Page 20 of Exposed (The Wellard Asylum #1)

I ce freezes my chest and every muscle clenches as the van parks outside of the cemetery. The engine stops. The headlights switch off.

I stand next to my mother’s grave.

Don’t breathe or step. Run. Run!

The van doors open. The assistant steps out and pushes up his glasses.

Then Dr. Ambrose emerges.

A pulse pounds in my ears. My toes curl. I hold my breath.

The doctor steps around the van and into the streetlight. We’re a few meters away from each other, and yet the burns flecked across his face are visible, and the deep crater on his cheek flames red.

He offers his hand to me. “Are you ready to come home, love?”

Home?

Love?

Acid curdles in my throat. Flashes of white spot my vision. I have the knife and the poison. This is what I want.

But what if the “right” reasons aren’t enough? What if I’m never free of Dr. Ambrose ?

I take a step back. “No,” I whisper.

Dr. Ambrose opens the gate, the metal hinge creaking.

“I was afraid of this,” he says. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out metal handcuffs. “Benji told me about your argument.”

Benji talked to Dr. Ambrose already? Even after he told me we had to run away?

“I-I don’t believe you,” I stammer.

“You may have your doubts, but we both know where you belong,” he murmurs.

Each word etches into my skin with goosebumps. As my pupils narrow in on him, I realize his features are carved into me. We have the same dark eyes. The same high cheekbones. And my skin is firm where his is loose, but in thirty to forty years, I will probably look just like him.

The world fades: there is no assistant, no cemetery, no empty coffin, no gate keeping us trapped.

It’s only Dr. Ambrose and me.

“I need more time.” I step back and stumble over a headstone. I catch myself and keep walking backward, careful to never turn my back on him, to always keep my eyes on the predator. “I need time.”

“You need more than time, sweet one,” he says. “You need me. ”

I spin around and leap forward, each foot pummeling into the ground. The assistant darts to the side, closing in on me in one direction. Dr. Ambrose circles to the other.

I hide behind the small shack. My heartbeat drums in my ears.

Run! Leave!

I could hop the gate, but there are spikes at the top. I’m not even sure I could pull myself up and over without getting hurt, and the assistant is waiting for me to escape the gates. And Dr. Ambrose is inside of the cemetery, getting closer to me with every second.

The knife.

I can stab him. I can finally get this over with. I can?—

The gravel crunches. I whip around.

Dr. Ambrose fists my hair and drags me between the headstones.

“You can’t do this!” I scream. Hair rips from my scalp. He adjusts his hold. My body leaves a trail of flattened grass. I bang on his arm and dig my nails into his skin. “Help!” I twist my neck. Pain shoots down my spine. “Someone, please?—”

Dr. Ambrose drops me. I collapse on the ground, then flip over onto my hands and knees, pushing myself up. He kicks me in the stomach so hard, I roll and fall into a hole.

The coffin thuds, then the lid knocks into my head.

I heave, the wind knocked out of me. Somehow, I stand up.

I pull the pocketknife out, flick it open, and hide it in the waistband of my leggings.

I accidentally jab my leg with the pointed tip.

I’m probably bleeding, but I don’t feel it. I have to be prepared.

Dr. Ambrose jumps into the coffin, his weight crashing into the wood. He hovers over me, caging me in his darkness.

My chest deflates. His eye sockets deepen to black, like shadowed caverns in the night. He sneers down his nose.

“You’ve been obsessed with your mother ever since you found out who she was,” he says.

He unzips his pants. His peeling cock is hard, a dried corn husk shedding its skin, and my legs spread apart even as I tremble against the dirt wall. He angles forward, crowding me.

“Did you truly think you would accidentally stumble upon an old copy of your birth certificate with her name?” he asks. “You only found out who she was because I wanted you to.”

My throat constricts. I’m poisoned by his scent: disinfectant, sourness, dirt. He grips my neck. I press my arms to my side, the knife digging into my skin. I cross my fingers, pleading he doesn’t notice the weapon. Not yet.

He leers at me. “Answer me honestly, sweet one. Do you think she wanted you?”

