Chapter 25 Katarina
KATARINA
Iwoke suddenly, or at least my consciousness did.
My thoughts were scattered like I’d just restarted my brain.
I didn’t how long I’d been out for, but my neck ached and my head throbbed.
The floor beneath me spun sickeningly as I blinked.
When I was able to focus on the room, two male voices were arguing.
Slowly, I straightened up and glanced around. Where am I? I felt like I’d just woken from a long sleep, but I wasn’t in bed. I didn’t know where I was.
Rise and shine! Finally you join me.
I jumped. The voice spoke quietly, but the sound carried from wherever she was sitting. I glanced around looking for the person who had spoken.
I was in an office, and there were shelves with medical texts along one wall, and a leather sofa.
In the corner was a privacy screen. I stared at that the longest. It was familiar, somehow.
Candles burned all around. Outside the window, the sky looked black and white.
There was no woman. Whoever had spoken must have left.
Confusion pressed down on me, making me feel small.
A man in a black priest’s robe stood before me, his face flushed. He stared over my shoulder at someone else.
“Katarina, how are you feeling?” a deep voice asked from behind me.
I swung around to see whoever had spoken. A man in a white lab coat. I peered between him and the man dressed like a priest, perplexed. What the hell had I been doing when I’d fallen asleep? Was I sick?
No. They are.
I spun around again. It was the woman’s voice. But no one stood there. Unease crept through me, and my palms began to sweat. My chest felt like I couldn’t draw a full breath.
“Katarina,” the priest urged me to answer.
“Okay.” What else could I say? Okay, but I think I might be hearing a voice inside my head? Okay, but I lost my mind somewhere and don’t know where to find it?
“That’s good,” the man in the white lab coat said, moving in front of me and shining a small light into my eyes like a doctor.
Ah, that made sense. He was a doctor.
“Do you remember why you’re here?” he asked.
I opened my mouth and froze. The answer was just there, not far from my lips, but it was held back somehow. I couldn’t quite reach it. I shook my head slowly.
The man in the priest’s robes smiled. A nameplate sat on the desk behind him.
Father Pavol. Pavol. I waited for some feeling of recognition at the name, but it didn’t come. Fear skittered through me. My head felt painfully empty.
“That’s fast-acting. Excellent. I need to send word to the director that we’ve at least achieved one thing with all this shit going on.”
“I don’t think the director will be very impressed in the end, seeing as you’ve somehow managed to let the cops in here on your watch,” the other man said sharply, a name embroidered on his lapel.
Dr. Blackwood.
Pavol sneered at him. “What do you know about everything I’ve been handling here? It’s not your place to worry about the director or the business. You’re just here to keep the patients alive until we want them otherwise.”
Get out of here. Now, the woman’s voice whispered in my ear, and this time I didn’t wait to see where it was coming from. I trusted her somehow.
Blackwood shook his head and reached into his pocket.
“You still think that, don’t you? You still don’t know who works for the director and who works for you.”
Pavol paled. “Lucciano works for the director, that’s why he was sent here.”
Blackwood pulled his hand from his pocket, something black and shiny in his grip. A gun. I froze at the sight. The doctor had moved around the far side of the room, his eyes locked on Father Pavol.
He shook his head and sighed.
“It was never Lucciano. He’s here for training. It was never the guy before him, either. It was always me. And the director is fucking sick of your flagrant mismanagement. I’m afraid he’s going to have to let you go.”
I watched through my dreamlike confusion as Blackwood raised the gun toward Pavol and, before the priest could step away, shot him in the chest.
The sound was suppressed by a silencer, but I still jumped.
Pavol reared back from the impact, careening into the table behind him and knocking over the multitude of candles.
His numerous bottles of spirits also fell, some smashing on the floor.
The fallen candles made contact with the spilled liquid, and with a loud whoosh Pavol went up in flames.
I jumped up, backing away as the burning man flailed around the room. The curtains went up next.
“Jesus, what an idiot, he can’t even die gracefully,” Blackwood muttered, and took my arm in a steellike grip.
He guided me from the room as thick smoke clogged the air.
The windows shattered behind us, oxygen feeding the blaze.
A scream rent the air, and it took a long moment to understand that it was coming from me.
Blackwood went for a fire extinguisher on the wall and tried to go back in, but he soon gave up. I edged away from him up the hall, watching him tuck the gun away somewhere under his coat.
