Chapter Twenty-Five ABBIE
Wings was right about the shitty timing.
I sigh as the summer storm hammers against the rideshare’s grimy window.
The driver has been tightlipped since picking me up at the compound gates, so I use the silence to shoot texts to Ark and Patch, explaining that I’ve been called into the clinic for a priority case.
I won’t stay long, and they can call me if they need me to come back and help.
I pocket my phone as we reach the parking lot, the driver playing dumb when I tell him there’s a slip road for drop-offs closer to the entrance.
When he refuses to circle back around, I sigh and pull my jacket over my head, stepping gingerly out into the punishing rain.
The sunbaked asphalt is swirling with oily puddles, and I keep my head down as I dodge between them on my way to the front entrance.
I’m nearly at the sliding doors when I catch sight of an ambulance parked haphazardly between two emergency bays.
The lights are still going, although the siren has been switched off.
The rear doors are propped open and a paramedic is leaning in to check on a patient.
I pause, wondering if my timing could be that good, as the paramedic turns to look at me. “Abigail Taylor?”
I shake the excess water off my jacket and drape it over my arm. “Yeah, is that Damien Courtland?”
I’m peering in the open doors when I catch a whiff of the paramedic.
Alpha, middle-aged based on the gray at his temples, and with a stale, musky scent that’s both sour and filled with rage.
Dark eyes glint at me from behind his glasses, and I lift my arm to block him, right as I feel a pinch in the side of my neck. “Fuck!”
“Lights out,” he mutters as he shoves me into the back of the ambulance, my knee catching painfully on the edge of the door.
I try to draw it back to kick him in the chest, but my leg barely twitches, my head clunking loudly on the floor.
A terrifying heaviness is stealing over my limbs, pressing me down against the cold metal.
I twitch, trying to claw my way upright.
But I’m helpless, immobile, and panic explodes in my chest right as the doors bang shut behind me, sealing me in.
Please, please, please…
I don’t know if I sleep or pass out because of whatever fucking sedative he pumped into my neck.
It’s the kind of oily blackness that clings like tar, and the world comes back to me slowly, in broken, hazy fragments.
I feel the sway of the ambulance, driving me God knows where, and hear the crackle of the radio, random snippets of code that mean nothing to my fuzzy ears.
I think I hear rain, but all I can smell is antiseptic wipes, and the lingering stench of the alpha, like an old gym bag left in the corner of the bus.
Fuck. Pitt’s face swims in front of my foggy eyes, and I try to reach out and grab it.
Try to tell him I’m sorry, I’m stupid, and I want to drown in his kisses.
But I can’t move my hands, and my blood runs cold as I realize I’m on the gurney.
Strapped down by arm restraints, like a butterfly under mounting tacks.
Oh, poor Wings.
Tears burn my eyes, but I suck them back, the effort scraping my throat raw.
I’m already fuzzy enough without giving into hysterics.
I need to stay calm and watch for my chance.
We can’t drive forever and when he stops, he’ll have to remove my binds before he can carry me anywhere.
Dank basements and dark woods flash through my mind, a new surge of panic burning in my chest. I try to clench my fists, to rouse my steel-cold fighting instincts, but I can barely manage a flicker of my fingers.
Fuck, Abbie, you have to do better than that…
“Wake up.” A hand slaps my cheek, hard enough to make my eyes spring open.
Shit. I was asleep. While this asshole climbed into the back and made himself comfortable with my unconscious body.
“Fuck you!” I spit, my voice coming out small and slurred.
He just grunts and I look around, my eyes skipping over the compartments that no doubt house the scalpels and syringes. They’re useless to me while I’m still tied up, but if I manage to get free…
“Focus.” Another slap to my face, this time harder than the last. Tears burn my eyes, but I glare back at him, imagining flames dancing through his thinning hair.
His greasy scalp would go up like an oil-soaked rag, and I try to hold that image in my mind as he says, “You’re here for one purpose only.
Tell me where he is, or I’ll start to make things very unpleasant for you. ”
His voice is deep, modulated, and terrifyingly detached. Now that I’m looking at him, I realize he’s changed from his paramedic’s uniform into a button-down, gray trousers, and a navy tie. Over it, he’s wearing a white coat, a name embroidered on the breast. Doctor Evan Hargreaves.