My vision blurs. I clench my eyes shut. “Dr. Ambrose, please?—”

“She told me to abort you. Begged me, in fact. She couldn’t bear the thought of bringing another life into this cruel world. It wasn’t up to her though.”

He squeezes my neck tighter; I gulp down my spit. I clasp the knife’s handle; he doesn’t notice. He bares his jagged teeth.

“I injected my seed into her because I knew a woman like you would eventually come to me,” he says. “I’ve been experimenting for years to see whether depravity is nature or nurture, and though I’ve found evidence to steer me both ways, you, Violet, are nature. ”

I grit my teeth. “No!”

“Did you know I kept her in a cage for the entire duration of her pregnancy?” His smile widens.

“Of course you do. You had your idiot boyfriend steal my files. But do you know why I kept her in the cage?” He winks.

“I couldn’t let her take away what’s mine.

I couldn’t let you die due to some foolish attempt at mercy. ”

I am not his.

I pull the knife out and ram it forward. The sharp edge cuts his chest, but before it penetrates, he grabs my wrist, cinching it midair.

I shove harder, but I can’t move.

A spot of blood seeps through his lab coat.

He smirks down at me, then squeezes my wrist tighter, and tighter, until the pain blinds me.

He’s going to crush me.

I cry as I drop the knife. Finally, he loosens his grip on my wrist.

“Oh, sweet one,” he says. “If you truly want to kill me, you’re going to have to try harder than that.”

Panic floods me. I reach for the top of the grave and jump, clutching the dirt. Each handful sends clumps of earth hailing down. He rips me from the wall.

My eyes burn, but I snarl at him. “Fuck you?—”

He tackles me to the coffin. My lungs compress and strain for air. He tears down my leggings and begins to mount me. I reach around for the knife, scrambling for anything to help me survive. But his cock impales me, and as he props himself up on his elbows, he grins, like he knows he’s won.

“Looking for this?” He raises the knife, pressing it against my throat.

“Tell me, freak. Does your cunt get wet when you’re forced to meet the potential of your death?

” The knife pierces my skin, the tiniest trickle of blood tracing my neck like a bead of sweat.

I moan, and he snaps his teeth. “It didn’t take anything for me to slide inside of your filthy hole just now.

You want me to hurt you with a knife. You want me to fucking take you,” he growls.

Tears drown me, and finally, I let go, sinking into the wooden exterior crowding me. My mother’s coffin becomes my cradle, and Dr. Ambrose becomes my home without a door. A locked cage without a key. He is the embodiment of every messed-up thought in my brain.

And he is exactly what I want.

“Don’t move, or I may cut you even more, you pathetic piece of trash,” he says. I whimper and shudder. His cock digs a hole inside of me. “You came from a freak, you are a freak, and soon, you’ll be nothing but my fucking freak.”

My chest crushes my heart, and as each valve pulses, pushing blood through my vessels, I tremble so hard, the pill container smashes into my thighs.

I still have the poison. It’s not over yet.

But there’s something inside of me that wants to give up, to accept everything. Wouldn’t it be easier to give everything to this man? A man so obsessed he chased and captured me, even after I burned him. Even when I tried to stab him.

A thought echoes across my consciousness: I will never be the person I was before Dr. Ambrose. I am a living corpse, and this is a symbolic death.

He swipes his hand across my face, then licks the tears from his hands, his fingernails black with dirt, and I realize why his hands have been filthy this whole time: he dug up my mother’s grave before the initial examination.

The proof of his obsession has always been right in front of me.

He stole my dead mother, and he did it to control me.

“Fuck you!” I scream. I don’t know if I’m mad at him or myself, but I’m frustrated, and it’s the only thing I can say to hold on to my old self. “Fuck you, you fucking?—”

“You are fucking me, sweet one,” Dr. Ambrose says with a cold laugh. Goosebumps ripple over my skin as his cock jabs inside of me. He puts his lip to my ear, the knife pressed against my neck. “And soon, fucking me will be the only joy in your miserable existence.”