Chapter 2
Chapter
Two
HALLOW
The heavy steel door doesn’t just open; it slams against the padded wall with a sound like a gunshot, vibrating through the mattress and straight into my shattered nerves.
Miller jumps, his hands fumbling with the hem of my hospital gown, trying to yank the thin, blood-spattered cotton back over my hips.
He’s frantic, his fingers slippery with the cocktail of my pussy juice and the blood from my split lip.
He looks like a panicked animal, wiping his mouth with a sleeve that’s already ruined, his breath coming in shallow, terrified hitches.
The silence that follows is heavy enough to choke on.
The air in the room is thick, cloying with the metallic tang of blood and the unmistakable, pungent scent of a woman who has just been forced over the edge.
Aris stands in the doorway, his silhouette sharp against the hallway’s humming white light. He doesn’t move. He just stares at the bed. He stares at me.
His gaze travels from my swollen, purple eye, down to the crimson smear across my chin, and finally to the way my thighs are still trembling, my pussy still weeping a slow, steady rhythm onto the stained sheets.
“What the fuck did you do?”
The doctor’s voice isn’t soft anymore. It isn’t clinical. It’s a low, vibrating growl of pure, unadulterated fury. He takes a step into the room, and for the first time in ninety-six days, I see the mask of the professional crack.
He looks at Miller like he’s a piece of shit stuck to the bottom of his expensive Italian loafers.
“Doctor, she—she was combative,” Miller stammers, his voice cracking, his hands still shaking as he tries to tuck the gown around my waist. “I had to restrain her further. She bit her lip, she—”
“Shut the fuck up, Miller.” Aris crosses the room in three long strides, his eyes never leaving my face.
He reaches out, his fingers trembling with a different kind of heat as he tilts my chin up.
He looks at the bruises, the raw skin where Miller’s knuckles met my bone.
“I told you to sedate her. I didn’t tell you to use her as a fucking punching bag. ”
I let out a wet, bubbly giggle, the blood pooling in the back of my throat. I look up at Aris through the one eye that isn’t swollen shut, and I give him a smile that is all jagged edges and madness.
“Oh, don’t be so modest, Miller,” I rasp, my voice a broken, psychotic whisper. “Tell the good doctor the whole list. Don’t leave out the best parts.”
Aris looks down at me, his jaw clenched so tight I can hear his teeth grinding. “Hallow—”
“Let’s see,” I continue, the words tripping over my swollen tongue as I start a rhythmic, sing-song count.
“Item one: Assault. Very visceral, very professional. Item two: Sexual battery. He really liked the way I tasted, Doc. Ask him about the way he licked my clit until I bled. Item three: Rape. Though I suppose in this building, you just call that ‘therapy,’ don’t you? ”
“Hallow, enough,” Aris snaps, but his eyes are fixed on Miller, who has backed into the corner of the room, his face the colour of sour milk.
“And my favourite,” I whisper, leaning into the doctor’s touch, my eyes wide and shimmering with a terrifying, drug-induced clarity.
“Item four: Theft. He stole the one thing you’ve been trying to kill for three months.
He found the fire, Aris. And he poked it.
You should thank him. I haven’t felt this alive since the day they dragged me in here in chains. ”
Aris turns on Miller, his hand reaching out to grab the man’s collar, yanking him forward until they’re nose-to-nose. “You touched the assets. You compromised the patient. You’re not just a fucking animal, Miller—you’re a liability.”
“She’s a crazy bitch!” Miller screams, his cowardice finally boiling over. “She’s nothing! She’s a hole! Who’s going to believe her? Look at the chart, Aris! She’s fucking psychotic!”
“I believe her,” Aris whispers, and the coldness in his voice makes even Miller go silent. “Not because I care about her soul. But because I can smell her all over your fucking face.”
Aris doesn’t yell. He doesn’t scream like the common animal trembling in the corner. He simply lets go of Miller’s collar, smoothing the lapel of his own pristine white coat with a terrifying, slow precision. The fury hasn’t left him; it’s just calcified into something sharper. Something lethal.
“Get out,” Aris says, his voice a flatline.
“Doctor, I—”
“Get. Out. Before I decide that your internal anatomy is more useful to me on a tray than inside your skin.”
Miller doesn’t wait for a third invitation. He scrambles for the door, his boots squeaking on the linoleum, a pathetic, retreating beat that fades into the humming silence of the hallway. The slide-bolt clicks into place.
It’s just us now. The doctor and the disaster.
