Chapter Ten
Patient Seventeen
The nightmare morphed into something different several dozen more times.
One moment, I was strapped face down to my bed while orderlies took turns violating my backside, and the next I was in Saint Bart's morgue, being slowly dissected and forced to watch them toss me into the cremator, one piece at a time.
The painful thing wasn’t even the torture. That shit got old after a while. It was that she wasn’t there.
Pitch darkness folded around me as the nightmare took on a different shape. I shouted into the void, “Is that all you’ve got, you fucking cocksuckers? If you end up breaking me, it will be from sheer goddamn boredom, not your pathetic mind game—”
The taunt hadn’t fully left my tongue when the darkness melted. A new setting materialized, leaving me standing in a strange room.
This wasn’t Saint Bart’s.
Grateful Dead posters hung from the walls. The Rolling Stones were playing on the record stereo cabinet at the foot of the bed. My attention centered on the vinyl disk going round and round.
It tickled a distant memory in my brain…
Back when I was still human.
My father had gifted it to me after I’d graduated from Brown. Christ. It felt like a lifetime away.
I barely remembered the person I was before Saint Bart’s.
Standing in my old room was a bigger mind fuck than any other torture method they’d thrown my way. Especially when I realized I wasn’t alone.
Someone was in my bed.
A woman lay on her side with her back to me. White sheets draped her curvaceous body, the dramatic dip of her waist perfectly framed between her hips and her bare shoulders. A halo of yellow hair splayed on my pillow. I knew that hair. I knew those curves.
She was here.
A potent surge of excitement and hunger pounded through my system.
What were the chances she was completely naked under the sheets? My dick ached with an instant erection that strained my hospital-issued sweats.
“Tuesday?”
When she didn’t respond, I prowled closer.
My lips twitched into a smirk at the soft rhythm of her breathing.
Fast asleep, her cute little snore made the monster within me ravenous with hunger.
Was she dreaming? A nightmare within a nightmare?
Was that even possible? The logistics of this place got fucky; it was best not to dwell on it.
One could drive themselves mad trying to figure out the inner workings of this place.
I would know.
Edging myself toward the bed, I pulled my white t-shirt over my head and shoved my pants to the floor. My smile dropped when I caught my reflection in the large wall mirror—the one I’d installed so I could have a good look at any guests in my bed from all angles.
My eyes were stark with malice as I took in my appearance. Even in my dreams, I had the green veins spreading over my body like a disease. They bulged and pulsated with the Treatment. The tendrils stretched down my Adonis belt and wrapped around my cock, giving it a rippled texture.
It was a good thing Tuesday was asleep. I didn’t want her to see the veins marking me as a monster. I’d rather her feel it.
Peeling back the sheets, my teeth clenched as my previous question was answered. She was completely in the buff.
Christ.
This woman was perfectly shaped, as if she’d been chiseled from marble by an ancient master sculptor. Her skin’s flawless pallor was begging for me to cover it in my marks. It was easy to imagine her skin pink with my handprints and purple with my bites.
I savored the sight of her stunning shape for as long as I could bear it before slipping onto my side next to her, my cock resting between the valley of her ass cheeks.
This was the first time I could touch her since I’d been restrained in my other dreams.
It had been ages since I’d been this close to a woman, and fuck me, she almost felt real. Her body heat, her smell, the way her nipple stiffened with my light pinch.
It wasn’t in my nature to be gentle. Not anymore. Still. If I fucked her as hard as I wanted to, in all the depraved ways I daydreamed about, she’d wake up.
“Mal.”
Her sleepy mumble had me freezing. How did she know my name?
“You’re one of Rook’s demons, aren’t you? He planted you in my brain, didn’t he?”
My low growl in her ear had her squirming, but she didn’t seem to wake. I leaned over her to try and get a look at her face, only to find it half concealed by the pillow, half by her scattered tresses.
I was so damn turned on. If she were a demon, that would be a problem for later. There was a sexy woman in my bed. I couldn’t bring myself to find two shits to rub together about the other details.
I shoved my nose between her shoulder blades, reveling in the feel of her bare flesh against my lips. No mask. Nothing to keep me from biting her this time around. Unable to resist, I nibbled on her shoulder and ran my tongue over her nape.
