Chapter Twenty-Four
Tuesday
I’d retreated to my room early and locked myself inside the darkened space. With a flashlight as my light source—a reading light was pretty much its only use out in the boonies with no service to speak of—I pored over Seventeen’s journal.
I inhaled the entries like a drug, curiosity snowballing into pure blown obsession.
Each entry sent me on a rollercoaster of emotions.
He’d documented everything. Patient notes.
Grievances with his douchebag father. His thoughts on magazine clippings he’d saved from The Lancet, his favorite medical journal.
He’d even scribbled lyrics into the margins and practiced his gorgeous signature on random pages.
It was all there: How his family had turned Saint Bart’s into a very profitable sanatorium, starting with his grandfather, who really was the skinned corpse on display in the lobby.
How he’d come to Saint Bart’s, living under the shadow his father’s expectations cast. How his father worked longer and longer hours, sometimes disappearing into his lab for days at a time.
How Mal had protected Bunny and his other patients from Rook’s madness as best he could.
He even reported Saint Bart’s himself, several times. No one answered him. It was heartbreaking how the outside world ignored him, so he stayed to shield them the best he could.
These people deserve better. How sad it is that I alone can’t save them. For I am all they have.
The compassionate man who’d written this journal didn’t feel like the same man in the mask, who looked at me like I was something to be eaten.
I flipped a page, and an old news article fluttered loose with the headline “brUTALITY AT ST. BARTHOLOMEW’S.”
My spine chilled seeing a monochrome photo of Seventeen and his father, side by side.
The article went on to talk about an investigation. Missing patients. Unmarked graves scattering the grounds. Failed lobotomies, too much electroshock therapy, macabre experimentations, suicides...
Saint Bartholomew’s dirty secrets seemed to have bled out into the public eye all at once. The article went on to say that the day the police moved in to shut the hospital down, they found an abandoned building.
No sign of the patients or staff.
All of them, gone. Vanished into thin air.
It was hard for me to come to terms with something I couldn’t explain with logic.
My running theory for the dates was that Rook’s Treatment somehow froze cells, lengthening a person’s lifespan.
That didn’t explain Bunny, though. Or why everyone had simply up and vanished without so much as a hair left behind.
I stretched out on my bed with the journal spread onto my chest, its musky aroma of leather, dust and aged paper lulling me to sleep.
Just like that, I was somewhere else. Immediately, I knew I was in one of Saint Bart’s operating rooms. It couldn't be an O.R. in a modern hospital, not with these filthy tiled walls, peeling ceiling paint and archaic equipment that I’d previously only seen in movies and vintage medical books.
Pins pricked my nape as movement in my periphery snatched my attention to the silhouette of a man.
A chill skipped down my spine upon seeing his surgical scrubs, cap and cloth mask.
Before I could make out anything else, he reached up with a gloved hand and positioned the chrome-lined surgical light so it shone in my face.
It wasn’t until I cringed from the fluorescent glare that I noticed I was strapped to my gurney.
All I was wearing was a thin hospital gown and grippy socks.
No underwear. Not even a blanket to cover me.
While my arms were pinned at my sides, ankle cuffs chained to the corners of my bed forced my legs into a wide V.
He held out his large latex-covered hand. “Nurse. Scalpel.”
A voice answered from a far corner of the room, “Right away, Dr. Rook.”
Oh, God, no.
“Get away from me!” Panic set in like a shot of adrenaline straight to my heart. Pain flared through my ankles and against my ribs where the straps were the tightest. The gurney rattled with my attempts to flee, earning me a deep and rolling chuckle from the mad doctor holding me hostage.
The nurse approached with a steel surgical tray bearing an assortment of scalpels. I strained to see which one he’d selected, and my mouth went dry when he opted for the beefiest one.
Was he going to lobotomize me? It wouldn’t be Rook’s first.
I wasn’t a religious person, but I prayed to God right then that this was just a visceral nightmare. One that I’d wake up from any second now.
Dread coiled down my throat and hooked in my belly when he used the scalpel’s blade to lift my hem and peer at my spread apex.
A piercing scream wrenched from my lungs, and the doctor surged forward, slapping a gloved hand over my mouth. First, the scent of latex filtered into my nose, then was quickly chased with a dark and musky scent that sat low in my belly like a hot coal, turning my muscles to goo.
With his other hand, he tugged down his cloth mask to reveal a face I’d yet to see completely bare.
“Mal.”
His name on my tongue was rife with relief. This time, he didn’t scold me for not calling him by his patient number. “If you scream, you’ll wake yourself up. So, I’m going to take my hand off your mouth now. Understand?
I nodded.
He was giving me a choice. If I stayed silent, he’d continue. If I screamed, I’d wake up.
“This is only a dream, right?” My voice barely sounded like my own.
“Yes.” His palm smoothed over my thigh, and I relaxed beneath the weight of it. “But if there's anything you must learn about Saint Bart's, it's that everything hurts here. Even dreams.”
I should have been terrified—I had been, when I thought it was his father co-starring in my nightmare. Now all I wanted was to indulge in this dark fantasy. “Good thing I have a high pain tolerance, then, Dr. Rook. You may proceed.”
“That’s my girl,” he cooed, flashing me one last devastating grin, pointed teeth like sharpened pearls in the fluorescents.
The scalpel’s blade glinted ominously as he brought it to my chest.
I swallowed. “Do I have a safe word?”
His cruel chuckle scraped over my skin like sandpaper, and a full-body blush sparked across my skin. “I already told you. You want me to stop? Then scream.”
Before the last word fully left him, he slashed my sternum with a flick of his wrist. I swallowed down my gasp as he inserted two fingers into the slash he’d made in the gown and tore it wide open. My breasts spilled out, and blood trickled from the shallow cut he’d made in my flesh.
A neurosurgeon had to be precise with his movements—his tools had to be an extension of himself. Mal was just that, calculated and precise. The wound was superficial, deep enough to draw a few drops of blood.
My heart floundered in my chest when he hunched over me, close enough that his body heat tangled with mine. His eyes held mine captive as his tongue snaked out, long and serpentine…
It split down the middle, fat beads of saliva oozing off the fat appendage and peppering my breasts. If only he had a tongue like that in real life.
Mal’s tongue slithered over my torso, lapping up my blood, the tips splitting simultaneously to flick and tease my nipples.
Then, my thighs clenched at the cool kiss of metal against my molten core.
It wasn’t until he sank the first inch into me that my brain parsed what was about to happen.