Chapter Twelve
Patient Seventeen
I couldn’t see shit through the burlap bag over my head. As if the leather half-mask covering my mouth wasn’t bad enough, how was I supposed to scare the shit out of this new doctor if I couldn’t even see her?
“O–on second thought, I don’t think I’m ready for today’s session. I’m not feeling well all of a sudden.”
The moment she spoke—hearing the waiver in her voice—maybe it would be easy crawling under her skin after all. She sounded timid. Shaken up. As if she’d seen a ghost.
I couldn’t place the exact emotion in her mutter, but something had thrown her off her game. Was it me? Doubtful. I hadn’t the slightest clue why Rook was allowing this new doctor to see me. It’s not like he cared about my treatment. This place wasn’t here to help people. It was just a prison.
Was this new doctor the latest accessory to my punishment? Either way, he would have warned her about me.
“I’m not sure what strings you had to pull to get Doctor Rook to loosen his grip on my dick and assign you as my new shrink, but if you send me back now, he might not think you’re qualified to treat me after all,” I drawled in my toughened baritone. “You don’t want him to change his mind, do you?”
I wasn’t sure if the manipulation would work, but I had to give it a stab. It had been ages since I’d been let out of the isolation ward, and from the light leaking through the burlap fabric over my head, I gathered this doctor’s office had a window.
The sunlight probably wasn’t real. It didn't matter. I ached to feel the warmth on my face.
“He’s a tricky son-of-a-bitch, Dr. Beckett. Maybe it would be best if Dr. Rook remained—”
“Quiet. I–I’m trying to fucking think.”
It sounded as though the doctor was having a panic attack. “Have the nurse send up the file for the patient in my chair. In the meantime, get her out of here. Leave Patient Seventeen where he is for now.”
The orderlies grunted in response and wheeled me to the middle of the room. Vague shapes and shadows shuffled in my shrouded vision. The door closed, leaving me alone with the single silhouette of a woman. She breathed heavily, as if trying to collect herself.
I tilted my covered head as much as the strap pinning my head allowed. “Are you scared, Dr. Beckett?”
It wasn’t the first thing I expected to say to Rook’s latest hire. They were never scared, or if they were, they hid it well.
This woman didn’t.
Her heart hammered so hard in her chest, I could practically feel it on the tip of my tongue as I flicked it out to taste the air we shared.
“I am,” she admitted after several seconds of tense silence.
“Of what?”
“Myself, I think. My head isn’t… I haven’t been well. I’ve been…” she trailed off, like she was debating telling me. “Seeing things.”
“You’re at Saint Bart’s, Doc.” I snickered. “What did you expect? A normal hospital?”
“Is this place haunted?”
Now it was my turn to pause, allowing the silence to stretch between us. Well, dig me up and fuck my corpse sideways.
She didn’t know.
Rook hadn’t told her yet.
Meaning she was fresh off the mortal plane. And she couldn’t have taken both doses of the Treatment yet, either. Why in this festering shithole was Rook assigning me a doctor that hadn’t completed her transformation yet?
“Something like that,” I growled. “Whatever you did to land yourself here, I hope you deserved it. For your sake.”
The dark outline of her figure took a step toward me, then another.
My tongue flicked out of its own volition to run over my lower lip, and my mouth salivated at the scent tickling my nose.
Christ. She smells good. Almost…familiar.
“You’ll keep your distance if you’re one of the smart ones. I’m chained up for a reason, Doc.”
She paused at my warning, guised as a taunt.
“Seems like an awful lot of trouble to go through to keep a single man held down.”
I shrugged as best I could in my straitjacket, making my chains jingle. “Yeah, well. I’m something of a Houdini, let’s say.”
“No man is that strong.”
This poor woman.
She had no idea where she was. What was Rook thinking, assigning me to her? What was his game?
“I’m not a man, Dr. Beckett. Haven’t been for a long time.”
“Then what are you, Mr… I’m sorry. Your last name wasn’t in your file.”
“Just call me Patient Seventeen. And has our session officially begun? Are you analyzing everything I say? Recording me so you can report back to your boss?”
“No. Everything said here stays between us. Now, Patient Seventeen. If you’re not a man, what are you?”
“I’m a monster,” I said simply.
“Just because you’ve done things in your past you regret, doesn’t make you any less human.”
At that, I hacked a manic laugh. “You’re so na?ve. Poor little lamb. Wandered into one of the darkest corners of existence, and you don’t even know it. You're in Hell, Dr. Beckett. And you're talking face to face with its most deranged demon.”
“You mean face to burlap?
I balked at her response. Despite the evidence that she was flustered, her voice didn’t betray it. She even cracked a joke. Couldn’t remember the last time someone had the balls to fire one back at me.
“Your file mentioned that you’ve been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Do you hallucinate often?”
She didn’t believe me. Of course, I didn’t blame her. I did sound crazy.
My lips curled with a slow, acidic smile beneath both my masks. “Don’t we all?”
By the way she recoiled, I’d hit a soft spot. I savored the accelerated thrum of her heart, and the delicious taste of her anxiety lacing the air.
Just when I thought she was reconsidering calling the orderlies back to take me away, she surged toward me and snatched the sack off my head.
An unholy growl crawled up my throat the moment I parsed her features.
Pert lips.
Golden hair that lit up with the sun pouring through the window behind her.
Her curvaceous body wrapped to perfection in a tantalizing skirt and sweater combo that had my cock swelling against my thigh.
