Chapter Fifty-Nine
Rheda
My mouth opens before I fully think. “Deogal—”
Nothing happens. There’s no flicker of recognition or shift in his eyes. No secret softness hidden underneath the mask.
Nothing.
The absence is violent. Because this man has had his hands inside every part of me. He has watched me cry and shake and come apart for him in the dark. He has touched me slowly enough to make my own body betray me. He has looked at me like I was something holy to ruin.
And now he looks at me like I am nothing.
“Patient continues displaying fixation,” Peter says evenly from behind the glass. “Persistent delusional attachment to lead investigator.”
Lead investigator.
The words hit me sideways.
My head jerks violently toward Peter.
“What?” The word breaks apart immediately. “No. No, Peter, that’s not—”
“Welcome back, Miss Ainsley.” Deogal’s voice slides through me like a blade. It’s calm, smooth. Practiced.
I choke on the breath.
My entire body reacts before my mind does. Pulse detonating. Heat flashing low through my stomach so fast it feels humiliating. Terror following immediately after, cold enough to make my hands shake against the restraints.
His eyes stay fixed on me with detached clinical patience, like he’s waiting for symptoms rather than recognising a person. He lowers himself slowly into my chair, one ankle crossing over the other, fingers resting against the arm like he has never been held down by anything in his life.
I stare at him and feel my mind try to reject the shape of him.
My breathing starts turning uneven again. “No, stop. Stop fucking doing this.”
He doesn’t react at all and it fucking knives me.
This is a man who ruined me completely, sitting three feet away and looking at me like I was never special to him at all.
“What are you doing, Deogal?” My heart slams. “Why are you doing this?”
A sob catches in the back of my throat. It claws up like it has talons.
“No,” I choke. “This isn’t real. This can’t be real.”
His eyes hold mine. “You keep saying that to things you don’t want to believe.”
My wrists ache beneath the restraints. The skin there is damp, sore, already swelling where I fought too hard against leather and metal. I do not look down, because if I do, I will see orange again, and if I see orange again, I will remember that my badge is gone.
I try to sit straighter. The band at my throat forces the movement small.
“I’m a doctor.” I say like it helps.
“Yes,” he says. The agreement disarms me so completely I lose the next breath. He watches that too.
“You were very good at it,” he continues, his voice low enough that it does not need to compete with the hum of the room. “Standing behind the glass. Writing things down. Giving other people’s madness clean names so you didn’t have to smell it on yourself.”
“I helped people.” I splutter.
His eyebrow arches. “Did you now?”
I glance at the glass. Peter stands with his arms folded, expression locked into something unreadable. Mike stays slightly behind him. Sean is near the monitors; one hand pressed to the back of his neck.
My stomach turns so hard I have to swallow.
“I don’t know what’s happening,” I say breathlessly. “I don’t know what’s going on. I want this to stop.”
His face remains still. “I know.”
Something inside me gives a dangerous little shift, reaching for comfort before I can stop it, because he said it like he believes me.
Then his mouth softens. His fingers tap once against the arm of Peter’s chair. Slow. Patient. The sound is nothing like dripping water, and yet my body flinches anyway. I’m panting now.
“No,” I whisper. “No. No.”
“Rheda?” Peter’s voice is somewhere distant.
The restraints bite deep into my wrists as I jerk against them again, panic turning ugly now, full-body and animalistic.
My breathing breaks apart.
I shake my head harder, frantic now, chains scraping violently against metal as I try to force the images back down before they split me open completely.
“Why are you doing this?” The words rip out of me wet and shaking. “Why are you doing this to me?”
I thrash violently and the chair slams backward hard enough to screech against the floor.
“No—” The word tears out of me broken. “Please, stop—”
The room blurs at the edges.
Deogal moves fast, grabbing the chair before it fully tips, forcing it upright again with rough hands against the metal frame. The movement jolts through my spine hard enough to make me gasp.
“Easy,” he says, but there’s strain underneath it now.
I shake harder. My body can’t stop. Sweat sticks cold against the back of my neck while the room continues humming around me like none of this is impossible.
No.
No, no, no.
This is wrong.
But even as panic claws its way up my throat, something worse slides underneath it.
Relief.
The shame of it is so sharp it feels like being skinned alive. My thighs tense. My body reacts to his nearness before my mind can even finish breaking apart, some filthy, ruined instinct uncurling low in my stomach like it has been waiting for him to step closer.
Deogal turns slightly toward Peter behind the glass.
“Get the vial ready.” The words don’t land properly at first. His voice is deceptively soft. “Doctor Ainsley is deteriorating too rapidly now.”
Ice floods my body.
Death penalty.
It hits me like a punch.
“Deogal—”
“Now.” The single word cuts clean through the room.
Peter obeys quickly. There’s a buzzing of the door when he enters, and he moves straight for the tray. My mouth keeps shaping the word no, but the sound has stopped coming properly. My lungs seize so violently I taste copper.
