Chapter Forty-One
Tuesday
Blinding pain lanced through my jaw, my teeth grinding together as I put every sliver of willpower into biting back the screams of agony shredding through my body.
It wasn’t because of the large needle slamming into my ass cheek, or the cruel laughter as an orderly held me down for his boss with his gargantuan hands on the back of my head—muttering how easily he could crush my skull. Or even Rook, taking my panties and shoving them in my mouth to gag me.
The pain came from what I’d just watched.
Mal fought for me. H–He said he loved me, with his last dying gasp.
As much as I wanted to believe that he couldn’t truly die, it was a tall task to believe the impossible. Especially when proof of the logical lay before me, bleeding into my office carpet.
There was no question of it, looking at the lifeless body.
Mal was dead. Gone.
Just like that, the hole in my heart was bleeding all over again—with nothing but hatred to fill it now. Hatred and regrets.
My eyes shut tight. I wanted to crawl in on myself and never emerge from the darkness.
The injection was brutally painful. While the first dose had barely been more than an ache in my ass for a few days, and the general trauma of not knowing what was being injected into my body, there weren’t any other downsides.
This one, though? It hurt like a bitch.
The fluid itself burned, as if drain cleaner had been poured inside me, punching through my vascular system.
“Sonofafuck!” I hissed into my panties.
Convulsions racked my body. I barely heard Rook’s voice cutting through the fog shrouding my brain, ordering another orderly to hold me down.
Then another.
And another.
Why did it take four grown men to hold down one woman for a shot?
My mind kicked on, whirring at full speed, while my sensory input was a beat behind. It took a handful of terrifying seconds to grasp that I wasn’t having a seizure or a stroke. My body thrashed hard because I was fighting back, and I was overpowering them.
“That’s right, Tues. Let me take over. I’ll gut them for taking him away from us.”
I blinked.
It was the voice from before.
If I were still hooked on the pain pills, I wouldn’t have thought much of the voices. Hearing voices wasn’t that much of a walk from the hallucinations I’d been experiencing since Lauren Hawkin’s death.
But I hadn’t taken the drugs in weeks—at least by my estimation.
No, it wasn’t that. There was no evidence beyond what I was experiencing first-hand, and my lucidity was debatable. What was certain was my gut feeling. It was rarely wrong. And my gut feeling was telling me that the voice was a side effect of the Treatment.
Could it be the mad thing Mal had mentioned before? Like a dangerous split personality that would take over if I wasn’t careful.
I couldn’t help but surrender to it. It wanted to kill these men, too.
My vision dotted with black spots that spread until I couldn’t see at all. Screams sounded, and this time, they weren’t my own.
The hands released me, and the world tipped back to the right angle as I lifted off the desk.
More cries of pain ensued. Satisfying, delicious cries of full-grown men dying in horrible ways. One even cried for his mother, sending electric thrills through my boiling blood.
Then, everything went quiet.
As still as a graveyard.
My sight slowly came back into focus, and the bloody scene surrounding me shook me to the very center of my soul.
Dead. All of them. Butchered, some of them beyond recognition. Like a wild pack of animals had been set loose inside my office.
Had I done this?
“No shit, Sherlock,” I cackled out loud, responding to myself.
Wait. I wasn’t gagged anymore.
My attention fell on Rook’s lifeless corpse, sprawled on my sofa. A gaping hole in his chest offered a window to the other side of the viscera-crusted cushions.
In his mouth were my panties. His eyes were blank, his noseless physiognomy frozen in pain.
“Cute touch, huh?”
Again, my mouth moved as if on its own volition.
The next thing I knew, I was bolting out of the office and sprinting full speed down the corridor.
The nurses and the orderlies I passed in a blur didn’t try to stop me as I made my way through the lobby and out of St. Bart’s front doors. The Gothic wrought iron gate was even open for me. Not a soul in sight. No cars to be seen on the unpaved road, nor a bird in the sky.
I ran as best as I could, stumbling more times than I could count in the muddy grass alongside the road to avoid sharp gravel beneath my bare feet.
I’d kicked my heels off in the heat of the moment when I fucked Mal.
Not that the stilettos would have been of any use in this terrain.
There was nothing around for miles, but I didn’t care.
I’d run or walk for as long as I needed until I found a town.
My heart hitched as a grave stone appeared in the distance. Two, as it turned out.
One, a classic cross and the other a lamb.
Jesus Christ. My pulse spiraled out of control while I read the larger stone.
Barbara Reed.
1951 - 1969
Daughter. Friend.
Mother to Joanie and Baby Boy Reed.
A fresh wave of tears pricked my eyes.
It was just as he described.
I continued on with the numbness that came from dissociation. I welcomed it. I had no pills to chase away the pain, so my own nervous system was doing the best it could on its own.
The sun sank over the flat planes, the chilly night air making me shiver. I drew my lab coat tighter over my body and stilled, feeling the bump in my pocket. My cell.
I pulled it out. No service. Of course, because what was the chance that there were cell towers all the way out here?
My hope was sinking fast like a hot stone through butter. It settled in my gut like lake sediment and made everything heavy. My feet ached, and my calves screamed with pain.
Right about now, that voice would have been welcome company. While my veins were darker than ever, a sign it was still inside me, it made no move to show itself.
I’d been walking for hours. There should have been a town by now. A passing car. A bird overhead in the sky. Anything.
The sky got darker as night fully covered everything.
With every agonizing step, it grew darker still, until everything was so black I could barely see a foot in front of me.
Even on moonless nights, I’d never seen or heard of a murky night so thick. It was unnatural. With every step that took me further away from St. Bartholomew’s, the blinder I became.
Uncertainty wound my muscles tight, and fear began its slow descent over my mind.
Where the hell was I supposed to go?
It was so dark, I couldn’t go back even if I wanted to. I was trapped in a void of nothingness, with only the crunch of gravel under my feet and the roar of my pulse in my ears.
I hated how my mind wandered back to Mal. And I hated how I missed him already. I missed him most in my nightmares. At least with the darkness in my head, I wasn’t alone.
I walked until my phone told me it was morning, but the sun never came. I walked until each step felt like I was stepping on nails, and my throat burned with thirst.
When my legs eventually gave out, I welcomed the cool grass against my face.
And as my eyes drifted shut, I prayed to anything that cared to listen to let him be waiting for me in my sleep.
Dreamless unconsciousness gripped me, and I lay there in complete darkness. He wasn’t here.
I was alone now, regardless of whether my eyes were open or closed.
“Dr. Beckett…”
I woke up with a sob in my throat. I blinked, the darkness still consuming me, even though I was fully awake now. Movement in my periphery had me sitting up.
My voice came out paper-thin, like I’d seen a ghost. I was seeing a ghost.
“L–Lauren?”
I got to my feet and stumbled after her. “Lauren, where are you going? W–wait!”