Every sinew and muscle in my body twitched and bulged. My primal side strained against my restraints.
It was her.
Tuesday wasn’t just the woman I’d fallen for in my dreams. She was not only real, but she was my new physician.
It all made sense now.
My father was using Tuesday—Dr. Beckett—as a means of torture. And fuck me, for the first time in a long time, it was agony.
She looked like an angel. But I knew the truth. Rook was turning the woman of my dreams into my personal demon—a nightmare in the skin of a beautiful woman I ached to touch.
My father was getting smarter. And somehow crueler.
Didn’t think that was possible.
Finally, he knew traditional torture methods were no way to break the monster he’d created. He was switching methods by teasing me with a toy I couldn’t have. A woman who would never return my obsession, no matter how much she seemed to want me in my dreams.
I’d seen this whole plot coming a mile away, and I’d still fallen for it.
If she recognized me, she didn’t allow it to show on her face.
Her office was probably the nicest room in the entire asylum. It even had a window. I swallowed, the sun pouring over my face like the bitter memory it was.
There was a little potted plant on her desk. Scattered papers from what I assumed was my scrubbed patient file—Rook would never tell her the truth.
Her medical degree from UCSF was framed and mounted behind her desk. The entire room smelled of her.
Even if she was my enemy, this office was as close to heaven as you could get at Saint Bart’s.
Her eyes dropped, and her professional smile—which was fake as fuck—faltered for a beat before her gaze snapped back to mine.
My lips splayed as far as they could, and I knew she could see through the metal bars fixed into my leather mask positioned over my mouth. “Recognize me, Doc?”
Clearing her throat, she collected a pencil and medical pad from her desktop and took a seat on the small sofa opposing me. “No. Should I?”
I didn’t know if I believed her, but I’d play along for now.
“You’re fresh out of your residency by the look of your sweet baby face. If you’re really a doctor.”
Her lips puckered into a sexy little scowl. “Of course I’m a real doctor. Just because I’m young doesn’t mean I’m not qualified to help you.”
At that, I cackled. “Oh, you are nowhere near qualified to help me. And your age has the least to do with why.”
Tuesday’s jaw ticked. “Enlighten me.”
“I wouldn’t even know where to start.”
The air between us buzzed with heated intensity.
Her gaze dropped to watch my tongue flick over my lips.
There was no missing the flame of her cheeks. Finally, a reaction. My dick twitched with triumph.
“L–Let’s start at the beginning, Mal. Your file—”
Instant rage burned through me at the mention of my first name. “Next time you call me that, I’ll break out of these chains, rip off your head and fuck both your eye sockets, Dr. Beckett.”
I expected her to cringe.
To at least flinch.
She only sat there, pinning me with a glare I felt in my bones and my balls. “I thought you were a murdering cannibal. Not a murdering rapist. Which one is it, Mal?”
The fucking nerve of this bitch.
I was sucking up every bit of it.
“Do you have a death wish?” I purred, the tip of my tongue curling around one of the bars in my mask.
Sure, she was already dead, but she didn’t know that.
Tuesday remained unflappable, at least in appearance. Her heart had launched into breakneck speed.
She crossed her legs, and my cock flexed again at the glimpse of her plump thighs as her skirt rode up. Her knuckles tightened around her pen.
“We’re talking about you today, try to focus. That way I might be able to prescribe some medication that might—”
“Why would I talk to you? You’re one of them.”
Her attempt to remain polite and professional crumbled, and her scowl returned. Mmm, my doctor didn’t like being interrupted by a man. Too bad she was so sexy when she was angry. I would most definitely do it again.
“I understand that your circumstances might feel a bit dehumanizing—”
I scoffed, and she continued after a tense pause.
“But I get the feeling that you’re an intelligent man capable of respect when you’re lucid, so during our sessions you’ll act like the gentleman I know you can be. Is that fucking understood?”
“Gentleman? Have they told you nothing about what I am or what I’ve done?”
Her perfectly shaped brows knitted together.
“I know very little. Your patient file seems to be missing some important papers. I do know that you're well educated. You attended Brown University, though I don’t know your major. And I know why you’re here.
You killed someone, and then you ate their flesh. ”
Only some of that was true. “I killed someone, alright.”
“I also know you’ve been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.”
I wasn’t when I’d been admitted. The truth was, sometimes I didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t anymore.
Did she know they made me dream of her? I considered telling her. Tempting as it was to see the face she’d make when I told her about the things I did to her in my dreams, I opted to keep that ace stowed in my sleeve.
The best game plan for now was to crawl beneath her skin and slither into her brain. I’d make her crack. If she were here to be my personal demon, I’d become hers too.
I’d destroy her mentally. And as soon as I got my hands on her, I’d break the rest of her.
“Tell me about your childhood.”
My fists clenched around the armrests. It was about the only movement I could manage, but the audible cracking of my inked knuckles had her lashes fluttering. “Ask me something else, Doc.”
She glanced up from her legal pad. “What?”
“Ask me the question you really want the answer to, Dr. Beckett.”
“Tell me about your relationship with your father,” she said with a smile, which was just as much of a mask as the one plain on my face.
I was getting under her skin. Her beet-red cheeks were a dead giveaway.
“You don’t want to know about my father.” I flashed her an unhinged grin that had her blush deepening a shade. “You want to know what I’d do to you if I weren’t in this straitjacket.”