Chapter 20
MASSIMO
The director had barely left, taking his heavily armed escorts and incriminating evidence with him, when Sister Vera hurried over to me. I’d been looking for Katarina, wandering from the cafeteria to the art room to the office.
She hadn’t appeared.
“Father Lucciano!” Sister Vera rushed toward me, her pinched face revealing her panic. “Father Benedict requires you, immediately. He’s in the infirmary wing. Operating room two.”
What the fuck?
I nodded to Sister Vera and took off toward the infirmary wing.
What would Benedict possibly be in an operating room for?
If he was going to ask me to step in for Father Vargas to help him steal some poor girl’s baby, or her fucking organs, he was about to be sorely disappointed.
If I delivered a cool box of organs to anyone, they would be his.
I reached the operating room and pushed inside, coming to a stop immediately.
It took a moment for my brain to process what I was seeing.
Katarina, lying on the operating table, strapped down. Her head turned toward me as soon as I walked in, her eyes wide. She was terrified.
Father Benedict stood by the window on the other side of the room, a fucking mask and gown on like he was a surgeon prepped and ready to perform an operation.
He swung toward me when I came in, and I knew there was something wrong. His skin was mottled, and his eyes portrayed madness. Hmm, it seemed a combination of the recent stress and high doses of what they’d been giving Katarina had fucked him up.
What a shame.
Silence fell as all three of us looked at one another. It was absurd, really. I almost felt like laughing.
“You asked for me?” I raised an eyebrow in Benedict’s direction.
“Yes, I did. Aren’t you supposed to be helping around here? Are you reporting back all the goings-on to Sergei? Or are you here for someone else? Tell me the truth!”
I narrowed my eyes at Benedict. The man had lost the plot.
“Exactly what are you implying, Father?”
Benedict licked his bottom lip, then quickly killed the macabre humor coiling in my chest at the surreal tableau he’d made of the operating room.
He put his hand into his pocket and brought out a gun.
“I’m saying that if you are who you pretend to be, you should be helping with the other business of Hallow Hall, starting now.” He gestured me forward with the gun. “Take that syringe off the tray and fill it to fifty ccs from the bottle.”
“What is it?” I asked, delaying complying.
“It’s a little something I’ve been working on for years.
Sergei’s tired of waiting for it.” Benedict glared at Katarina.
“She can test it. She might as well be good for something around here. Do it now.” Benedict cocked the gun at me.
It was an older-model revolver with a hammer to draw back.
The sound was sobering. He was serious, apparently.
I stepped up to the tray that was set up close to Katarina’s side. Her eyes were wild, and now they fixed on mine. A gag filled her mouth so she couldn’t speak. Her eyes were wet with tears.
Benedict just moved up his order on my killing schedule.
“And . . . what are we looking for in terms of effects? I know the director is eager to see progress,” I bluffed.
Benedict nodded. “Increased memory loss, confusion, painkilling function, and addiction forming. Better control over patients, the ability to perform surgery when and if required with less medical intervention needed afterward. Aftercare is expensive,” he said, his gaze falling to the tray.
On it was a perfectly arranged mix of surgical implements. I cataloged the instruments while slowly filling the syringe.
“Of course, the biggest benefit is the curbing of the lustful, sinful behavior of the patients here and all girls who reach maturity. It will be powerful. A means to control the temptation of Eve, finally, so Adam may continue down a more righteous path.”
Benedict was rambling now, spit flecking his lips, and he seemed to have developed a tic of some kind. His eye twitched madly.
“Inject her, and we will see if it works. She might be special, but if this works like I think it will, the director will never know we tested it on her. He’ll simply be impressed.”
I nodded and played along, flicking the air out of the syringe and then stepping closer to Katarina’s side.
I brought the syringe as close to her arm as I could and slowly injected a long stream of the liquid onto the floor.
From Benedict’s angle, he couldn’t really tell.
He seemed to be having trouble concentrating on anything.
Taking advantage of his distraction, I finished pretending to administer the drug and put the syringe on the tray.
“And now?”
He grunted, eyes darting about. He eyed me distrustfully.
“You—you say all the right things, and you seem to do them, but is it all an act? Everything bad started happening when you came here.”
He raised the gun toward me again. Damn it. Benedict was going to have to go sooner than I’d planned.
A chuckle left me before I could help it. “I’m sure your patients would disagree. I think bad things have been happening here for a long time. Too long.”
He frowned at me, the gun shaking in his hand.
“See, you speak with a forked tongue,” he said. “If you want to prove you’re an ally, take the scalpel there and remove an organ from Katarina, a nonessential one. Nothing too noticeable. A kidney will do.”
A scoff left me, and I braced my hands on the metal bed where Katarina thrashed around.
“Jesus Christ, Father. That is dark, and coming from me, that’s really saying something.
I’d be impressed if your idea were more creative, but as it is, it fucking stinks.
I have a proposition for you and this hellhole you live in.
Go and round up all the rapists, and human traffickers, and fucking terrible parents who abuse their children, and take those organs.
I’ll harvest with you all day. But Katarina is off-limits, as are all the other poor, innocent girls you’ve imprisoned up here. ”
“Innocent! A fifteen-year-old pregnant girl isn’t innocent. She has sinned! And she will pay for it! Cut into that bitch on the table now, or I’ll shoot you dead,” Benedict warned.
I dropped my hand to the scalpels and ran my fingers over them, selecting the most wicked-looking one.
“Okay, Father, okay. I understand.” I glanced down to stare into Katarina’s anguished eyes. “I know what I have to do.”
