Chapter 37 Harper-Rayn
HARPER-RAYN
Heaviness sinks into my muscles as I peel my eyes open, taking in my blurry surroundings. Unease immediately pounds through my veins. Is this . . . fuck. This is the psych ward. How the hell did I end up here? Did somebody have me committed?
My brain is foggy, and as I try to sit up, something pulls me back.
My brows furrow, and I pull against my wrists, only to find them restrained to the rails on the edge of the hospital bed.
“Doll?”
My head whips around, finding Knight hovering in the corner of the room, his hands buried in his pockets and his gaze full of guilt.
“You,” I breathe as bits and pieces of the last few hours come back to me. The morgue. Laith. The guards. The betrayal. “You did this to me.”
He visibly swallows before nodding, and as he steps closer to my bed, I shake my head, tears welling in my eyes. “No. Don’t,” I cry, not prepared to hear how he thinks I’m going crazy. “Just leave.”
Knight shakes his head and pulls up a chair beside me, reaching out and holding my restrained hand through the bed rails. “Push me away as much as you want, Harper, but I’m not going anywhere.”
“How could you do that to me?”
“I’m sorry, doll,” he murmurs, his heart on his sleeve, looking just as broken as I feel. “I had no choice. I need you to be okay, and if I took you back home, you would have just pushed me away and refused to hear me.”
An overwhelming mix of rage and betrayal sneak up on me, claiming every piece of my heart.
“So you had me committed to a fucking psych ward?” I demand, pulling against my wrists.
Being bound this way takes me straight back to the night my stalker tied my wrists and ankles, and my panic spikes.
“Do you have any idea what you’ve done? What setbacks this will cause for my career? ”
He nods. “I wouldn’t have done this if I didn’t think it was important, Harper. I know you don’t agree with me, but you need to hear what I have to say. I need you to understand how we got here.”
“Don’t . . . Don’t do this.”
“I have to,” he tells me. “You don’t see it, but right now, you are covered head to toe in flames, and this is me stepping into them with you. You’re burning, doll. Let me burn with you.”
I shake my head, the weight of my situation resting heavily on my chest as I try not to cry. “I’m not crazy.”
“I don’t think you’re crazy,” he tells me, leaning right in and brushing his fingers down the side of my face in a gentle caress. “You just need the kind of help that I can’t offer you.”
“And you think this is where I need to be?”
Knight nods. “Just hear me out. That’s all I’m asking.”
“I’m restrained to a bed in a psych ward,” I tell him. “I don’t think I have a choice in the matter.”
The guilt returns in his stare, and he eventually nods, reaching for his phone on his lap.
“I don’t really know where to start, so I suppose we’ll just start right at the beginning,” he explains, swiping his thumb across the screen to unlock it.
“After you kicked me out of your hospital room last week, I went and spoke to one of the people who work in the hospital surveillance room, and after some begging and pleading, she was able to get me the surveillance feed from all the nights that you said something had gone down in the morgue.”
I sit up straighter, my back stiffening. “You’ve seen him,” I breathe, not knowing whether to be scared or relieved to finally get some answers.
“Not exactly,” Knight tells me.
“What do you mean? If you have the security footage, you’ll see it all.”
“I do see it all, but what I’m seeing isn’t what you’re believing went down.”
“Wha . . . What are you talking about?”
He presses his lips into a tight line and turns the phone to face me. “This is the footage of the night you first sensed someone there. I’ve scrolled through the whole thing, and while I can see you freaking out, there’s no sign of anyone entering the morgue.”
I watch the footage, my brows furrowed as all I see is myself working, but I know for a fact there was a black rose left on the autopsy table, only I don’t see it here.
Knight jumps ahead in the video to where I’m freaking out and eventually race out of the morgue with no sign of anybody following me.
“Okay,” I say, confused why I’m not seeing a rose on the table. “How does that prove anything? I told you that night was only a feeling. I never saw the guy, I could just sense him there.”
“I know,” he tells me, “Which is why I kept digging. This video is from when that first body came in. The one that had your name carved across the knuckles and the internal organs all messed up.”
