Chapter 5 Katarina #2
“Three years ago,” I echoed, and a tear dashed down my cheek.
“So, that makes you twenty-five years old, correct?”
I just shrugged. What did I know? My life was slipping through my fingers like sand.
“It says in your file that you’re a flight risk, violent with the orderlies, and known to self-harm.”
I forced a jagged laugh. “Quite the catch, aren’t I? I’ll have a hell of a dating profile when I get out of here.”
Lucciano’s mouth twitched, and I felt sure for a second that he was going to laugh, but the moment passed.
Unlike the man I’d seen smoking and peeing against the side of the chapel, the Father Lucciano who haunted the halls of the institution was sober and unreachable.
An emotionless well so deep, it pulled you in if you stared too long.
“Do you plan for life after this place?”
“No—here, all my wishes have come true. Of course I do,” I snapped.
“What kind of things do you wish for?”
“To be normal. Next question.”
“So, you think about leaving?” Lucciano continued.
“Every day. I should never have been here in the first place. Sleeping around with married men?” A bitter chuckle left me. “I’ve never so much as kissed a man.”
Lucciano’s eyes narrowed at me. “But you did stab an orderly and slash a nun across the face, did you not? And you do hear voices in your head.”
I sighed. He’d definitely read my file. I lowered my lashes and batted them. “Like angels whispering . . . or devils. Either one would work.”
“You hear angels speaking to you?” Lucciano pressed. “What do they say?”
“Nice try, Lucifer,” I murmured, and sank into a chair opposite him. “You’re not getting any divine secrets from me.”
He looked bemused at my refusal to share. But what could I really share? Sometimes I heard a voice in my head saying the stupidest shit. Other times it was screaming absolutely terrifying shit. Most of the time it was quiet. It had all started when I’d met Ivan.
He peered at the clock on the wall.
“We’d better end there.” He glanced down at the file. “Oh, one last question. Who was Mira?”
I froze.
Mira. An angel.
“It says here that you were close. She comes up often in your psychotic episodes.”
“I don’t have psychotic episodes. I have moments of lucidity where I realize how much the people who run this place need to suffer for what they’ve done.
What they continue to do to the patients here,” I burst out; probably not a great idea, but the mention of Mira had stirred my emotions up too far to wrestle them under control.
“If you don’t have these episodes, then why do you have a list of medications a mile long?”
“That’s a good question. Maybe Father Benedict can answer it one day in court,” I snapped.
Lucciano narrowed his eyes at me again.
“Let me guess, you’re going to report back on everything that I just said, right?
Like a good little demon. I expect nothing less.
This is a cursed place, forsaken . . . Only evil can walk through these doors.
You are no different from them. Your hands are stained just like theirs .
. . I can smell the copper . . . and ash.
You smell like the pyre of the people you’ve killed.
” The words left me thoughtlessly on a wild rush.
I had no idea where they’d come from, but that was all just part of losing your mind.
From the brain fog, sometimes crazy shit emerged.
Lucciano stared at me, his hand tightening on the desk. I wondered what the other fathers thought of the tattoos on the back of his hand.
Then he stood, and my heart stopped. He was so imposing, so threatening without even trying. It was in his effortless strength, his onyx eyes, his calloused hands.
He crossed to me in three long, measured strides and placed a hand on either arm of my chair, caging me, then leaned in, staring into my soul with that brimstone gaze.
“How do you know that?” His voice was low, a husk. A rasp. A call to sin.
“Know what?”
“What I am?” He leaned down so his face was only inches from mine, leaving me nowhere to hide.
My spine felt like it was liquefying. Jesus, save me. Sure, controlling my mouth wasn’t my strong suit, but now I’d gone and pissed off an actual devil.
“How do you see me?”
His eyes searched mine. He really wanted an answer.
Some way to explain how I could know just by looking at him that he had bloodstained hands.
I had no explanation except that the voice in my head told me so.
No reason except for the fact that surviving in Hallow Hall had honed my ability to tell when monsters walked among ordinary people.
“Do you really hear angels inside your head?” He sank a hand into my hair and gripped the back of my head. He gripped it hard, as if he’d like to crack it open and peek inside.
Fear laced down my spine.
He straightened slightly, forcing my head back so I was staring right up at him, supplicant.
“What do they sound like?”
“Insanity. I think they’re what insanity sounds like,” I whispered, honest and disarmed.
“But I thought you weren’t crazy, remember?” he reminded me.
A lump formed in my throat so large I couldn’t dislodge it. A tear welled in my eye. It trailed down my cheek.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I don’t know anymore.”
Fear was making my heartbeat spike, and I wet my suddenly dry lips. His gaze fell to the movement. He tilted his head to the side.
“What are you?” He matched my quiet tone.
“Just another crazy girl. Or another victim of Hallow Hall. Take your pick,” I whispered back.
Lucciano shook his head. He seemed disturbed by me. “No, neither of those is all you are. You are something else,” he said.
“Hey, at least I’m unique,” I wisecracked, feeling like if I didn’t ease the intensity of his inspection, I might cry. I hated to cry in front of anyone. I hated to let them see they’d gotten to me.
