Chapter Fifteen
Tuesday
My session with Patient Seventeen had left me shaken and weak-kneed.
What started as a psych evaluation had turned into a heated battle of mind games. I was less sure than ever that my dreams of him—because I couldn’t keep lying to myself, they were of him—were simply a coincidence.
Or maybe I was really losing it.
It was the only explanation for all the crazy shit happening around me. That, and this place was changing me. The person I was before wouldn’t have submitted to a dangerous patient like that.
He’d looked inside me, past my core, straight to my soul. Leaving me feeling more exposed than I thought possible.
What had I come out of that hour knowing? That Patient Seventeen was more than just Saint Bartholomew’s most dangerous inmate. He held its secrets, as though he were the heart of this horrible place, and he’d tell me everything I wanted to know, so long as I bent to his will and played his games.
I peered down at my notes. I’d been so distracted I’d only managed to write a single line.
Barbara Reed. Dr. Rook’s office.
It didn’t make sense. I’d seen his office, but Seventeen had specifically instructed me to ask her to show me her old doctor’s office. Meaning it was somewhere else entirely.
I stared at the cactus on my desk, trying to detangle my whirlwind of thoughts. Meeting the patient in the black file had done nothing to silence that voice in my head that told me he and the man in my dreams were one and the same.
“I’ll see you in your nightmares, Doc.”
I shuddered at Seventeen’s baritone, playing in my head over and over.
How could I know a man’s face before ever meeting him? There was no explanation, nothing from my expensive education that could provide a scientific reason for this insanity.
All that was left to do was follow the lead he’d given me.
I stood and smoothed down my rumpled skirt—couldn’t give anyone a reason to suspect what I’d done with my patient—and left my office for the nurses’ station.
A small group of them stood in a cluster, like mindless zombies. They didn’t speak, didn’t so much as react to my approach until I shouted, “Someone fetch me the file of Barbara Reed, now.”
They looked up, then looked at each other. One of them finally spoke in a rasp, as if she hadn’t spoken in months and struggled to find her voice. “Those files are in Dr. Rook’s office. Only Nurse Beatrice and Dr. Rook have access.”
“Then get me Nurse Beatrice.”
They looked at each other, swapping unsure glances.
“Now!” I shouted, making them jump.
The one that appeared to be the most senior among them shuffled down the hall, beckoning for me to follow her. She stopped and pointed toward a door at the end of the corridor, refusing to go any further. “The head nurse's office is down there.”
I approached the door, finding it cracked, and peered inside.
There, bent over her desk at the center of the room, was the head nurse with the starched skirt of her uniform pulled up to her waist and white cotton panties tangled around her ankles.
Dr. Rook stood behind her with his trousers shoved down his hips, pumping into his head nurse with hard thrusts that had Beatrice whimpering every time he shoved inside her.
One hand was tangled in her hair, the other smacked her pale ass cheek, leaving an angry imprint of his hand among the dark veins covering her flesh.
Beatrice wasn’t the only one with the green veins. Dr. Rook had them, too. They covered his hipbones and wrapped around his upper thighs.
They all had them.
Nurse Beatrice, by all appearances, didn’t seem the sort to enjoy a plowing like this by her boss.
It left me wondering if this was by choice—it certainly wouldn’t be the first time a doctor had made a female staff member do something against their will.
He did seem the type to exercise his power over his nursing staff.
Just as I was about to burst in and come to her rescue, she said, “Yes, oh yes, Doctor. Fuck me. Fuck me like the damned soul I am.”
“Yes. You deserve this punishment. Don’t you? That’s what you get for murdering your own sister. You’re lucky you’re such an evil cunt, otherwise I’d have thrown you in with the rest of the patients. Just another number. To be tortured for all eternity like the rest.”
“My tight pussy also pleases the doctor, doesn’t it?” she said with a glance over her shoulder and a smile on her lips that sent a chill down my spine.
“Oh yes, that too.” Dr. Rook came with a roar. I stumbled back from the door with my heartbeat in my throat.
I didn’t know what to make of what I’d just witnessed. There was no time to unpack it.
Instead, I forced my attention to the task that had brought me here. Dr. Rook’s office was unattended.
I’d get Barbara Reed’s file myself.
When I found my way back to Rook’s office, I hurried over to the filing cabinets and opened each drawer in a hurry.
Before searching the R’s, I went to the H’s and cursed at myself when I found no file for Lauren Hawkins.
What had I been expecting? Whoever that girl was in my chair, it couldn’t have been my dead patient.
“Yes!” I muttered in victory as I found Barbara’s file. I opened it, and immediately went cold.
She’d been admitted on her eighteenth birthday… In 1969. She’d been admitted for killing her stepdad, cutting off his penis and later serving it to her mother for dinner.
I nearly jumped out of my skin when a heavy hand fell on my shoulder. Whipping around, I found myself face-to-face with the noseless Dr. Rook.
He was clearly angry. “What are you doing here?”
“I–I— Getting a file on a patient.”
He peered behind me, where I’d instinctively hid the file, getting much too close to me for comfort. So close that his torso pressed against mine, and the tang of his post-coital sweat stung my nose.
“Give me the file, Dr. Beckett. Or you will be punished.”