A shiver sails down my spine, remembering it all too clearly. It had fucked with my head in a way that I’ll never recover from. Even now I still remember the feel of the letters carved into the heart. It was horrifying.
Knight skips ahead in the video, only stopping when the morgue door opens and we see the coroner striding in with the body. “Wait. No, this isn’t right,” I tell him. “Detective Gray was there.”
Knight shakes his head, putting the video in fast forward so we don’t have to replay every single moment of the night. “No, he wasn’t. The coroner is the one who gives you the body and leaves. Only as you open the bag, it’s not the body your head perceives it to be.”
“What?” I mutter, leaning closer to see the screen better, and just as Knight said, I watch the coroner leave and get straight to work.
Only as I open the bag, it’s not the body I remember working on.
It’s an older Korean gentleman who appears to have perished in a fire.
“No. No, that’s not the body I worked on. ”
“Keep watching, doll.”
My brows furrow, and I watch the footage to the end, watching as I go over the body with great detail, taking down letters and making sentences out of markings that aren’t even there. “This isn’t right. Somebody must have doctored the footage.”
“That’s what I wondered at first, but with none of the detectives, first responders, or even the people who work with you in the morgue able to confirm even a snippet of your story, it leaves too much doubt.”
I shake my head. “I’m not crazy.”
“I know, doll,” he says, before letting out a breath. “Next up, the double homicide.”
Tears silently roll down my cheeks as I go over the footage, and just like with the first body, I feel more confused than ever.
I see the two bodies come into the morgue, and just as Knight and Dr. McKullan had said, they’re the victims of a horrific car wreck, not the two men I had danced with in the club.
They don’t even look a little bit alike, and yet my brain told me they were different people all together.
I watch as I go through the motions during their autopsies, searching for secret messages and documenting my findings, only there’s nothing to find.
“It got me thinking about what actually happened at the club,” he tells me.
“To the two men?”
Knight nods and brings up the next video. “I needed to know that there weren’t two bodies rotting away somewhere, so I got in contact with the club. I had to jump through more hoops than necessary to get the footage, but they eventually caved.”
“And?” I say, not sure I want to see what he found.
“The two men you were dancing with definitely weren’t the two men from the morgue.”
He jumps ahead in the footage again, showing me on the dance floor, grinding against the two men, and I feel the first bit of relief, seeing that I’m not going crazy. I even grin when I see Izzy in the background hooking up with a complete stranger.
That night was wild in so many different ways.
The footage plays, and I watch as the two men eventually leave, one heading for the bar and the other hoping to meet me in the bathroom, when I begin to wander away.
“Wait,” I say, knowing what comes next before realizing that if Knight has already watched it, that means that he would have also seen me with the stalker and watched as he made me come on his fingers before I pulled him away to the private booth, took him in my mouth, and then fucked him raw.
“So, you saw . . .”
Knight nods. “I certainly saw something, but I don’t think it’s exactly what you remember.”
“Huh? What’s that supposed to mean?”
He cringes, and I reach for his phone, only for my wrists to pull at the stupid restraints, and then as if on cue, I see myself wander off the dance floor and step in front of a strange man.
Only, he’s not masked, and he’s certainly not tall and broad.
Just some regular guy trying to enjoy his night.
Confusion plagues me. I have no recollection of this. When does the stalker come? I keep watching, waiting for him to show up. “Wha—HOLY SHIT,” I gasp, watching in horror as this strange man shoves his hand up my skirt, and I start riding it like it’s Christmas morning. “What the fuck am I doing?”
“My question exactly.”
“That’s not . . . That’s not him. My stalker wears a mask, and he’s much taller—like you. I’d almost convinced myself that he was you at one point.”
He nods. “Just watch. It gets worse.”
“Worse? How the fuck does it get worse?”
Knight skips through the awkward hand grinding, only stopping when I take Regular Joe over to a private booth and start blowing his mind before riding his cock reverse cowgirl style.
“No, no, no,” I groan, hating every minute of this before realizing that this guy could have any number of diseases, and I sure as fuck didn’t see him suit up. “I need to get checked for STDs.”
“That you do,” Knight agrees.
“Turn it off,” I beg him.