She squirmed, still sound asleep. There must’ve been a part of her that registered what was happening. Her hips writhed, grinding her ass against my cock, subconsciously seeking more friction.
I could hurt her. I could fuck her, then break her open to see her pretty little insides painted with my cum.
My fingers bit tightly into her hip, and a deep, swollen moan crawled from her throat.
I couldn’t hold myself back anymore.
There was a reason they kept me tied up.
They’d made me into a monster, and when that part of me surfaced—looking for a victim—there was no holding it back.
“It’s not rape if we’re both dreaming, is it, Doc?” I snickered in a hushed growl against the back of her neck as I gripped my cock, holding it with all the resolve of a killer with a loaded gun.
The slit at the top was already leaking absurd amounts of pre-cum. It wasn’t just an embellishment of the sleep state. I couldn’t remember the last time I had an orgasm. Not when my restraints denied me basic human necessities.
Most of the time, I couldn’t even get up and take a piss on my own. Had to go in a bedpan, if they even bothered giving me one.
They usually didn’t. Why would they?
I was every bit the animal they’d made me into.
Denied the touch of a woman for how long, I wasn’t sure. My dick seemed to remember, though, with the way it wept for her, aching to fill her to her limit and more.
It didn’t matter that she wasn’t wet. I was slick enough to slip inside her pussy, stretching her walls to take my girth.
With a whimper, her walls fluttered around me, her soft insides hot and throbbing around my shaft.
Fucking hell. There weren’t words to describe how damn good she felt. A dream had no right feeling this visceral. Even the women I’d fucked back in my old life hadn’t been like this.
“I need you.” The words dropped from my lips, each syllable slurred and drunk with feral lust.
It only took a couple of pumps until she was soaking. The cocktail of our juices slicked over the juncture where we were joined, the slap of wet flesh on flesh ringing through my brain like my new favorite song.
“Oh—Mal… I’m–I’m going to come.”
She was awake.
I didn’t care anymore if she saw what I was.
“I’m c–close, too,” I growled as I chased my release with abandon. “Turn around and look at me. I want to see your face as you come around my cock.”
Her body convulsed, and her pussy twitched, clamping tight around my dick, as if she wasn’t ready to let me go.
Tuesday’s heated scream pushed me over the edge, and as I came undone, she finally twisted to look at me.
Everything shifted in an instant.
Next thing I knew, I was the one screaming.
It wasn’t Tuesday’s face that looked back at me. It was the face of my father, smacking me with that evil grin, all while Tuesday’s feminine cry dropped from his lips.
The Freudian horror of it all was only enhanced by his noseless face. That gaping hole mocked me—a nose. That’s all I’ve ever managed to take from him.
Meanwhile, he’d taken everything from me.
I woke with a jerk, my bed creaking and the leather restraints groaning, covered in cold sweat and shivering so violently, my mattress springs groaned a hellish hymn from below.
After a nightmare like that, I needed something to ground me. So I looked to my cell wall, expecting to see the portrait of Tuesday I’d painted.
It had been a mistake. It was futile attempting to keep anything close to the heart in Saint Bart’s. Even if it was something from your own brain. Shit, especially then. Rook would just figure out a way to crack your skull open and steal it.
Staring back at me from my wall was a portrait of my father, exactly over the place I’d painted Tuesday. It was like hers had never existed.
His noseless visage gloated at me from the wall, and as each brush stroke oozed, I realized the blood was still wet.
My veins glowed hot with loathing, strangling my vision with a poisonous haze.
My left eye began to twitch as screaming from somewhere in the isolation ward filled my skull.
It wasn’t until my cell door swung open and an orderly charged in with an electric cattle prod that I realized the screaming was my own.
Several other orderlies filed into the room—at least a half dozen.
When they circled my bed, my screams turned to wild laughter.
“Sorry, fellas, one at a time. If you want me to take all of you at once, it’s gonna be extra.
And let’s be honest, Rook doesn’t pay you that kind of dough—arrrk, bastards! ”
One of them jammed the cattle prod into my ribs so hard, lights danced behind my eyes.
“Keep your witty comments for Dr. Beckett. We’re to get you bathed and ready for the shrink.”
“I don’t want to—Wait. Who the fuck is Dr. Beckett?”