Chapter 55
NADIA
My eyelids are heavy. My tongue is thick, metallic, bitter. My head pounds like it’s been split open, and every nerve feels like it’s firing at the wrong time.
I try to move, but my arms won’t budge. My legs are pinned.
Panic snaps through me, cold and sharp. I force my eyes open.
The world tilts into focus.
My wrists are strapped to what I think is a gurney, leather biting into my skin. My ankles, too.
I yank at the straps, but they don’t budge.
A sharp panic flares under my ribs.
My mind splinters in a dozen directions at once. The room smells coppery, and the scent clings to the back of my throat. Blood. Is that… my blood?
For a second I’m sure I’m in a hospital. Maybe my hospital. Maybe something happened on shift. Maybe I collapsed. Maybe someone found me.
But this room doesn’t look like any at the hospital. It’s cold, concrete, sterile. There are no windows and the only light comes from a small naked bulb hanging from a hook in the ceiling.
My head throbs like someone dropped a grenade behind my eyes, and every thought that rises is jagged, unfinished. Confusion swirls so thick I can’t tell up from down.
Why am I strapped down? What the hell happened to me?
A sound slices through the silence. A door opens, the hinges squealing in resistance.
Footsteps scurry against concrete, harsh in their purpose as they near me.
I jerk upright as far as the restraints allow, my chest heaving.
A man comes into view. I have to squint against the light to make him out.
Kellerman.
His white coat is pristine, his stethoscope draped casually around his neck.
For a moment, a fragile, desperate thought sparks: maybe I really did collapse at work. Maybe I hit my head, maybe that’s why everything feels like it’s detonating behind my eyes.
A fall could explain the pain. The fog. The way my brain won’t stitch anything together. But something about him - about all of this - feels wrong, incomplete.
“Ah,” he says softly, smiling as though we’re colleagues meeting in the hall. “You’re awake.”
My throat is sandpaper, but I manage a rasp. “What happened? My head hurts.” I yank at the restraints again, but they’re a prison unto themselves.
His eyes are calm, cold, devoid of any empathy or emotion as he sets a tray down on a metal counter, instruments clattering faintly. I catch the glint of steel. Scalpels. Syringes. Clamps. My stomach lurches.
“What?” My voice cracks. “What happened?”
He turns, his smile widening as though I’ve asked something amusing. He steps closer, tilting his head, studying me like a specimen pinned beneath glass. “You’re a loose end, my dear. And I don’t leave loose ends.”
The straps bite into my wrists as I thrash, panic flooding me, every breath shallow and sharp.
He watches calmly, as though my terror is expected. “Don’t waste your energy. The drugs will still be in your system for another hour at least. Your body can’t fight what your mind wants.”
Tears sting my eyes, hot and angry. “What happened to me? What do you want!?”
For the first time, his smile falters, just a fraction, and something colder creeps into his gaze. “Your submission.”
The confession scrapes across my bones like razors. “My…?”
I close my eyes, fighting the scream rising in my throat.
Lucian.
The name rips out of me like a prayer - raw, involuntary, dragged straight from somewhere dark and deep. Because in that instant, one brutal truth crashes over me: fate has finally caught up with me. And it’s decided I’m the price. Collateral for Lucian’s sins.
The tray rattles when he moves it closer.
My pulse slams against my throat, a wild bird trapped in a cage. My wrists burn where the straps bite, but it’s useless - I can’t move more than a fraction. My body is heavy, my muscles sluggish, the drug still coating my veins like lead.
Kellerman hums under his breath as he arranges the instruments. The sound is soft, almost cheerful, and it makes my stomach pitch. Metal taps against metal, a delicate chiming that feels obscene in the silence - like he’s setting the dinner table instead of… whatever this is.
I force my aching brain to work, to remember, to find some thread that explains how I ended up strapped to a gurney under the care of a man I trust. Every thought slips away the moment I reach for it, leaving only fragments and panic.
What did I miss? What did I do? Why me?
