Page 14

Sean

“She doesn’t have a uterus.”

I narrow my eyes on Jones as he explains his findings from the exam he performed. “What do you mean, ‘she doesn’t have a uterus?’”

He stares at me flatly as he answers, “Exactly what I said. There’s no uterus. It’s gone.”

“Why?”

“I can’t answer that, but I suspect that the likely explanation was removed, along with her uterus. You’d have to ask her about it.”

Jace scoffs from where he’s stationed next to me in the infirmary. He knows as well as I do that Louhi won’t tell us shit.

“Did you find—or not find—anything else?”

He shakes his head. “She’s healthy, all things considered.”

I mutter a thanks, and he leaves us alone. Jace tugs off his mask, and I replicate the action. My friend leans against the metal table that Louhi was strapped to just a few minutes ago, crossing his brawny arms over his chest.

“So, what are we going to do about the hellcat in Eight?”

I blow out a heavy breath. There’s no denying that Lou’s been a problem today. A huge fucking problem, to be precise.

She killed Stuco. She stabbed him in the chest as if that meant nothing to her. But that’s not what sent a chill down my spine. No, it was the minacious smile she gave me when our eyes locked. Her expression told me that she’d love to do it again.

The look on her face as she woke up on the table is haunting me. Sure, I was across the room, but the room is small, and I could easily make out the violence and terror swirling in her dark eyes as she attempted to combat the drugs in her system. She was afraid. I hadn’t seen that look on her face before. There wasn’t a trace of it when I practically drowned her. It wasn’t there when the scorpion tiptoed over her. It was even absent when I torched her alabaster skin.

But there was something about this experience that frightened her, and I’m determined to learn what it was. Was it the fact that she was naked and exposed? Or maybe it was the fact that she was restrained and paralyzed, even temporarily? Or was it Jones and his examination?

“We’re going to experiment, Jace.”

I’m bent over the computer with headphones in as I watch Louhi on the monitor. I’ve gotten in this disgusting habit of watching her whenever I can. I can’t resist the temptation to see what she’s up to. Mostly, it’s boring. She’s either working out, reciting song lyrics, or talking through the process of baking fucking bread. Today is different, though.

I rewound the tape to see what she’s been up to since Jace and Vincent took her catatonic body back to her cell. She was still unreachable in the same way she was when I removed her toenails. I’ve never seen a prisoner check out for that long before, and I find that fascinating.

She swipes at her face. Fuck, is she crying ? Why? Did Jones hurt her? I’m still attempting to decipher the meaning of her tears when she begins to undress and inspect her body. Does she truly not know what was done to her? Damn, she must’ve really gone elsewhere in her mind.

Something bumps my shoulder, and I turn to find Jace. Pulling the headphones off, I look up at him from where I’m sitting.

“Chopper is five minutes out. You sure you don’t want me to stay?”

“Nah, man. You should take your leave.”

He nods, and I give him a note to pass to my mother, when he inevitably sees her. There’s nothing but the usual shit in the letter, but it will make her happy and that’s all I ever want for my mom. She deserves a better son than me. At least she has Callie.

Jace nods and stalks out the door, leaving me alone in the barracks. I’m about to resume the video, when a loud crash from down the hall echoes against the concrete. Quickly, I exit out of the camera feed and rush toward the sound.

The first thing I notice is the overturned folding table in the middle of the room, a toppled chair adjacent and Borman towering over it, his breathing heavy and his fists clenched at his sides. Jones and Davis stand across from him.

Dammit, they must’ve told him about Stuco.

“I’m going to kill her,” Borman snarls as he picks up a chair to hurl at what, I don’t know.

Stuco and Borman were tight. Probably as close as me and Jace. I’d be rioting if something happened to Jace and certainly something as violent and senseless as the way Stuco died. But he was foolish, reckless. Louhi became a caged animal the second she stepped into the infirmary. I should’ve done a better job of securing her the moment I noticed that something was off. That’s on me. His death is on my shoulders, and that’s a burden I’ll carry with me every day. I’ve already added it to the invisible pack strapped to my back, weighing me down.

I step in front of the snarling soldier, getting in his face. “Stand the fuck down, Borman. ”

The vein in his neck protrudes, pulsing in time with his ire, and his chest heaves with uneven, ragged breaths as his body practically vibrates. His eyes flare with enmity, and while I fucking get it, destroying government property isn’t going to help anyone. He must come to that conclusion too, because he tosses the chair aside and marches from the room, with Jones following him. Better him than me. I’m not good with feelings.

“What the hell happened? I told you to wait for me and that I’d tell him,” I gripe at Davis.