I placed the scalpel at Katarina’s middle, her body tensing and trying to twist away, her moans escaping around her gag and filling the room.
Benedict followed my movements, chewing his inner cheek in anticipation.
Before the blade could touch her skin, I flipped it in my hand, tossing it and catching it with ease, and then sent it flying.
It hit Benedict in the neck before he could realize what had happened.
He turned this way and that, confused, the gun drooping in his grip.
Blood dripped from his neck. The carotid artery, severed.
He dropped the gun completely to pull at the blade and collapsed to his knees.
A snaking trail of blood leaked out onto the floor.
I made my way over to him. I grabbed a few paper towels as I passed the dispenser and let them fall to the floor.
Cleaning up blood was much easier if you acted quickly.
He squirmed, still trying to get a grip on the scalpel.
“Here, let me,” I murmured, and drew it free.
More blood poured out, landing on the paper towels.
I tutted at the blood spots soaking into the material on my arm.
“What a mess. What a disgusting bag of blood and bones you were, you dirty old sinner. But you’ve managed to make it quick, which you don’t deserve. ”
His eyes grew unfocused.
I leaned in and whispered in his ear, “Enjoy the fires, Father. They burn for men like you and me.”
Benedict slumped down, eyes glassy, the last air he’d ever breathe leaving his lungs.
Fuck. I glanced around the room. What a mess. This was the opposite of how I did things in my work. I was methodical and precise, and I never left a mess.
This was going to take a while to clean up, not to mention that I hadn’t planned on killing Benedict already. I wiped my red-speckled hands on my cassock, getting them as clean as possible.
With a sigh, I stood and crossed to Katarina. She had her head turned as much as she could, but not far enough to see Benedict’s lifeless body on the floor below. I untied her gag, careful to wipe my hands on my cassock first, and then unbound her wrists.
I slowly helped her into a sitting position.
She shook. Her skin was too pale, her breath too rapid.
“Breathe, Katarina. Breathe. You’re safe. I have you now,” I told her quickly, gripping her shoulders to keep her upright.
She stared at the bloody floor, eyes full of horror.
“Look at me, micetta. Look at me,” I commanded when it seemed like she was never going to blink again.
She raised her eyes to mine, blinked once, then again, and promptly fainted.
I caught her before she could fall more than a few inches and cradled her against my chest. It had been an eventful few days for my little stray. Not only Vargas’s death, solitary, and then our session, but now seeing a man killed brutally in front of her. When had she last eaten?
I scooped her into my arms and walked toward the door, maneuvering around the blood as much as I could. Luckily, the black cassock hid blood effectively. My hands were cleaned, and Katarina had escaped the splash zone. I needed to get her out of here, and then I needed to start cleaning up.
It was time to get to work.
Hours later, I stripped off the bloodstained robes I’d only made worse when cleaning up the scene and dropped them on the floor of the shower as I stepped in. I had the water turned up as hot as it would go, but it still didn’t feel hot enough.
Benedict’s blood felt soaked into my skin, permeating every pore. I scrubbed hard with the rough soap bar until my skin was red.
I didn’t kill like this. I killed with gloves and tools, and I never got some motherfucker’s blood on me. Sure, people could take you by surprise sometimes, but it didn’t happen often, and if it did, that’s when the backup plan came into play.
Today, though, I hadn’t killed for work. It hadn’t been professional.
It had been personal.
He’d tried to touch Katarina. Hurt her. Drug her and cut her.
Katarina was mine. Mine.
The dark possession that raced through my veins at the very thought of her being hurt, or pushed around, or upset, made me certain I’d kill a hundred Benedicts to protect her.
It had been a very long time since I’d had someone whom I’d cared about so deeply.
It had been a very long time since I’d had anything to lose, and I didn’t fucking like it. I felt vulnerable and exposed. I felt threatened by Katarina’s simple presence in the world. It was like she was becoming a part of me, but a part that was independent from my body and thus harder to protect.
I showered until the water was freezing and then scrubbed my cassock until black dye leaked down the drain.
Stepping out, I squeezed the water out of the fabric as hard as I could, then took it back to my room to hang dry.
Luckily, I had a spare. I was also lucky that only Blackwood remained in the medical wing of Hallow Hall since Vargas’s so-called suicide, and no one had interrupted my cleanup.
I’d never been lucky before, but since coming here, I was beginning to think I might be the luckiest bastard alive. I’d met Katarina, after all.
The operating room and my robes would never hold up to a black light. Though if the priests were slicing and dicing and stealing organs in these operating rooms, I imagined that a black light would find a lot more than just Benedict’s blood.
Inside my room, my gaze immediately found her. She hadn’t moved much, except to snuggle deeper into the scratchy blanket on my bed. Fortunately for me, Alonso was still shit scared enough of me to lie about someone missing from their room if I told him to.
My own personal angel, sound asleep.
My heart finally unclenched as I locked us in, hung up my wet robes, and crossed to the bed. She was still pale, painfully so, but her breath was deep and even.
Her hair spread over the pillow like satin ribbons. Softer and more luxurious than any manmade texture would ever achieve.
I stroked her cheek, enjoying the smooth, plush feel of her skin.
She looked perfect here, innocent and trusting, sleeping in my bed.
Exactly where she belonged.
I pulled the blankets back and slid in beside her. My chilled skin burned against hers. She shivered for a moment, her warmth meeting my ice. She attempted to turn away from me, even in her sleep rejecting the sudden cool in her cozy bed, but I brought her close, caging her against my chest.
She couldn’t escape me. Not now, not ever. I buried my face in the back of her hair, pressed my hard body to her softness, and slept.