“Fuck,” he swore, watching the growing blaze. He turned to me. “Get out of here, and wait outside for me.”
“Why?” I asked. Who was he to me? Why would I wait for him?
“Because I told you to. I’m your doctor, Katarina, I want what’s best for you. So do what I say.”
“You’re my doctor? You just killed someone,” I said, the words jumbled and thick in my mouth.
He nodded. “To save your life. That man wanted to hurt you. He’s hurt a lot of people. He’d have hurt more in the future. I did the world a favor.”
“You should have called the police. You can’t just kill someone,” I cried, hysteria making my voice thin and sharp. Smoke flowed out of the burning room, and I coughed.
Go on. Unless you want to burn to a crisp.
I started at the voice. There was a long line of mirrors on the wall, and I could see myself clearly in them. I was alone. There was no woman whispering in my ear. She sounded like me, but confident and all-knowing.
She was inside my head. The certainty hit me like a gut punch.
I was hearing a voice inside my head that made more sense than anything that was happening outside it.
Was I crazy?
“Kat. I know this is all scary, but you don't need to overthink anything. Just trust me.”
Blackwood put his hands on my shoulders, and I shuddered. His touch felt wrong.
“I’ve taken special care of you here, you just can’t remember that right now. I’ve cared for you on behalf of your mother, Elena, and your fiancé, Ivan.”
Fiancé? The name Ivan meant nothing to me, but Elena? That name clicked somewhere inside me, soothing my fear and pain for a moment. A comfort that could never be denied.
Elena. Mom.
“You know my mom?” I asked, gripping onto his white coat.
He nodded. “She wants me to bring you to her. We need to go.”
Go to my mom? She was the only thing in my head that I recognized. In the empty, echoing hallways of my mind, there was only her.
“Okay, take me to her,” I agreed. My thoughts were getting foggy again. I glanced at the room beside us where a huge fire raged. I shied back from it.
“There’s a fire!” I exclaimed softly. I had no idea how it had started, but it was spreading. It was dangerous.
Blackwood considered me carefully and nodded. “Yes, we need to get out of here. You go raise the alarm and wait for me outside. I’ll be there soon, and I’ll take you to your mother.”
I left Blackwood in the hallway, which was getting increasingly hot and smoky, and ran up the corridor toward the double doors at the end.
As soon as I pushed through, a fire alarm screamed overhead. Some of the doors along the hallway opened, and other people looked out, dressed in white sweats and looking just as confused as I was.
“Fire! There’s a fire!” I shouted to anyone who would listen.
People gathered in the huge foyer and then poured out the doors into the storm. As soon as I stepped out, the chill in the air stole my breath, and I couldn’t see anything except for the orange blaze of the building. Snow fell thick and fast. It was freezing.
Above me, windows blew out, and a whooshing sound filled the air.
“Fuck—the oxygen in the operating room!” someone yelled, and then a boom sounded and the ground seemed to shake.
I fell to my knees in the gathered snow and covered my head with my hands. People screamed and cried all around me. I was too close to the blaze. I could feel it raging at my back.
I sensed the whole place was going to go up.
Cold soaked through my sweats as I stumbled up and slogged through the thick snow, putting more distance between the fire and me, watching more and more people leave the building.
A man appeared, coughing and covering his face with his sleeve. He made his way toward me through the crowd wearing a white lab coat with the name Blackwood embroidered on the lapel. Did I know him?
“Stay here, I’m getting my car. We need to leave.”
“Where are we going?” I asked, but he’d already moved away.
I glanced back at the door, where a man was just leaving, and something sharp clenched in my heart. The snow seemed to stop falling for a heartbeat. Even the fire faded for a second.
He was tall and broad, brooding in a way that was magnetic.
Stubble wreathed the lower half of his face, and his dark eyes were piercing, even across the distance between us.
He was huge. Imposing. Scary. His dark priest’s robes smoked as he left the blaze.
With a background of fire and smoke curling off his shoulders, he mirrored a devil who’d come to claim souls for hell.
And he was staring right at me.
I stumbled back, falling against the freezing stone of the chapel wall behind me. My foot slipped on a metal bowl hidden under the snow, and I nearly fell.
The man walked toward me.
You know him, the voice of insanity said inside my mind.