by Sadie Jacks
The serial killer.
“What do you want, Ethan?” I asked. The effort to form the words already taxing my slowed system.
“What I’ve always wanted, Willow. For you to help me heal people. You remember my work, don’t you?” He moved over so I could see him. He had a prepped syringe in his hands.
He looked so normal. So earnest. How the mind of a monster lived behind that mundane mask never failed to amaze me.
I nodded. “I remember your work.” There was no arguing with him. No reasoning. No logic that could penetrate the elaborate web he’d woven for himself.
“Then why did you leave me?” He sighed, looked so disappointed. “I had to get another assistant. And then another. No one lasted as long as you did, Willow. None of them could replace you.”
Bile rose up the back of my throat. He’d taken more. Stolen more lives on his quest to understand the brain and try to unlock its full potential.
“Because of you, I went through fourteen more assistants and thirty-two more subjects.” He gripped the foot rail, his hands shook as his face mottled with rage. “You’re to blame for those losses. Do you think I can just find more subjects? It’s not easy, Willow. You expect too much of me.”
I bit back the retort, knew that way lay nothing but more drugs and unconsciousness. “I’m sorry, Ethan. I’ve had some time to think while I was away.”
He snorted. “Don’t try to play me, Willow. You’re not that bright.” He walked over to the familiar machinery next to the bed I’d learned to hate with every fiber of my being. “Even though you abandoned the project, I’ve come up with a new mixture that has shown promising results. Assistants Three, Twelve, Thirteen, and Fourteen were able to achieve positive results under the serum.”
He held up the syringe in his hand. “I have to wait for the current dosage to evacuate your system, but once it’s been expelled, we’ll start up where we left off. Thankfully, I didn’t lose too much time in your absence.” He moved to the door. Outlined by the brighter hallway lights, I could have sworn I saw horns sprouting from his head.
I knew he didn’t really have them. But I wished, not for the first time, that his outer appearance matched his inner personality. That everyone could see the demon who lurked under his skin.
“Sleep healthy, Willow. Tomorrow, we begin again.” He pulled the door shut behind him. I heard the key inserted into the lock. Felt the crushing despair settle in my chest.
This time…this time I would die here.
Chapter 36 – Willow
Something buzzed against my chest. My eyes flew open. The sedative was wearing off and I could feel my hands and feet. I had maybe a half hour before Ethan came back in here.
Thirty minutes to try to get to safety.
Buzzzz buzzzz buzzzz
I startled again. What the hell was that? This was new. He’d never attached electrodes to me. Not that delivered stimuli. Only ones that read biological information.
I looked down. My shirt trembled as another round of buzzing vibrated against my boobs.
Correction. My left boob. A foggy memory of me sliding my phone into my bra when I went to answer the door at the shop slid through my mind.
Lifting my hand that felt like it weighed at least a hundred pounds, I fished the device from my clothing. Ethan was either getting sloppy, devolving, or had been too excited to get his psycho hands on me to frisk me for a phone.
I stabbed at the screen as the name TALI flashed with strobing lights. The phone went quiet as I finally hit the glowing green button.
“No!” I flicked up the screen with my index finger. I had to get her back. She was my only hope.
The key sounded in the door.
I was out of time. By muscle memory, I found the power button. Pressing and holding it, I shut it down and stuffed it back in my bra. Prayed Ethan wouldn’t think to frisk me later.
He opened the door as my hand slid back to my side. His bright eager face was all smiles and psychopathic joy. “Good morning, Willow. Are you ready to begin our work?”
I nodded, unable to bring myself to say the words.
His smile widened. “Wonderful. I think you’ll really enjoy this latest round of testing. If what I observed in the other assistants holds true, you should show some astonishing results.” He came over to the side of the bed. “Do I need to restrain you?”
I shook my head. Needles didn’t bother me anymore. Not after all this time. I also wasn’t stupid enough to try to physically fight him. That just ended with more numbness and more death.
“Excellent. That will keep your neurotransmitter levels lowered. I’ll get untainted results. I knew I could count on you.” He pressed his lips to my hair.
I fought not to shudder. I tried to tune him out. I could do this. I would do this. The irony of fighting for my life now, when yesterday I’d been ready to end it, was not lost on me. But yesterday had been my choice.
If nothing else, I would take him with me. Then I could end his reign of terror. And in some small way, atone for my part in all of the deaths he’d committed.
The familiar feeling of lead infiltrated my body. The paralytic he used was fast acting. It had to be. For what came next. There was no way to prepare myself for an intubation tube. No matter how many times he’d forced it on me, that wasn’t something I could sit through calmly.
As my body went dead around me, I felt him lower the head of the bed. He tipped my head back, lowered my chin.
I started counting. He had maybe three minutes before the first round of paralytic wore off. Three minutes to get everything set the way he wanted it.
His routine was flawless. Measured. Precise. He injected me with the second, slower acting paralytic in three minutes and twenty-two seconds. I’d been able to manage one solid breath on my own before he flipped the ventilator on.
I shuddered to think of him doing this to those poor faceless, nameless women. He saved the younger girls for his most rigorous testing. Thought their younger bodies made them more resilient. Made them last longer. Older women would have been his assistants.