All I know - all that cuts through the haze - is that he drugged me. I’m restrained. And he’s calmly laying out tools that look far too precise, far too cold, for anything that resembles help.
It looks like he’s preparing for surgery, and I have no idea what he plans to carve out of me.
“What are you going to do?” I choke out, my voice rough. “You don’t have to…”
He tilts his head, amused. “Oh, but I do.”
His eyes slide to me, cold and clinical, as if I’m nothing more than a pound of meat waiting to be cut open. “You’re clever,” he murmurs, almost like he’s complimenting my technique in surgery. “Too clever. But you were stupid not to take the senator up on his offer.”
He picks up a scalpel and studies the blade against the light, turning it slowly. It gleams like it’s proud of what it’s about to do. “Which means there’s only one way to handle this.”
My voice rips out of me, shrill, raw. Panic punches through my ribs. “What are you talking about?! Why did you drug me?”
He steps toward me, and instinct takes over. I thrash, hard. I kick at the restraints, jerk my wrists until my skin burns, scream so loudly my throat cracks.
“No-one can hear you down here, Nadia.”
“Stop! Get away from me! Help! Someone help me!”
He grabs my shoulders, trying to pin me down, wrist slipping as I twist beneath him. “Nadia - Nadia, stop.” His voice sharpens into something colder. “If you move like that, the syringe won’t go where it’s meant to. You could really hurt yourself.”
“I don’t care - let me go!”
“You should care.”
He lifts the syringe between us, the barrel catching the light. The needle looks impossibly long, wicked. “If this enters the wrong place… if your arteries aren’t still…” He clicks his tongue as though the thought inconveniences him. “It could paralyze you. Blind you. Stop your heart entirely.”
The words slam into me. He’s not threatening. He’s explaining what I already know. Like a teacher walking me through a disastrous outcome he’d rather avoid for the sake of clinical neatness.
I freeze. My breath hitches on a sob I didn’t feel coming. He waits for the moment my muscles go slack, my body trembling but still.
“That’s better,” he says, satisfied. “I need you complacent for what comes next.”
He lifts the syringe and flicks it once. A bead of liquid blooms at the tip, catching the light like a warning. Then he steps closer.
His fingers clamp around my jaw, unforgiving, forcing my head to the side and exposing the soft line of my throat. I can feel his breath ghost against my skin when he leans in.
“You should have kept your head down, Dr. Reed,” he murmurs, almost pitying. “You could’ve had a long, quiet career here. But now?”
His grip tightens.
“Now you’ve bought yourself an expiration date.”
The syringe descends.
The world shrinks to the thin, glinting needle hovering above my pulse. A cold thread of terror zips through me as the metal kisses my skin - a single point of icy fire. My breath locks in my chest, torn between a scream and a sob.
I twist instinctively, wrists burning against the straps, but my body won’t obey the way it should. The drugs drag through my veins like sand, weighing down every limb. Panic claws at me, frantic and useless.
Kellerman doesn’t flinch.
His thumb digs into my jaw, tilting my head to the exact angle he wants.
“Hold still,” he whispers. “Let’s not make this messier than it needs to be.”
My vision pulses, edges blurring. The needle dips. Cold fire blooms beneath my skin.
My breath punches out of me in a broken gasp. The straps cut deeper as instinct makes me jerk hard, but his hand holds me steady, thumb pressing cruelly into the hinge of my jaw.
“Good girl,” he croons, as the plunger depresses. “Let it happen.”
The drug hits fast. It surges through my neck, a burn that turns to numbness, then to something thick and heavy that spreads like ink in water. My vision wavers. The ceiling swims. My limbs melt into the gurney.
I try to fight. I try to scream. But nothing works the way it’s meant to. I’m going to die here.
The fog curls around my thoughts, dragging them down, down, down.
Kellerman’s face blurs. The room tilts. My eyelids grow impossibly heavy.
My last thought splinters through the fog - not a scream or a prayer… just a single, desperate truth: I don’t want to die like this.
Then the dark takes me.