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ADRIAN

E ach corner seemed to stare back at me, patients roaming the halls like they were one second away from cracking someone’s skull open to find their next meal. Their movements stiff and robotic while the noises they made were like a Romero movie with the sound turned all the way up.

Shit was intentional. Keep the crazies overmedicated and the building understaffed, so there wasn’t anyone around competent enough to ask questions.

That was how John liked it. Fucker didn’t enjoy the challenge of breaking someone as much as I did.

He wanted things easy. Not that I was judging him.

It was more of an observation than anything else.

A fact of life. Some of us were hunters, while others were more inclined to starve if their meat wasn’t chewed for them.

And I wasn’t against watching them choke. It was a benefit of natural selection after all. Picking and choosing which traits benefitted the species survival and which should have been eradicated at birth.

I’d yet to determine what category the men I worked with fell into. Though I was leaning towards a mixture of both.

Burke and Hare used Briarwood as their own personal playground, John positioning himself on the other side of the fence, keen enough to look and not touch, which had never been a problem before. It wasn’t my business. Until they made it my business. By bringing her here.

It didn’t take more than a quick glance at Marisela to know that they’d been hooking her up to that archaic electroconvulsive machine the fuckers dug out of the basement.

Inducing seizures while interrupting the neuropathways in her brain.

It was like pressing the reboot button on your computer over and over again until the damn thing wouldn’t turn on anymore.

“Fuck,” I cursed under my breath, gripping two fistfuls of hair and tugging until the pain was sharp enough to ground me.

I wanted to drag her out of that office, kicking and screaming or calm and sedated if she refused to go willingly.

The couple of vials I had burning a hole in my pocket would have done the trick if Hare tried to stop us.

But that would only get us as far as the first hallway of doors.

He had her locked up on a secured wing. Away from the more…

active patients. Something that was both a relief and an inconvenience.

It was also deliberate as fuck. A way for them to keep her under their thumbs and in their sights .

I slammed the car door shut and peered up at the building taking up most of my rearview, as I willed myself to throw the gear stick into drive and pull away.

She was just a dot of dark hair in the window, watching me maneuver Tate’s old BMW around the circle path until that same dot was nothing more than another memory plaguing my waking hours.

But at least I wasn’t imagining it this time. At least she was alive.

Three hours and a fresh change of clothes later, I had a duffle bag slung over a shoulder, several syringes rolled up in a leather carrier, and next semester’s tuition taking up most of the suitcase I had swinging by my side.

It would have been safer to wire some cash out of one of my offshore accounts.

It also would have been smarter to cover my trail.

Both were luxuries I didn’t have as I grabbed my keys off the hook, only to have my bedroom door flung open and crack me in the face.

Blood trickled down my forehead, wet and sticky, as I tried to clear the haze from my vision without rubbing at my eyes.

When I was finally able to look up from where I was sprawled out on my bedroom floor, I found a familiar face glaring down at me.

White bandages covering the curve of his nose and the underside of his jaw and a twisted smirk pinching his mouth.

A mouth that appeared just as pained as it did satisfied.

“What the fuck do you want, Tate?” I grunted as I rolled over onto my side and used the meat of my palms to push myself upright.

Which aggravated the pounding in my temples and increased the blood flow of the wound dripping over my left eye.

I knew better than to elevate a fresh head injury but I also wasn’t fully conscious yet.

I could hear the sound of his loafers pacing in front of me, his pants swishing with each long stride, back and forth across the small area rug. But I still couldn’t see much of anything past the tunnel vision.

“ At first … I wanted you dead. I wanted to strangle you with my bare hands as you stared up at the same nose you helped piece back together,” he hissed, forcing out a huff of hot air before chuckling to himself.

“I was going to do it too. Use the spare key I made back when your cunt of a mother still had, well, a cunt . Slip in here when you were sleeping and get the job done.” He turned and took a sharp step in the opposite direction.

“But then, I had all those weeks with nothing but four white walls, a few very attentive nurses, and my thoughts. And suddenly, it occurred to me, baby brother.”

“Yeah, and what’s that? The fact that I’d have you knocked on your ass before you made it two steps through the door,” I grunted, trying to stand until a wave of vertigo sent me tumbling back.

Fuck!

I saw the irony, considering he was two steps through the door the moment he sent it flying into my face. I just didn’t care to acknowledge it. Keeping my feet firmly planted in the delusion seemed like the medically sound route to take right now.

“More like the fact that it would be so much more fun to keep you alive, so you could watch…” he trailed off, and I didn’t have to see his face to know that he was gloating.

“Watch what, Tate?” I indulged him. Because the only thing that was going to get me standing again was time. Something I didn’t have.

Instead of answering, he stomped back towards the door and slammed it closed. And then I heard the unmistakable thud of a padlock clinking into place.

Motherfucker…