He’d have found both subjects and assistants on online dating sites. His charm was off the charts. His urbanity and sophistication were impeccable. He usually had more than one subject held at any given time.
Part of me went to that cold and empty place deep inside me. That place allowed me to survive. To catalog everything around me in minute detail. To file it away like I was a computer.
The other part of me, the part that kept me Willow, moved to the side. But she never left. Not fully. Sometimes the cold, emotionless part of me yelled at her for her screaming. Threatened to silence her so she could work.
But sometimes…sometimes, the Willow part of me would comfort the cold. Wrap the freezing analytical side in warmth and love. It didn’t last long. The inhuman part of me didn’t like to be coddled or babied.
She needed analysis. Information. Facts. Those are what she understood. Those are what she needed to keep going. To keep doing her job. To keep me alive.
I knew I shouldn’t have so many different parts and pieces of me rattling around in my brain. I knew it was abnormal. But it was how I survived five years of this.
I tried my best to keep all of me together. To at least keep the threads of all my personalities in the same drawer in my mind. Some days I was better at it than others.
“Willow, are you ready?” Ethan asked. He had a bite to his voice. A sure fire way of knowing I’d escaped in my head for too long.
I blinked once for yes.
My chest inflated briefly. I knew my brain was getting oxygen because I was still alive. But that was it. I couldn’t feel anything else but my eyelids and eyes. Not being able to feel my chest lift, but having to watch it do so out of the bottom of my vision made me hate him all over again.
His face brightened. “Wonderful. You’re already responding better.” He chuckled softly. “I knew this serum would yield better results.”
&nb
sp; It sure has, fucker. Let me stab you and pump you full of this shit so you can see what it feels like. Make you try to fight the effects of the paralytic and the sedative. You need firsthand knowledge of what a brain can really do.
He stepped away. Headed for the closet with the false flooring panel. The dungeon where he kept his subjects.
It’s horrifying appearance slid through my mind. I’d only been forced down there once. But once was more than enough to etch its picture on my brain. Sear it on my heart. Stamp it on my soul.
Brightly lit, no one could escape the horrors that greeted the eye. Shutting the eyes didn’t help. The stench made it impossible to push reality from the mind. The new subjects were greeted with what awaited them. They got to see firsthand their fates at the hands of a madman who looked like an angel.
The walls were dirt. Hard-packed dirt that he added to in layers. Once, the space had been as big as the main floor. But that was five years ago. Who knew how many layers he’d added to the walls since then. Eventually, he would run out of room.
Each layer of dirt held one round of dead subjects.
Dead girls I’d been unable to save. Dead women I’d sentenced to death because I couldn’t get my mouth to work. Dead.
He came back into the room. A limp body hung over his arms. The small peaks of her breasts identified her as a female. Ethan didn’t think men were good subjects for his testing. They were already too strong. Too able to get to that baser side of survival.
They were too big for him to fight. To drug. To restrain, more like. As delusional as Ethan was, there was a scary logic to his twisted mind.
I would have felt better about it all if I didn’t understand his thought patterns. The fact that I could follow those loosely logical arguments made me fear for my own mind. I’d kill myself before I became like this man.
Ethan dumped the woman on the floor, a careless tangle of limbs and tissue. I wondered how much he actually saw of them. Outside of their neurological activity and the fact that they had beating hearts, did he see them as human? As something other than a bundle of electrical impulses and meat to test and theorize on?
He stepped over what had to be the lump of her body as he made his way to the computer setup he’d installed five years ago. Some of the computers were different, but the basic layout was still the same.
“Let’s begin, shall we?” He double tapped a button on his console of horror. “Subject seventy-three. Obtained from the general population through voluntary meeting. Platform: Tinder. Date of retrieval: September Twenty-Two. Date of testing: September Twenty-Four.”
At least I’d only been gone one day. I just prayed that when I didn’t show up with the cake for Natalie that someone would figure out what had happened. They would find me. They would find me.
They had to find me.
Chapter 37 – Ryker
Water splashed in my face, pulling me from the bottom of the drunken well I’d climbed into last night.
“You’ve got one chance, motherfucker, before we tear you a new one. Where is she?” a low whispered voice said.
I blinked away the water to try to identify the speaker. The face that belonged to the voice was on the edge of my mind. The name that belonged to the face was on the tip of my tongue.
“Where is who?” I asked as I fished around for the name.
A husky chuckle. “Wrong answer.”
Bright, shocking pain tore through my brain. Ripped it open and poured gasoline on it before someone lit a match and tossed it in there to set the whole thing on fire.
I tried to move. Tried to evade that all-consuming pain. I was stuck. Unable to move anything but my head as my vocal cords tried to escape the fiery pyre of my scorching body.
As quickly as it started, the pain vanished.
“Where is she?” the man with the broken voice asked again.
I blinked, tried to push the pain aside. The man’s face swam into focus as the reverberating agony eased the slightest degree. “Massimo? What the fuck?”
A smile pulled at his mouth. “Wrong answer again.”