Fuck. I know that name.
“You’re Damien’s family doctor.” The one who stalked him, kidnapped him, and held him at his mercy while he broke his body and his psyche. “You’re a fucking animal.”
Instead of a slap, I feel a pinch, and I hiss at the sudden burning in my left arm.
“Doxorubicin,” he says in that same weirdly blank voice.
His scent still crackles with rage, but his face is a mask, and I wonder how many other patients he’s terrorized with his Jekyll and Hyde routine.
“If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a chemotherapy drug.
Quite effective, but also very potent. Some people call it the red devil, because of its color.
” He holds the syringe up, where some of the red liquid still clings to the side.
“It’s also known to cause fatigue, hair loss, and mouth ulcers.
If the drug leaks outside of the vein, you’ll also suffer severe tissue damage. ”
I shudder, the horror of the side effects flushing some of the sedatives out of my system. I try to take it as a good sign, but my head is throbbing, and I wonder if his demon drug is already eating away at my nervous system.
“How can you do this?” I ask him through gritted teeth. “You’re a doctor, or is that coat just more of the charade?”
“It’s real.” His nostrils flare, something dark and dangerous slithering behind his glasses. “Before my license was revoked, I was considered a leader in my field.”
I want to sneer at him, because I’ve met plenty of pompous, egotistical doctors in my life, but this is the first time I’ve brushed up against a psychotic one. But that musty, sour edge is thicker in his scent, and I watch his knuckles clench on his knee.
I cast around for something to distract him before he decides to take his frustrations out on me. “What was with the butterflies? The dead ones you had dumped on me?”
I don’t really expect him to answer, but he rubs at his cheek, a dirty nail scraping over the scruffy whiskers.
“He got a tattoo. Marked up his perfect skin with some ugly ink because he felt inspired.” He snarls the word and his dark eyes flick down to mine.
“By his therapist, according to the barista where he gets his coffee. I didn’t believe it at first, but then I started following you.
I had other plans for teaching you a lesson, but then he disappeared, and you stopped going to work. ..”
Teaching me a lesson? I shudder to think what those plans entailed.
“So you called the clinic, pretending to be his father.” I cast a dismissive glance at his coat. “You know the ins and out, even if you only dress like a doctor now.”
“I’m still a physician,” he says with a snarl in his voice. “I haven’t forgotten how to heal. Or how to hurt.”
He’s reaching into another drawer now, and my heart flutters, nausea climbing the back of my throat. “I don’t know where he is.”
He pulls something out - a roll of gauze, I think - before he clutches it in his hand.
“I don’t believe you. I saw him give you those flowers.
He picked them out himself and had them wrapped in a special ribbon.
” He leans down, his fetid breath fanning over my cheek. “He told you where he was going.”
I think of the business card Damien gave me in the hotel parking lot.
I’d shoved it in my pocket and forgotten about it, but even if I had it on me, I wouldn’t give it to his abuser.
“He didn’t. He just wanted to say goodbye.
” I pause, wondering if I’m making a terrible mistake.
“Damien Courtland is just a patient, nothing more.”
He seems to chew over my words, his heavy jaw flexing as a rumbling sound vibrates in the back of his throat. “You’re lying,” he says finally. “The Courtlands are old money. Damien could have any physician in the city to help him with his heats, and yet he went back to you. Over and over.”
Because he didn’t trust alpha assholes after you abused his body and soul. “I can’t tell you what I don’t know.”
“Then perhaps you need an incentive.”
I gulp, because he opens his hand like a magician revealing a trick.
The gauze is gone, replaced by a shiny new scalpel that gleams against the grimy skin of his palm.
“I could pump you full of drugs, but your heart might stop before you break. And this way, you can watch your skin split, your body bleed. Pain is so much more meaningful when we can see the damage with our own eyes.”
Just like you’ll see your eyeballs boil in their sockets when I get free and burn you to ash.
But my fighting words die on my tongue as he presses the scalpel to the skin of my inner arm. “No one can hear you out here,” he says as we both watch the blade draw the first drop of blood to the surface. “We’re parked in a quiet, secluded spot. I can cut and cut and cut...”