Chapter Three – Tristan
Wolf said he was going to take on another patient. During their appointment times, I wasn’t allowed on the first floor of the house or outside on the grounds. My first instinct was to, of course, push the boundaries and see what he’d do if I did indeed make myself known on the first floor, but that thought quickly disappeared.
That’s the old me. The old me died in Cypress when my sister looked me in the eyes and shot me three times.
The old me tried so hard to do what he thought was right, to do what he thought his sister needed… and it all blew up in his face. The old Tristan Arrowwood died the day everything he fought for crumbled around him.
I should be thankful I’m not locked up anymore, but that’s not exactly true, either. This thing around my neck, with its electrifying failsafe should I try to leave the property, is another prison. It’s simply a larger one.
Wolf is my caretaker now. He is my owner, my master, my doctor; you name it. He says he wants to help me, but I don’t think he does. I don’t believe he actually cares about anything. I get a particular psychotic vibe from him—trust me, I’d know a fellow psychopath when I see one.
I still remember the first time I met him, when I first woke up in this house and it slowly dawned on me that I’d never leave it.
I come to with a pounding headache, groaning as I try to reach for my head—but I can’t reach for it. My wrists are tied down, as are my legs. I’m fastened to a chair that I can’t escape from, a pathetic thing for an ex-assassin to admit.
An unfamiliar voice speaks, causing me to stop struggling and stare at the man sitting across from me with a notepad on his lap, “Hello, Tristan Arrowwood. Or do you prefer the Cobra?” He wears a dark gray suit that’s perfectly fitted to his figure, and he sits there so normally, like he’s used to having people tied up in front of him.
I’m so caught off-guard by the stranger and his question I don’t respond right away. All I do is glare at him and wonder why I’m not in my prison cell with Nix as my guardian.
Who the fuck is this guy? And how does he know me?
When I don’t say a single word, the man goes on, “You can call me Dr. Wolf. You might know my cousin, Atticus Jameson. I believe you recently stabbed him in the gut and tried to kill him?” The look I give the man must say it all, because he continues in the most normal-sounding tone I’ve ever heard, “Believe me, whether you want to talk about your past or not, I know all about you and what you did.”
I grind my teeth. “Then why don’t you let me go? What kind of doctor are you if you keep me tied up like this?” I’m a bit skinner than I used to be; being kept in a jail cell didn’t do me any favors, neither did getting shot—but I could still take this asshole down.
“Dangerous patients are often restrained, but I suppose there is no harm in untying you now.” Wolf pauses as a dangerous glint surfaces in his green eyes as he fixes his glasses. “You will find I’m perfectly equipped to handle you, regardless of whether you choose to go by Tristan or the Cobra.”
We’ll see about that.
Wolf sets his notepad aside and stands. He approaches the chair I’m tied to and walks behind me. I hear him kneeling down and loosening the rope keeping me in place. My feet are loosened first, then my wrists, and soon enough the rope falls to the floor and I am free.
And that will be this asshole’s last mistake.
As Wolf returns to his seat, I leap up and grab him from behind, wrapping an arm around his neck and pulling him back against me tightly to choke him. Such an action would cause any normal man to struggle and freak out, but as it turns out, Wolf isn’t normal. Looks like my psychopath radar was right.
He grabs the arm around his neck with one hand, and his other arm becomes a weapon when his elbow jerks back and gets me in the side. In the same movement, he bends over and uses the momentum to flip me up and over him, thereby freeing himself from my vice grip and landing me on the floor.
Before I can get up, he sticks a hand into his pocket and pulls out a small remote. A millisecond later he must press the button on it, because an electrical shock so strong it knocks the breath out of me causes me to tremble on the floor. Coming from my neck; it’s the same leash Nix had on me.
Damn it. I should’ve known.
Wolf makes it last long enough to make my thoughts get fuzzy and the skin beneath the collar around my neck to get warm from the contact—long enough to make a point, to remind me that I am still a prisoner. Just because I’m not trapped in that tiny glass cell doesn’t mean I’m free.
