Page 13 of Even Robots Die (Even Ever After #3)
Florentine
B rice didn’t tell me to follow him, but since someone is blocking the path back to my room when I get out of the dining room, I follow him anyway.
Maybe I’m finally getting the explanation I’ve been waiting for since I’ve been kidnapped.
Oh, I know. I served myself on a silver platter, but that doesn’t change the fact I’m now Brice’s hostage.
When I cross the threshold of the room he’s waiting in, I gasp.
The room looks like a very clean lab. It’s not something someone would expect inside a medieval castle so it surprises me a bit, but the more I look at the room, the more I feel unsettled.
On the walls there are pictures of open bodies showing muscles, and I don’t mean drawings or those high resolution AI generated pictures.
No, these look like real pictures of real people opened up just for the sake of science.
I know people used to give their bodies to science for research, but it doesn’t look like that’s what these pictures are.
Because those cracked open people … they have their eyes wide open and I can see the terror through them.
I wrap my arms around myself as a chill spreads through my body.
I don’t know what Brice wants in this room, but I already hate it.
“Sit,” he tells me, gesturing to the stool next to the only cot in the room.
I comply, but move the stool away from the cot enough for me not to touch it as I do. If those pictures are real, I’m pretty sure people have been cut open alive on that cot. I refuse to even touch it.
“Why are we here?” I ask, a shiver coursing through my body again.
I hate it here.
“This is where Michael kept me,” Brice says, without missing a beat.
Wait. What?
He decided to live right where he was tortured? What kind of masochist does that?
I really want to be understanding and not remark on it, but my mouth doesn’t comply with my brain and before I know it, I’m saying something I might regret.
“And you’re crazy enough to stay here?”
“I need the reminder,” he answers, as if my question wasn’t a direct attack on his sanity.
“Explain,” I demand as I get up.
I hate that stool. I hate that room. If he doesn’t give me an explanation, and fast, I’ll make sure he regrets it.
I don’t have my guns with me anymore, but that doesn’t mean I won’t find something in my arsenal that will work on him.
There is a small smile at the corner of his lips as if he’s mocking me before it disappears and he answers.
“They cut my head open and toyed with my brain. I attacked my best friend because of that. I don’t feel because of that.
And they did all of this with electric shocks,” he tells me, and it’s way more than I expected.
“I need the reminder, or else I might turn into the monster they were trying to create.”
My mouth opens. And closes. And opens again.
I don’t know what to say to that.
It’s fucked up.
This is a freaking mess.
“I don’t do brains,” is the only thing I find myself saying.
Talk about something witty.
“I know that. But I also know that you can work magic with anything electronic …” Brice answers me, but I stop him.
I don’t know what he was going to say, but I don’t want to hear it.
“No. No, I won’t do that. I don’t work on the living. I make things. I repair things. I don’t toy with living, breathing things.”
Remember when I said yesterday that everyone had a price? I was wrong.
There is no way I’m going to play with what’s in his brain. I can see it as clear as day. He wants me to open him up and put probes in his brain and send shocks so I can reverse whatever the birds did to him. I’m not the right person.
“I’m not a freaking surgeon,” I add under my breath. “I’m not competent. Find someone else.”
No matter what price he’s willing to pay—and I’m not even sure he plans to pay me—I’m not doing this.
Fuck you, handsome psycho.