Aris turns back to me. He doesn’t look like a healer anymore. He looks like a man who has just realised he’s been starving and someone just laid out a feast of broken glass.
He pulls a pair of latex gloves from his pocket, snapping them onto his hands with a sound like a whip crack.
“He was messy,” Aris whispers, stepping toward the bed. He reaches out, his gloved fingers tracing the line of my split lip, dragging through the drying blood before sliding down my throat to the hollow of my collarbone.
“He was rough and loud and utterly without finesse. He treated you like a common whore, Hallow. He didn’t understand the nuance of your ruin.”
I let out a jagged breath, my skin crawling under the sterile touch of the latex. “And you do, Doc? You think your needles and your charts make you any different than the man who just had his tongue in my pussy?”
Aris leans down, his face inches from mine. I can smell the expensive espresso on his breath, mixed with the sharp, cold scent of antiseptic.
He looks at my swollen eye, then down at my bared breasts, his gaze lingering on the purple thumbprints Miller left on my skin.
“I don’t want to break you, Hallow,” he murmurs, his hand sliding lower, his palm flat against my stomach, pushing down until the air leaves my lungs.
“I want to dismantle you. I want to take you apart piece by piece until there’s nothing left but the screaming.
He played with the surface. I want the marrow. ”
He reaches for the edge of the hospital gown, yanking it the rest of the way up until it’s bunched around my neck, leaving me completely naked and trembling under the weight of his clinical, dark obsession.
He looks at the mess Miller left—the wet sheen on my thighs, the way my clit is still red and pulsing from the abuse.
“He made you cum,” Aris says, his voice dropping into a dark, vibrating register of jealousy and fascination. “He forced a climax out of a mind that is supposed to be under my control. That is a fascination I intend to explore.”
He doesn’t use his mouth. He uses the cold, hard handle of his silver pen, dragging the metal over my clit with a slow, agonising pressure.
The contrast of the freezing metal against my over-stimulated nerves makes my whole body jerk, the leather straps groaning as I try to fight the sudden, violent spike of sensation.
“Does that feel like therapy, Hallow?” he asks, his eyes locked on mine, wide and shimmering with a cold, intellectual lust. “Does the cold hurt as much as the heat did?”
“Fuck… you,” I gasp, my head snapping back.
“Later, perhaps,” he whispers.
He drops the pen and replaces it with his gloved hand. He doesn’t tease. He drives three fingers deep into my pussy, stretching the raw, abused tissue until I cry out, the sound echoing off the padded walls.
He’s not looking for pleasure; he’s looking for the limit. He’s digging his thumb into my clit with a heavy, rhythmic grind that is more about dominance than desire.
“You’re so wet,” he observes, his voice devoid of any warmth. “Even after what he did to you, your body is still a traitor. You’re still weeping for the touch of a man who hates you.”
He hits my g-spot with a brutal, repetitive force, his other hand moving to my throat, squeezing just enough to make the room start to dim at the edges.
I’m gasping, my blood-stained lips parted as I fight for air and for some kind of grip on reality.
The drug haze is still there, but Aris’s darkness is cutting through it like a scalpel.
“He was an amateur,” Aris growls, his face twisting into a mask of cold, psychotic possession. “I’m going to show you what it really means to be hollow.”
Aris pulls back, the latex of his gloves slick and glistening with the evidence of my betrayal.
He looks at his hand as if he’s examining a culture in a petri dish—detached, fascinated, and utterly devoid of mercy.
“You’ve been overstimulated, Hallow,” he says, his voice regaining that terrifying, clinical calm. “The nerves are firing in a chaotic, undisciplined loop. We need to ground you. We need to remind you that every inch of this skin belongs to the state. To the file. To me.”
He turns to the small, stainless steel trolley he rolled in with him. It’s covered in a white cloth, a shroud for the gods of pain. With a flick of his wrist, he pulls it back.
I see them. The “tools.”
There’s a speculum, cold and gleaming under the predatory white lights. There are long, thin needles used for deep-tissue biopsies. And then there is the crown jewel of his madness: a modified portable cautery tool, the tip a needle-thin point designed to seal wounds—or create new ones.
“No,” I rasp, the word catching on the blood in my throat. My heart is a frantic bird hitting the cage of my ribs. “No, Aris, don’t be a fucking coward. Use your hands if you’re so goddamn brave.”
“Hands are for animals like Miller,” Aris whispers, picking up a pair of heavy, weighted metal clamps. “I am a man of science, Hallow. I prefer precision.”