And if it’s the same collar, there’s no way I can get it off. It requires a tiny key, and if it senses any sort of fuckery, it’ll zap me on its own. I learned that the hard way.
“I told you, Tristan,” Wolf chooses to use my given name, not the Cobra, once he ends my torment and stuffs the remote into his suit’s pocket, “I am perfectly equipped to handle someone like you. Now, get up. Let’s chat.”
The gravity of the situation didn’t really hit me until later that day, as night started to all. I learned I was in the middle of nowhere, far removed from Cypress—of which I could never return to. Never go back, lest those murderous tendencies surface inside me again. Never see my sister again.
That last one is the one that still stings the most, but it’s also the one that’s probably for the best. The disappointment in her eyes, the hatred… it cut me like a knife to the heart, causing pain worse than the three bullets she shot me with.
Shay found happiness with the men I would’ve killed, but she was never supposed to be with them. She was supposed to be with me. We were meant to rule Cypress together.
Or so I used to think.
But throughout my mostly silent, solitary days, if there is one thing I came to reckon with, it’s the fact that everything I felt was wrong. I was wrong. I was wrong and I should be dead because of it.
Death is too good for me. If anyone deserves to live with the weight of what they’ve done, it’s me.
Assassin skills die hard, so to speak, so although the girl didn’t make much noise at all as she walked down the hall, I still heard her approach. Heard her stop at my door. I didn’t plan on looking at her; I was too busy staring at my sister’s name etched into the skin on my arm, along with all of the other scars I’d given to myself over the years, but after a little while, I couldn’t help it.
She wasn’t leaving. She kept staring, intruding where she didn’t belong.
So I turned my head over my shoulder and met her curious stare.
I don’t know what I expected. Wolf has a thing for the most broken, a preference for the people who might never know a normal day ever again. What I saw… she looked like a normal girl. Around my sister’s age, maybe, though a stark difference when it comes to stature.
A pair of inquisitive gray eyes stare at me from under long, semi-wavy blond hair—some of which hangs over her eyes in haphazardly-cut bangs. She wears an oversized hoodie far too big for her body size, and loose jeans her legs drown in.
I don’t know how long we stare at each other, how long it is before Wolf appears and closes the door between us, shutting me away in my room. I hear him ask her if she has a habit of wandering where she doesn’t belong, though his stern voice is muffled.
I’m slow in turning away from the door. Instead of staring at my scarred arm, my gaze falls to the bed between my spread knees. Wolf didn’t tell me much about her, other than when their appointments are and how I’m not allowed to be on the first floor while she’s here.
She seemed normal enough. She didn’t look like she’s as broken as I am.
Just one look at me and anyone can tell something’s wrong with me. Even if I pull my sleeves down over the scars on my arms, even if I hide my sister’s name on my skin, I can’t hide all of the scars. My hands. My face. My neck. There’s scarcely a part of my body that’s scar-free.
I spent five years believing Shay was gone, that I’d never see her again. Spent those five years believing I failed her, and so I saw fit to torture myself. To hurt myself, to cut myself over and over again until pain was all I could feel. For so long, that pain was my only company.
That, and my mask. The man I pretended to be. The Cobra.
But there must be more to the girl than meets the eye, otherwise Wolf wouldn’t have taken her in as a patient. He must be a real doctor of sorts, a real therapist with an actual degree; I do have some doubts. His methods are… questionable, but he only works with questionable patients like myself, so I guess it fits.
As their voices become quieter and quieter, as they walk away from my room, I start to wonder just what’s so fucked up with the girl—what’s her deal if she’s here, a new patient of Wolf’s? Not a single part of me should care or even be curious, but she’s the first person I’ve seen other than Wolf since I got here. Until her, I was his only patient, someone who needs constant supervision.
I haven’t cut myself, though, nor have I tried to run away. I’ve been good, as good as someone like me can be. I think because I know this is it. This is the end. My slow march, the final curtain call. This is my torture before death takes me in its cold embrace and I surrender to oblivion.
As the minutes tick by, I eventually tug my sleeve down and cover my sister’s name. Instead of staring down at it and wondering what went wrong, instead of marveling at how spectacularly everything blew up in my face, I think about the girl and what could be wrong with her.