He wears a hangdog expression, knowing he and Jones went against my order. I wait far longer than I should to receive an answer, but eventually, Davis utters, “He knew something was up when Stuco didn’t come back with us, and he asked us point blank. We couldn’t lie to him.”

“You should’ve had him come to me.” I stretch my neck from side to side, attempting to quell my ever-mounting stress, before sighing. “I’ll deal with you three later. For now, go get Peter from Block Three and take him to the playpen.”

He nods and scurries away to obey my order—this time. Peter is one of my favorite prisoners to toy with. He’s a pedophile and trafficker. I’ve already gleaned all the information I can from him, but he always screams so pleasantly, and I’m in the mood to wreak some havoc.

I didn’t kill Peter; however, I thought about it. I thought about it the entire time I was strategically breaking the various bones in his hands. I thought about it while he screamed for mercy. I thought about it when he pissed himself. In fact, I’m still thinking about it, even now, as I lie in bed. The only thing that stopped me was the knowledge that I wouldn’t be able to fuck him up again. Playtime with Peter would be over. I’d end his suffering. I’d complete his life cycle. I’m not ready for that.

Unlike what was evidenced on Lou’s face this morning, I don’t enjoy killing anyone, only inflicting the maximum amount of pain and torture. I live for the sound of my victim’s screams, the way it fills the time and space around me. Like a vacuum, I’m sucked into their anguish. But I don’t share in their agony, nor do I feel an ounce of remorse. Yeah, I know that’s fucked up. I’m fucked up. Some might even call me a sadist, and those people would be one hundred and ten percent correct. I more than enjoy my job. I derive pleasure from knowing someone is suffering by my hand. I like hurting people. Their terror, unwillingness, and hurt excite me.

The second I step foot in the playpen, I shred all traces of empathy, like removing a heavy coat in a warm room. I can still empathize with others when I’m not in that headspace, although I typically have to work a little harder to get in touch with the more human side of myself. But it’s there. The dark part is always easier to tap into. It’s almost like a split personality, except that it isn’t. I’ve had that checked with a non-army therapist.

When Jace and I were still Special Forces, our unit was deployed on a mission that went south and tragically ended with three guys in boxes draped with American flags. As a result, the army ordered the rest of us to see a shrink. It was in one of those sessions that the therapist stumbled upon my darker desires—desires I’d never breathed to life before, no matter how much I wanted to—and she’s the one who threw out the “sadist” label. After that, I stopped sharing my thoughts with her and she never learned another goddamn thing about me, but the damage had been done.

I think I knew I was a sadist before she ever tossed out the term. How else do you explain that I got harder than concrete any time I’d pinch a woman’s nipple a little too hard, causing her to yelp in pain? Or the fact that nearly every fantasy I’d ever had consisted of me hurting a woman…and liking it ?

However, once that damned word was swimming in my brain, it became difficult to pretend that regular, plain sex would do it for me anymore. As the impulse to hurt the women I was fucking became all-consuming, the frequency with which I got laid slowed significantly. Now, I only have sporadic sex, and when I do, I exhaust myself trying to shut down my dark urges.

The scariest part is that it went beyond sex. I wanted to hurt people, see how far I could push them before they cried, begging me to stop.

I mentally fought that diagnosis for a long time, denying the sadist part of myself. After all, I’d never once acted on those impulses, and I was surviving just fine. Right?

I wasn’t a bad guy, and I never wanted to become someone’s worst nightmare. Shit, I was Special Forces, defending America against Her enemies.

At least that was the case until the army saw my file and sent me here. The only silver lining is that Jace got sent here, too. I suppose there was a reason Jace and I struck up an immediate friendship all those years ago, like our brains sensed that we had an undivulged darkness in common.

Jace and I realized that telling the shrink our truths and letting her inside our brains was a mistake. One that cost us both.

They began training us, and while having Jace around as the dark parts of ourselves were released from the cages of our minds made things easier, shit was hard . I didn’t want to be the fucked-up guy the army was having me become. I wanted to keep the darkness at bay; I didn’t want to lean into that part of me. I tried to fight it. I didn’t want it, but once I tasted the ecstasy of torture, I knew there was no locking that beast away again.

If someone had done tests on my brain while I learned how to torture people, they would’ve seen the joy and pleasure sensors lighting up like fucking fireworks. I swear I’ve never jacked off more in my entire life than in those eight months—until Lou had the audacity to show the hell up here, anyway.

Rolling onto my side, I wrestle with my pillow to get comfortable enough to sleep, though I’m sure that it’s going to be a long night. I wish my deep appreciation for sleep was enough to lull me into unconsciousness. I’ve been sleeping less since she arrived, just as I’ve been fisting my cock more.

Motherfuck me, I need to pull my shit together.