Chapter Three
Patient Seventeen
"Meal time, Seventeen."
The slot in my cell door opened, and a plastic tray with a foul-smelling bowl of slop slid through the metal flap. The ward attendant shoved the tray hard enough that the food splattered onto the floor. It didn't matter. The food was spiked—always was.
That was his game. Keep me too sedated to fight back when the demons come. Even in my dreams, there was no escape.
All the fucking years I’d been locked up like an animal in Saint Bart’s, monsters tormented my mind while I slept—and if I couldn’t sleep, sometimes I’d see them anyway.
I clung desperately to the fragments of what I remembered from my dream last night.
Tuesday.
None of Rook’s demons were like her. If she was one of his nightmares, she was different. Disarmingly beautiful, with a deep intellect behind her eyes, and a bridled ferocity I longed to claw from her with my bare fucking hands.
Or, she could have been a product of my own lonely subconscious…
But when was the last time I’d had a dream of my own?
Dreams weren’t to be trusted when you lived in Hell.
Not when everything about this place was engineered to make its inmates suffer.
My mysterious dream woman was probably just another by-product of the poison Rook called his miracle “Treatment.”
I didn’t care. I found myself wishing with every cell in my body that I’d dream of her again.
She’d felt so real—I had to touch her again.
I wanted to feel her warm body against my cold, corrupt soul.
A second window in the door—this one at eye level—opened, and glowing eyes appeared on the other side. “Too bad about your food, Seventeen. If you suck my dick, I’ll get you a new bowl.”
There was snickering on the other side of the door, and another voice said, “You're better off sticking your meat into a different cell; that one bites.”
“Nothing wrong with a little teeth,” the first orderly muttered, a smile in his voice.
An evil grin curled my lips. This demon had to be new.
Everyone, even the patients, knew my name… Or at least, they knew my inmate number. I was a legend in this asylum, the boogeyman of Saint Bartholomew’s.
He’d learn the hard way that I wasn’t in a straitjacket to protect me from myself. It was to protect them from me.
The second orderly, the one who’d been assigned to this ward long enough to know better, tried to warn the newbie again.
“If you want your willy warmed, you’ll want to try the ward upstairs.
They only keep the dangerous ones down here.
Patient 745 is on a sleeping medication.
She’s always passed out. Won’t wake up no matter how hard you fuck her tight little cunt. ”
“I’m not in the mood for pussy right now. I want this one.”
My jaw tightened, and my skull throbbed with red-hot hatred.
“You got a deal. I’ll suck you off if it means getting breakfast.”
There were several clanking noises as heavy bolt after heavy bolt was unlocked, and a beat later, my cell door swung open.
I stood up from my bed and bowed as best as I could in my straitjacket. “Welcome to my humble abode.”
There was nothing in my cell but a grubby toilet, a threadbare mattress and a bedframe with attached leather restraints that denied me even the simple pleasure of jerking off.
Just the rats, the distant screams of the other inmates, and the scraps of the occasional orderly stupid enough to enter my cell to keep me company.
The man was huge, all muscle. “Get on your knees, Seventeen.”
Even though my loathing for the asylum “staff” had my blood boiling, I kept my cool for the several seconds it took for the orderly to shut my cell door behind him and approach me with his scrubs slung low on his hips, his cock already clenched in his fist.
A vein throbbed in my temple.
“You’re a ravenous little fuck, aren’t you?” the orderly grunted as he gave his member a stroke.
I licked my lips. You have no idea.
My mouth opened wide, and the orderly didn’t hesitate to insert himself.
I bit him. Hard enough to sever the tip. Warm, delicious blood gushed onto my tongue, and I moaned as it soaked into my taste buds and dribbled down my throat.
The guard stumbled back, horror and shock dovetailing on his face. He clutched his bleeding groin, howling in agony as blood gushed between his fingers.
Manic laughter rattled through the ward, bouncing off the tiled walls. Took me a beat to realize it was coming from me.
“Y–Y–You—” He couldn’t push out the rest of his sentence, pure disbelief paralyzing him.
Getting to my feet, his blood oozed down my chin and stained the front of my straitjacket.
I spit the bloody mass of meat in my mouth onto the floor and—like the mad man I was—my cock stiffened at the terror banked in the demon’s eyes.
“You’re new around here…” I growled, my bloody grin stretching wider, “so I’m going to bring you up to speed. I’m not locked in here with you. You’re locked in here with me.”
Using the fresh blood in my system as strength, I tore out of the straitjacket with a roar.
Three other demons came running, and a beat later, my cell door slammed open. I staggered back, laughing at the three men who charged into my cell. "This all you got? Three guys? Is the devil running out of demons?"
“You didn’t say he was one of us!” The dickless orderly screeched. “He has fangs!”
One of them? Ha. Sure, Rook had given me the same experimental “medication” he’d given his staff. But I was nothing like them.
I threw a right hook at the one in front of me, and my knuckles landed on his nose with a sickening crunch.
My sculpted arm painted the man's face with blood, and his nose gushed red.
I couldn't tell whose blood was whose. That had my smile growing wider, even as the demons threw themselves at me, each one grabbing an arm.
The cockless orderly crumpled to his knees with his hands clutched tight to the gaping hole between his legs. As if that would stop the bleeding. “I–I’ll kill y–you for this.”
I licked the last drops of his blood from my lips with a snicker. “Promise?”
I’d welcome death with a spread asshole if it meant my freedom. This new staff member was too new to know there was no escape from Saint Bart’s.
They strapped me to the bed and secured a leather mask over my mouth. The orderly in the front had a syringe, the kind with a brutally thick needle. I kept on laughing like the psychopath I was and didn’t stop, even as the demon slammed the needle into my arm, making it as painful as possible.
“Stop laughing, you psycho fuck!”
“We need to up his dosage.”
It wasn’t until I felt a second needle in my other arm, siphoning a second dosage of the sedative into my veins, that I stopped laughing.
“Congratulations. You just bought yourself another week in the muzzle, and the straitjacket too.”
Worth it.
I gritted my teeth, refusing to show any sign of weakness. Wouldn’t give these fuckers the satisfaction.
The drug acted fast. My vision blurred, my brain felt like sludge, and the monsters the drug brought on danced at the edge of my vision, waiting for their moment to descend.
I always fought against the drug, against sleep. I didn’t want to see the monsters in my head.
Until now.
Until her.
Against all odds, I found myself praying to whatever would listen that I would see her again.