She peered around the doorway. The scene that greeted her couldn’t have been any more different to the one she and Johnny had found when they’d first crept up here, a little over a week ago. The bed was a tangle, clothes everywhere, dirty plates and beer cans on the floor. The room smelled stale, and she could see blood stains on the carpet.

She stepped in and looked around in horrified amazement. If this private space was supposed to be an indication of his mental state, it wasn’t looking good.

‘What do you want?’

She whipped round at the sound of his curt voice. Kit was standing in the doorway to his bathroom, a long towel wrapped around his hips, steam escaping past him.

They both recoiled at what they saw. She knew how she looked after one punch, but he . . . he had been hit multiple times. He had not one but two black eyes, with a dressing across the bridge of his nose. He had a split lip, there were multiple bruises across his torso, his right hand was strapped up and a bright white bandage – freshly reapplied, seemingly – wound several times around his ribs.

She couldn’t speak. He was the very definition of not fine. How could everyone have told her that he was? She stared, on and on in horror, realizing that she had come up here to shame him for not coming to see her; that at some level she had wanted him to see what had happened to her, in his name. She had wanted him to be appalled, disgusted, by what he made people do.

It had never occurred to her that he might have come off worse.

Her voice was a pale shadow. ‘I came to see how—’

‘Get out.’

She blinked at the harshness in his voice. ‘But—’

‘I said get out.’ He took a step towards her and she instinctively stepped back. He saw it, her fear of him. He stepped back too. ‘Get out!’

She rushed from the room, bumping into the side of a chair in her hurry. She gave a small cry of panic; she couldn’t gauge width with only one eye, much less when it was filling with tears.

She fled the room and ran to the lift. There was no chance of taking the stairs. His roughness had undammed her belligerent defiance that she was absolutely fine, and the tears were flowing freely, unstoppable. The very sight of him had reminded her of the horror of it all – the heat, the energy, the hatred, the power. The feel of bone upon bone, one human crushing another.

She heard the lift open and she fell in, her hands blindly pressing any button, all the buttons. She didn’t care where she ended up, just so long as it wasn’t here.

Chapter Fourteen