This time I got to watch as he laid the long, black tube against my chest. It sparked and arced with blue light right before it touched my skin. Excruciating pain fried my brain synapses.
I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t see. I could only feel. And it was sheer hell.
Just as the darkness began to close over my mind, the pain stopped.
“Where is she?” he asked again. No inflection. No emotion.
I shook my head. “How the fuck should I know?”
His smirk promised more pain. More agony.
I tried to jerk back. To escape. To think. “I left her at the shop. I left her at the shop.” I almost tripped over the words. “She was fine when I left her there.” I hadn’t been this close to begging in a very long time. He would regret this.
I’d make sure of it.
Massimo shook his head. “Not good enough. We’ve been calling her all fucking morning. No answer. Now her phone isn’t even ringing. It’s going straight to voicemail. She missed her party. The book cake is still in the cooler. I’m going to ask you again. Where is she?”
My mind reeled as the bourbon I’d downed last night created a blank fog of my memories. “I swear. I dropped her off at the shop.” I didn’t remember anything after getting home and taking that first mouthful of alcohol.
What preceded that alcohol, I remembered with teeth-clenching crystal clarity. I wasn’t going to share those facts with the mob enforcer currently zapping me with a modified cattle prod. I might be stupid, but I wasn’t an idiot.
“What time?”
“Right around ten.”
He bared his teeth. “It was ten at night in Oldtown and you dropped her off at her car without waiting to see that she got off okay?” He laid the prod against my chest again.
My bowels loosened as my mouth worked to loose the scream that stalled in my seized throat.
I gulped air by the lungful as he pulled the implement from my body. All I could do was breathe as I tried to get my brain to work. “Aren’t there security cameras over there or something?”
He shook his head. “They were broken sometime in the last two days. We only found out when we went to go view the footage.”
My brow furrowed. “How were they broken?”
He shrugged.
“You come into my house, stab me with a cattle prod, and you still don’t even have basic information?” As soon as I got free, I was going to beat this man to death. Stupid. All of them were stupid. And so quick to torture people. I shuddered as he waved the cattle prod from his hand.
He shook his head again. A simple slide right to left. Nothing else. No expression. Nothing.
“Let me loose and I’ll figure out where she went.” Fuckers didn’t even know how to use the city’s security system. What good were they as a mafia if they didn’t even know how to exploit the natural weaknesses of the constantly recorded footage that tracked every inch of this city?
He studied me for long minutes.
I raised my eyes to meet his gaze. “Do you really have time to judge me right now? If she’s been missing all morning, then I’m assuming she’s in trouble. Let me go.” I tried to keep the fear out of my voice. The dread from sinking into my brain.
If something had happened to her because I’d gotten my feelings hurt, they wouldn’t have to hurt me. I’d do it for them. Gladly.
He took a knife from his pocket, twirled it in and between his fingers with studied movements. “Mess with me and I will kill you.”
I nodded.
He cut through the duct tape holding me to one of the chairs from my office.
As soon as I was free, I was up. I was weak and wobbly, but I was on my feet. I took one unsteady step and launched my fist through the air at his face. He’d had it coming.
He ducked back, easily dodging my blow. He raised his free hand. A knife glinted in the lights of my bedroom. With a slight smile
that did more to brighten his dark eyes, he lifted his hand and plunged the knife into my side. He pulled it out just as quickly. “Next one will be in your kidney. Find her. Now.”
Another streak of heat surged through me. Thick, warm blood slid down my side. I sucked in a breath as I pressed a hand to the wound. “You deserved it.”
He nodded as he handed me a towel. “Undoubtedly. But you are not my executioner. Move.” He pushed me ahead of him. “It’s a flesh wound. I made sure not to go all the way through. Five stitches and you will be good as new.”
I tripped as we moved from my bedroom to my office. Rafe was sitting at my fucking kitchen island, a bagel smeared with cream cheese in his mouth. He finished chewing as he watched me stumble across the hall.
“I’ll stitch you up when you find her. Chop, chop, son.” He stuffed another bite in his mouth, his dark eyes cold as a winter’s night.
Whatever rapport or social capital I’d earned with these men was down the fucking toilet. I was now an obstacle in their path to get Willow back. My Willow back.
Using the focus techniques I’d learned from too young of an age, I zeroed in on the task at hand. Finding Willow. I had to find her. Had to apologize. Had to save her.
My brain chose that moment to flare with a migraine that shut down all vision in my right eye. “I need some water,” I called to Massimo.
“I don’t care. Find her.”
I gritted my teeth as I tried to apply more pressure to the wound in my side. “That’s going to take longer now that I can’t see out of my right eye. Hangover migraine. Get me some water, an orange, and I’ll be good as new. I’ll start combing the system, but I’m telling you, I need those things. Now.” I pushed into the office, fell against the doorjamb with my bad side.
A high whistle of pain escaped my mouth as I lost control of the agony that flooded my body.
I pushed it away. Shoved it in a box for later.
Willow.
Her name became a chant as I sat at my computer and booted it up.
Willow.
Her face became the touchstone I kept in my mind’s eye to guide me.