“Relax,” he says quietly. “You’ll only hurt yourself.”
I shake my head too fast. The movement stutters, wrong, my body jerking against the chains. Pain flashes white-hot across my wrists, but even that feels cleaner than the way my body responds to him.
“No.” It comes out pathetic. A frightened sound that makes humiliation burn hot in my face. “No. This isn’t—”
Isn’t real.
Isn’t possible.
Deogal moves closer. Each step feels like a hand sliding under my skin. My body leans before I do, a tiny, ruined movement toward him that makes horror bloom fresh and vicious.
No.
God, no.
Then he leans in, just slightly, close enough that his voice doesn’t need to carry. Close enough that it feels like it belongs inside me rather than in the room.
“I told you I’d win, Doctor,” He says it like lovers say I missed you. He watches me understand it in pieces. It comes slowly, like glass cracking under pressure. He does not rush me. He stands there with the patience of someone who has been waiting for me to arrive here for a very long time.
It’s him.
He’s here.
Ice spills down my spine so fast my teeth hurt. The room shudders.
“You wanted meaning.” His voice drags through my thoughts. His lips stay shut. “I gave you one.”
His hand lifts slightly, like he might touch me, and for one humiliating second, I still want him to.
The vial catches the light in Peter’s fingers.
“No,” I flinch, jolting against the restraints. I try to tell him. I try to force Deogal’s name out of my mouth, but terror mangles it before it becomes language. “This isn’t real. None of it is—”
A deep, throaty chuckle ripples around my skull.
“You wanted a story, so I gave you one.” His voice touches my brain with a cruel kiss. “Does it matter if it even happened?”
Panic claws its way up my throat. I inhale. Scream. Fail. The syringe catches the light and my stomach folds so violently I nearly retch. The liquid inside drags slowly when Peter tilts it.
“Do it.” Deogal says.
Peter exhales through his nose once and moves.
The needle touches my skin. I shriek. The first sensation is pressure. Just a horrible intimate feeling of the point searching beneath the soft skin of my throat until it finds somewhere to enter.
Then pain blooms sharp and deep. The needle slides in further.
The cold liquid burns as it forces its way through my veins.
I feel it spreading through my throat first, thick enough that my swallow catches around it.
Panic claws up my chest so fast my restraints slam against the chair before I even realise I’m fighting.
A scream rips out of me.
Peter’s grip tightens hard against my shoulder while the plunger continues downward slowly, steadily, the fluid pushing deeper into me with awful certainty.
It burns.
God, it burns.
My chest spasms around a breath that doesn’t come properly and I hear myself choking. The sound is wet and humiliating.
My body jerks violently again, chains biting hard enough into my wrists to split skin, but weakness is already arriving faster than panic can keep up with it.
It pours through my limbs in heavy waves, dragging everything downward.
My fingers lose strength first. Then my legs.
The cold reaches my chest. And that is when the real terror begins.
One beat stutters wrong beneath my ribs. Then another.
I feel it happen.
The rhythm losing itself inside me.
My mouth opens hard around another breath, but my lungs refuse to fill properly. Air catches halfway down no matter how desperately I drag for it. Every instinct inside me turns feral.
I’m dying.
The thought lands cleanly through the chaos.
I look toward Deogal without meaning to. And he is watching me the same way he watched me kneeling on my bedroom floor. The same way he watched me through the glass.
Still.
Certain.
Like this was always coming for me.
Tears spill sideways into my hair.
The cold inside my chest thickens until it feels impossible to move around it. Another heartbeat misfires painfully beneath my ribs and terror detonates so violently I scream.
The interrogation room starts coming apart around us, but it doesn’t feel like collapse. It feels like something being peeled back like this place was only ever a skin stretched over something darker. The white walls crack open and darkness breathes underneath.
“You think this is the first time someone like you has tried to understand me?” Deogal’s mouth finally softens into a smile. He laughs.
“And I already know how I want you next.” The words pull through my mind. I feel the ghost of his fingers against my cheek, hot and firm. I try not to nestle into them and fail. “I want you small. Wild enough to hurt yourself trying to get back to me.”
Something breaks inside my lungs.
Blood surges hot into my throat and when I choke it spills violently from my mouth, splattering dark across my chin and the front of the orange uniform. Panic explodes through the room somewhere far away, voices shouting, chairs scraping sharply against the floor, but all I can hear is him.
I cough again and more blood follows, thick enough to burn. My body convulses against the restraints. Metal cuts deeper into my wrists. The room lurches sideways.
“Run along, Doctor,” he purrs. “Let’s see how far you make it this time.”
And still—still some ruined starving part of me reaches for him anyway.
Because beneath the horror, beneath the blood and terror and the unbearable feeling of my own body shutting down around me, I can still feel the shape of his attention wrapped tightly around my throat.
I try to hold onto hatred. I try to force it through myself hard enough to survive him. But it slips apart every single time.
Because the most horrifying truth is even now, with death inside me, I still don’t want him to leave me.