Page 16

ADRIAN

I glanced down at a pair of bloodied gloves—which funny enough didn’t belong to me this time—before sweeping my glare over what remained of Tate’s nasal cavity.

Red, yellow, and a hint of black. Severe fracturing of the connective tissue and a deviated septum, though that last part could have had as much to do with the repeated blows my knuckles landed on his face as it did with all that coke he liked to snort.

The clumps of dark blood vessels blistering to the surface agreed with me, so did the little perforations in the lining of his mucosa.

I continued my visual examination until a suctioning sound had me looking up into the face of my mentor.

Thick brimmed glasses perched on top of a long protruding nose, accompanied by a tuft of facial hair that may as well have been whiskers.

I couldn’t see John’s mustache beneath his surgical mask but I could picture it.

Oddly thin and bushy at the same time. Just like I could picture the smirk I knew he was wearing along with it.

Where I enjoyed dissecting the human body and discovering all the secrets each layer told me, this fucker got off on it.

You could see his cock dancing in his light-blue scrubs, bouncing around with the weight of his overfilled balls whenever he stepped away from the table to reach for another piece of gauze.

The guy had no shame. What he did have was a weird aversion to underwear.

I should be disturbed. At the very least, a little uncomfortable. But the truth was, I knew enough about the way the brain worked to also know that there wasn’t much you could do when it came to ignoring a natural stimulus. And this shit was his.

I mean, he really, really liked his patients immobile. Corpse-like.

I’d be concerned about the welfare of all those stiffs in the morgue next door if I wasn’t so sure he liked his bodies warm.

Wet. My eyes drifted back to the layers of peeled flesh in front of us.

And sticky. John liked his patients warm, wet, and sticky.

I liked mine conscious, so they could feel everything I did to them.

Take that how ever you want.

He shot out an arm in a grabby motion before barking his next order. “Suction.”

No matter how much I wanted to tell him he could suction that shit with his lips for all I cared, I kept my expression neutral as I skimmed the plastic tubing over the opening of the incision and listened to the gurgling noise it made as it vacuumed up the pooling blood.

Though it would have been much better if Tate was the one gurgling instead of having his pretty fucking face pieced back together with cadaver bone—probably less-than-ethically sourced from that same morgue I wasn’t concerned about.

But only the best for big brother.

John’s methods might have been… unconventional. Definitely immoral. But I had to admit the guy did decent work. Maybe that was what happened when you enjoyed what you did. And, like I said, Dr. John Rath really enjoyed what he did.

Despite all the swelling and discoloring of the skin, which was no worse than any other cosmetic procedure he’d undergone in the past, my half-brother looked almost human again.

Ironic, considering Tate was as much a monster as I was.

Just a different type. Not so ironic when you remembered that most monsters came wrapped up in pretty packaging.

A few weeks and no one would remember I’d beaten him to a pulp. I’d remember though. I dreamed about that shit. About the feel of cartilage crumbling under the force of my fist, the way he squealed like the pig he claimed my mother to be…

Thirty minutes later, Tate was stitched closed, bandaged up, and rolling out. Heading to his private recovery suite to sit pampered and privileged until our father deemed him ready to see the light of day again.

I ripped off my gloves and tossed them into the red bin before making my way towards the industrial sink. The squeaking of a pair of designer loafers on the linoleum tiles told me John was following me. His mask gone and the bulge in his pants still waving around like a stray cord on a flagpole.

You didn’t have to be discrete when you thought you owned everyone. John didn’t own me, though. I was just on loan from my father.

“Your old man thinks it’s time you come work for me.

Keep your hands busy so they stop getting dirty.

” The fucker talked at me, not to me. John never bothered to look at me when he spoke.

Because you never looked a dog in the eye—I was guessing for fear it might bite you.

And that’s what I was to my father and his associates.

A dog to be leashed, biding my time till I was able to chew myself free.

I lifted a brow, even though he’d yet to make eye contact. “At the hospital?” It shouldn’t have been a question but it was. This surgical “spa” as John liked to call it was only one of many buildings with his name on it. And that was the shit I knew about.

He finally turned his head to peer up at me as a sick grin tipped up one side of his face. The other side was dead from all the Botox he used. Just another reminder that a doctor should never become his own patient. Those skills didn’t translate well when you were looking in a mirror.

“No, not at the hospital,” he replied in that mocking tone of his.