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ADRIAN

“ S o?” John prompted the moment I walked back into the room with the blonde kid’s chart tucked under my arm.

I still wasn’t sure what he wanted from me. More than that, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to give it to him. “Antisocial tendencies, oppositional defiance of authority figures, possibly histrionic. But I’m not a psy?—”

John cut me off with a sharp thwack to the back of the head, hard enough to have my ears ringing.

Something my father used to do to me whenever I got an answer wrong on my homework.

I quickly learned it was better to just accept the blow than to try to dodge it.

But I never lost count. Waiting for the day when I would match their numbers at a rate of two to one.

“If I wanted more of that psychology bullshit, I would have called in one of the useless pricks from the third floor. Did you see his legs? ”

I ground the teeth in my jaw as I did my best to temper my anger. “The result of a severe spinal injury to the L-4,” I recited the findings I’d seen in the kid’s chart. But there was nothing noteworthy about that. The damage was usually irreversible and crippling.

“Congenital analgesia,” John clarified, and suddenly my interest was piqued again.

“Insensitivity to pain,” I muttered more to myself, as my mentor’s eyes lit up like a pedophile playing Santa on Christmas.

“He’s the perfect patient. No need for anesthetics, none of the obtundation that comes with pain management.

We can crack him open and see the effects of nerve manipulation in real time.

” John didn’t even seem to be speaking to me anymore.

His grin wide and his hands moving enthusiastically in the air as he paced the room.

Almost like he could already picture the kid on his table.

“You think we can help him walk again?” It seemed unlikely, but the implications were fascinating. To be able to work without an anesthetic meant you could adjust your incision, keep the spine open and manipulate the connections without having to wait for the proper healing periods between.

“I don’t give a fuck if that brat’s in a diaper for the rest of his life,” John hissed. “We just need to keep him breathing and speaking.” I could see the wheels turning in the fucker’s head. Motivated by lust or greed? I didn’t know which.

“Parental consent?” I pressed, watching John’s teeth clench, much like mine had moments ago. Good, because I was just as irritated with him as he was with me.

“What about it?”

“Do we have to worry about obtaining it?”

“He’s a ward of the state. You should know that,” John snapped. I didn’t know that because it wasn’t in the file—intentional I was sure. “Abandoned by his whore mother and communist father.”

“And what if the kid doesn’t agree to lie still?” I asked, though something told me I did know the answer to that one.

“He doesn’t have a choice. It’s your job to make sure he understands that.”