My world has been so small lately, her mere addition to it makes it feel that much larger. After a while, I get up and exit my room. I walk down the hall and sit at the top of the stairs. Slumped a bit, from where I am at the top of the steps you can see most of the hall. I’ll be able to see when she leaves.
Wolf is with her in the office, the space where he pretends to be a normal man, a therapist who knows what he’s talking about. I imagine the girl, whoever she is, thinks nothing is wrong with Wolf. That he’s nothing more than a normal man.
She couldn’t be more wrong. It takes a certain brand of psychopath to control another.
I wonder what they’re talking about in that room. Not all scars are physical; whatever’s wrong with her, it must be underneath the surface. I’d know something about that. I’m the reason my body is littered with so many scars. If it weren’t for me bringing my pain to the surface, the only scars on my body would be from the bullet holes.
Time passes, and soon enough the appointment is over. I get to my feet at the top of the stairs when I hear the office door open, and I move through the second floor of the house, quiet as a snake. I go to one of the windows in the front of the house, and I make it just in time to see the girl leave.
A car waits for her. I can’t see who’s inside, whether it’s family or a significant other. She reaches it, sets her hand on the handle, and she’s about to open the door when the wind jostles her yellow hair around. She pauses. And then, for some inexplicable reason, she glances back at the house.
It’s like she can feel me. Her wandering gaze takes only two seconds to meet mine when she looks back, angling her head up to look at me in one of the second-story windows.
I’m so used to the shadows, so used to wearing that mask, that my first instinct is to shrink away, to step to the side and hide. But I don’t. For some reason, I stay right where I am.
The breeze blows outside again, and just like that, whatever magical force connected us breaks that link. The girl turns away as she opens the car door, ducking to get inside. I watch as she drives off, leaving the property until her next appointment with Wolf.
Wolf must know me too well by now—or he’s got some freaky spider-sense—because it’s not too long after the car disappears that he finds me near the window. I don’t turn and look at him; I can see his reflection on the glass, and with the way he’s staring at the back of my head, I can tell he’s not happy.
“You’re testing the limits of your boundaries,” Wolf remarks icily, as if sensing I’m about to remind him I did as I was told: I didn’t go downstairs. “Nothing I didn’t expect.” He moves to stand on the other side of the window, gazing out of it even though there isn’t much to see. “I did not think she would wander and find you. I suppose it was silly of me to believe I could keep you two apart.”
“What’s wrong with her?” I ask, my voice low.
The way Wolf sighs makes it sound like he’s addressing a child who should know better instead of me, a twenty-six-year-old adult. “You know I can’t tell you that.”
I recall the almost sun-kissed nature of her skin, the natural highlights in her blond hair, and I deduce the only thing I can from our mini staring contests: “She’s not from around here.” Not spoken of as a question; I know she’s not. She’s used to somewhere with much more sun.
Wolf sticks his hands into his pockets. “No, she’s not. She moved here with her father this past week. She’s here to stay.” His voice takes on a hard edge. “That means she will coming here more and more. I should not have to tell you this, but I will tell it to you anyway: she is off-limits. I don’t want her to talk to you, let alone see you. It wouldn’t be good for either of you, given what you’ve both gone through.”
I swallow hard, biting back my natural cold response. I hate having someone tell me what to do, and yet at the same time, I know he’s right. Still… Wolf really should’ve known.
When I don’t say a word, Wolf goes on, “Is that understood, Tristan?” A hard edge to the question; if I don’t give him an answer he believes, it won’t end well for me. The collar around my neck feels tight, all of a sudden.
I meet his green eyes and hold his stare for a few seconds before I say, “Yes.”
Wolf is mistrustful—or he can see through my bullshit because we’re the same flavor of psychopath. Either way, he must decide it’s not worth the effort, because he says not a word more and leaves me at the window, alone.
I watch him go, much like I watched the girl go.
Yes, Wolf should’ve known better. Telling me the girl’s off-limits… that only makes me more curious. What is it about this girl that brought her to Wolf’s door?