Chapter 73
CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE
BELLATRIX
Iwoke with a start. Popping up off the bed and quickly realizing I couldn’t get very far.
Something was holding me down, and I wasn’t coherent enough to try to figure out what it was yet.
Instead, I focused on my breathing, the pounding in my chest, and the bright light causing sweat to bead on my forehead and drip onto my lashes.
I scrunched up my face to try to get some of it off and felt a few droplets disappear into the hair around my ears. It sent an unexpected chill down my spine.
I was hot and cold and panicked. Naked from the chest down. My stomach flipping around and grabbing for my throat, and my throat so tight it wouldn’t let anything pass through it. It was trying. I just wouldn’t let the vomit out. I was too old and too fucking sober to be throwing up on myself.
I peeked one eye open and immediately shut it again.
But not before I noticed I wasn’t in the apartment anymore.
The room was whiter. Wider. More sterile.
The smell similar to the time I overloaded the washer with bleach.
Which wasn’t helping with that vomit feeling.
And I could hear two sets of shoes moving around. One close, the other closer.
“She’s waking up,” a voice said from above me. Casper. He had this mix of humor with an edge of sharpness on the verge of bleeding over that meant it couldn’t be anyone else.
“A shot of adrenaline will do that to you.” I didn’t recognize him. He sounded like someone who didn’t know how to put the pack of cigarettes down, though.
When the light above me dimmed and the underside of my eyelids stopped glowing a bright-orange color, I chanced another peek. Prying the left side open and then the other to find Casper staring back at me with a shit-eating grin. All teeth and no lips.
“I’m gonna kill you,” I hissed and tugged at the plastic straps securing me to a hospital bed. He must have taken me back to Briarwood. That or some place that got its interior design tips from their monthly issue of Nuthouse Chique.
“You keep saying that but something tells me you don’t really mean it, myshka.”
He was wrong. I did mean it. I was gonna kill him for what he did to me. I thought I knew what pain was. I thought I liked it. But what he did to me in the bathroom… that was different. It wasn’t enjoyable. I didn’t get that rush. He did. He got off on hearing me cry, on holding me after.
And I would kill him for that too.
“I, however,” Casper hummed to himself, “meant every word. Remember what I told you? What I said it would be like when I finally decided to put you down?” He reached out a hand and brushed my damp hair from my cheek.
I gnashed my teeth at him, and he laughed.
“I think the exact words you said to me were… that sounds nice…” He paused, looking off in the distance as though he could picture it.
I took that moment to glare past him at his friend.
His back was towards me as he moved some things around on the metal tray.
It wasn’t Adrian. Adrian was leaner, more put together.
He also had a full head of hair the last time I’d seen him.
This guy didn’t. One side was bald or shaved down and the other was thick and full.
His upper body was wide at the chest and he had a bunch of scars running up his right arm.
I caught a glimpse of them every time he lifted a hand to move something on the tray.
He must have felt me staring. Because he turned to glance at me over a shoulder, and I lurched back. I didn’t have anywhere to go but that didn’t stop my body from trying the second I saw that he was missing half his face.
Technically, it was still there. It just wasn’t pretty, and his eye was gone too. Which led me to wonder why he bothered to look. If he really wanted to see what was behind him, he would have turned the other way. The slight curve of his scarred lip told me he hadn’t done that on purpose.
He was the guy Vee marked down as “Frankie.” Another doctor. She’d showed me his picture that time in her office but it was different seeing him in person. Like having a horror movie villain walk off screen and stand in front of you.
The problem with that was I’d been so distracted by his face, I hadn’t been paying attention to what Casper was doing until he was crawling up onto the hospital bed, squeezing between my legs, and leaning over me with a set of paddles in his hands.
“You’re gonna shock yourself like that, idiot,” Frankie called out. I flicked my eyes in his direction before flicking them back. I didn’t want to look at the guy any more than I had to.
“You take the fun out of everything,” Casper grumbled as he kicked his feet over the side of the bed and landed next to me.
Frankie flicked a button on the cart to my right, and the paddles hummed to life.
“Are you scared?” Casper asked.
“Of what?”
“Dying.” He shrugged a shoulder. “I’ve always wondered what it was like to be scared of dying. So, are you? Tell me what it feels like.”
I shook my head and narrowed my eyes. “You aren’t going to kill me.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that, baby girl.” He grinned, dropped the paddles to my skin, and then I felt like I was being kicked in the chest by a two-ton horse.
It took a few seconds for the pain to go away, and then I felt nothing at all.