner of my eye. I dodged sideways and whipped around to face Brad, who’d just tried to grab me.

A smile split his face, the charm slipping away as something cold and serpentine took its place. Damn it. I’d finally given him the reaction he wanted.

“So jumpy,” he said. “You must be afraid.” From the way his dick was starting to tent up his pants, he was thrilled about the possibility.

Unfortunately for him, my fear had been subverted by rage. I was so mad that I felt oddly calm as I cocked my head sideways and dropped my eyes straight to his lap.

“Afraid?” I said. “Of some shrimp-dicked spoiled brat?” I lifted my gaze back to his, knowing he would see my fury, my anticipation. “Go ahead. Try to grab me again.” I stepped close to him for the first time all night, catching the smell of stale alcohol wafting off his breath. God, I hoped he’d do it. If he touched me first, I could say I was defending myself. “I’d love to see how a coward like you holds up against a fully conscious woman.”

He blinked at me, and I had just enough time to catch the triumph in his eyes before he scrunched his face in mock fear and started wailing. “Help! Help! This nurse just threatened me!”

I took a hasty step away, cursing myself for letting him manipulate me.

Several people came running in at Brad’s continued outbursts, including Ben, one of our security guards.

“You okay, Aly?” he asked, and I almost swore at him for using my name.

“I’m fine,” I said.

“Why are you asking her?” Brad whined, all evidence of the monster I’d just met gone, replaced by the spitting image of the spoiled brat I’d accused him of being. “I’m the one she threatened.”

“We’re not doing this again, Mr. Bluhm,” Ben said, approaching Brad’s bed.

Again? Had Brad pulled something like this the other night? Is that how he’d gotten out of here? Fuck. Had I just given his lawyers another excuse to target the hospital?

“I want my lawyer!” he yelled, right on cue. “And I want that one to treat me instead.” He pointed straight at Erica, who’d rushed in with Tanya to help.

Thin, petite Erica, who I noted had the same build and dark hair as the woman Brad had assaulted. Oh, hell fuck no. Was this his plan all along? Replace me with his ideal victim so he could torment her instead, or worse, try to find out who she was so he could attack her next?

“Nope,” I said, turning Erica around and marching her away while everyone else dealt with the shrieking rapist.

Tanya found us around the bend in the hall a few minutes later. “What did he say to you?”

I leaned against the wall and tilted my head back, trying to get myself under control. “Some bullshit about how his victim should have been thanking him for deigning to lay with such a low-quality woman.”

“But…that’s – what?” Erica sputtered.

“He’s fucking crazy,” I told her. “And I’m not being ableist. I mean that clinically. I might not be a therapist, but there is no way that man doesn’t have ASPD.” I shifted my gaze to Tanya. “He was just like that guy from last year.”

Her eyes widened. “The murderer?”

I nodded.

She looked away from me as a plump white woman in her early 30s joined us. Uh-oh. Someone had called HR.

“Hey, Aly,” Hannah said as she reached us. “You want to come to my office and tell me what happened?”

I sighed and pushed off the wall. Technically, I hadn’t broken any major rules, though I’d probably get a slap on the wrist for the shrimp-dick comment and the taunting. “Sure, lead the way.”

An hour later, Brad had been discharged, and I was back on the ER floor, ready for my next patient. Hannah had given me an unofficial warning and very kindly told me to watch my mouth while also insinuating that had she been in my shoes, she would have stabbed Brad with the nearest sharp object.

Hannah was good people.

I felt like I’d faced the worst of the night and came out mostly unscathed on the other side. That was until I got called to the ambulance bay to help with a car accident victim. These were always rough for me because of my past, but tonight proved to be my undoing.

The victim was a woman in her mid-fifties with dark hair and olive skin. Like my mom. And just like my mom, she’d been impaled by something on impact, only instead of the pipe that had plunged straight into Mom’s chest, this woman had an unidentifiable, thin piece of metal sticking out from her right shoulder. She would survive where Mom hadn’t, and though I told myself that it wasn’t her, all I could see was Mom looking at me from the passenger seat, blood pouring from her mouth as she tried to speak.

“I can’t,” I said, backing away from the gurney while one of my co-workers rushed in to take my place. “I can’t.”

I was 16 again, sitting uselessly beside my mother as she died, my hands covered in her blood while I tried to staunch the flow, the broken car horn drowning out my cries for somebody, anybody, to help us.