“Unique, but not alone . . . I’ve known another—” He cut himself off when the door to the office suddenly opened.
I jumped.
Father Lucciano didn’t release me right away. He took his time letting go. Father Benedict moved around his desk, ignoring us for the most part.
“My apologies. That coffee you gave me didn’t sit right for some reason, Massimo. Old age, never let it catch you.”
He sat and studied me. “How was your session?” He glanced at the file on the table. “Oh, you got to Mira already? You’ve made progress.”
“We had only just started on the topic,” Father Lucciano said.
“It’s one of the most difficult ones for Katarina. Isn’t it? Shame what happened to that girl.”
I shot up in my chair. “Can I go?” I couldn’t hear Mira’s name come out of Father Benedict’s mouth. I just couldn’t stand it. My mind was clearing every day, and the memories were nearly too painful to recall.
“Not without your medication.” Father Benedict peered at me. “You seem upset today. I hope you remembered to take yesterday’s dose with all the fire alarm kerfuffle.”
“I did,” I lied brazenly, looking him in the eye.
“I’ve got it ready, Father, if you’ll allow me.” Father Lucciano was right there.
God, I hated him. How beautiful he was. How strange and unsettling. A striking demon come to play in this little playground that the men in power had made, hidden away from the world. Somewhere they could let the beast out.
“Go ahead, Father, as you see best.” Father Benedict sank back into his chair and watched us with interest.
He was a man who had observed me kick and scream in pain, injecting different stimulants and sedatives into various veins and taking notes on the effects.
Vargas was in it for the money, or the power, it seemed.
Pavol was in it to satisfy his twisted sexual desires.
But Benedict? He has his own sick kinks, but what really got him going was the need to experiment on human subjects.
To see what happened when you combined different variables.
“Miss Dmitrova, open wide,” Father Lucciano said. He’d moved in front of me when I was glaring at Benedict’s balding head.
I glanced up at him, fighting the urge to scream. He held my medication in his hand.
Open wide?
I stuck my hand out, palm up, waiting for the pills, but he didn’t drop them.
Instead, he held a pill to my lips and waited for me to open my mouth.
“What? Why?” I demanded lowly, disappointment crashing into me.
I wasn’t going to be able to avoid taking today’s medication, which meant resetting the clock all over again.
Staff at Hallow Hall were pros at checking that you’d really taken the pills.
There was no escaping their inspection. It had happened to me countless times, but this time, I felt like my heart might snap in two.
“To ensure there are no mistakes,” Lucciano said dispassionately. He was a different demon from who he had been before, questioning me about my voices. Now, it was like a mask of cruel indifference had slid over his handsome features, cloaking them in ice.
There would be no mercy from a man like this.
My face felt hot as I slowly opened my mouth and let him slip his fingers inside.
They were long and thick, the kind you might find on a man who sculpted marble.
I had to widen my mouth to fit him. There was something twisted and shameful about the feeling.
He was staring down at me like he was committing every scorching second to memory.
It was violating. It was titillating. It was wrong and yet it made me burn.
Crazy is as crazy does.
His fingers caressed my tongue for a second before he moved them deeper, filling my mouth, choking me as his dark eyes sucked up all the air in the room. He watched the place where his fingers disappeared in the cavern of my mouth, and I watched him back.
Then he was pulling away, leaving my mouth strangely empty.
Empty?
Before I could process that fact, he brought the paper cup of water to my lips and tilted it up. Water ran down my chin and dripped onto my chest, wetting my T-shirt.
“Now, swallow,” he commanded in a voice that had probably never once been defied.
I swallowed, my throat bobbing, pushing the water down my gullet. Only water, and nothing else. I was so relieved I could have cried.
He nodded. “Good girl.”
My face burned hotter, but I didn’t turn away from him. I couldn’t seem to make my eyes leave his, or the words they seemed to be speaking to me in secret.
“Interesting technique for giving medication,” Benedict said from across the room, the spell breaking.
“It’s the only way to know for sure that the right dose has been administered,” Father Lucciano replied, and stepped back from me. “If it suits you, I can oversee Miss Dmitrova’s medication schedule from now on. It might be a nice way to continue my training on her case.”
My pulse jumped as Benedict considered his words and slowly nodded.
“Very well, go ahead.”
Sister Vera appeared in the doorway. She reached for my arm with the meat pincers she called hands and grabbed at me.
“Thank you for today, Miss Dmitrova. I look forward to working with you,” Lucciano murmured, his gaze not leaving me for a moment.
I nodded, confused and flustered.
We left the office, and I hurried down the hallway, eager to escape before either Benedict or Lucciano could change their mind. I glanced back before turning a bend in the hall and saw him standing in the doorway, a spot of darkness watching me go.
Strange as he was, demonic as his aura may have been, there was no denying one simple truth . . .
He hadn’t given me the medication, but he’d made it seem like he had.
Maybe I’d been wasting my time asking God to save me this whole time here, locked in Hallow Hall, forgotten by the world.
I should have asked the devil instead.