Page 91

ADRIAN

I glanced down at my watch, then back up at Marisela’s face. Twenty minutes after dislodging the scissors and she was already exhibiting significant pallor. Her lips starting to turn blue, her breaths shallow, and her eyes struggling to stay open.

My disgruntled little patient was declining fast. The blood loss affecting her much more rapidly than it should have been, even if I took into account the alcohol she chugged for breakfast. The baseline dehydration and anemia working to my advantage as cortisol and epinephrine flooded her system.

Increasing her anxiety and in turn her blood flow.

Her body was doing everything it could to protect itself. Unfortunately, those same measures were only helping to expedite her quick descent into hypovolemic shock.

She had the ability to put an end to this battle of wills, if she politely asked me to stitch her up. Her pride wouldn’t allow her to do it. Which was fine. One of us had all the time in the world, and it sure as hell wasn’t the one with a gaping wound in their thigh.

“Fuck you…” she mumbled under her breath, her words slurring in a way that had me pushing off the wall and stepping forward to sling her over a shoulder.

I could feel the warmth of her blood seeping through my shirt as I carried her back down the hall, stopping at Bugs’s door and pushing it open with the tip of my shoe.

He peered up from his computer screen, both hands thankfully in full view as he glanced from my face to Marisela’s ass, which I just now noticed was bare, the material of her skirt bunching around her waist and exposing everything she didn’t have underneath it .

“Went that well, huh?” He smirked.

I crossed an arm over my chest, using my palm to cover her. “I have some things to take care of. Keep an eye on Casper. Make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid,” I grunted.

“I’m not his keeper,” Bugs replied, reminding me just how young he was and old I fucking felt.

“No. You’re not. You’d do well to remember you’re not Donnie’s either,” I stressed before adding, “That doesn’t make it any less of a team effort, though.”

He nodded once, his fingers slamming against the keyboard as I clicked the door closed again.

These kids were gonna be the death of me. If my little lamb didn’t get to me first.

I flicked on the light, taking several long strides until I was standing in the middle of the room.

Padded walls, no windows, a few medical devices essential for ensuring our guest’s comfort, and a single metal-framed bed off to one side.

A cell originally designed to quarantine well-off tuberculous patients while everyone else was lined up on thin cots along the main floor.

It was then used to confine the sanitorium’s criminally insane in the 1950s after the epidemic became less widespread and expansive units were no longer needed.

Briarwood offered the land and space most of the asylums didn’t, and so the focused turned from overall health to full-on confinement.

A dumping ground for the city’s lost and unwanted souls, until Hare and Burke decided the most dangerous residents would be better off hidden away in the basement.

That was before I’d found them, of course. Before I’d helped reinvent this place from the inside out. Making it less Bedlam and more Dr. Frankenstein .

Now we used these rooms as private accommodations. These walls for research and development. The former patients having all been transferred to other facilities or lost in the shuffle of mismanaged paperwork. Patients like Donnie and Casper and Bugs and a few others who stayed behind or escaped.

I didn’t care to track them down. Treating the mind was never of interest to me.

It wasn’t the vision I saw for Briarwood after I took over.

Not as a surgeon specializing in reconstructive medicine.

In transformation. And I transformed those boys, eased what was ailing them even if it was for my own benefit.

The same way I’d transformed the figure staring back at me from across the room. I guess he really wasn’t staring. He’d need eyes to do that. More like facing in my direction. Then again, he didn’t have much of a face left…

But he still had ears so he could hear me, a nose so that he could smell it whenever he pissed himself from the tiny orifice I’d created at the bottom of his torso.

And one arm with two fingers. He didn’t need more than two to grip on to a pen.

He didn’t need legs either—those were sold off to a very gracious amputee for far more than they were worth.

Some rich fucker who’d gotten drunk and skied himself into a tree.

Cash was cash after all. And my interests required lots of it.

I had to admit it was difficult staying anonymous. Reading article after article call me a monster. A butcher. When really I was just a businessman like anyone else. But it kept people scared; it also kept me operational. Sometimes bodies needed to be found to make a point.

Not this one though. No one would ever find this one in its entirety .

“She came back just like I told you she would.” I moved closer to the mattress, despite the odor permeating from the overflowing bedpan—the dark brown color telling me his kidneys were of no use to me anymore.

He replied with a gurgle. His tongue had been the second thing to go, his cock the first, so that I could listen to him plead as I sawed it off a few centimeters at a time each day.

After that, it was just too much noise. Too much whimpering and whining from someone who had more testicles than teeth.

“ How’d she look ?” I pivoted on the heel of my shoe, creating that squeaking sound of leather against tile. “I’m glad you asked. Fuckable, as always, but not properly fucked—don’t you worry, she will be.”

I chuckled and he gurgled again. I could only assume that meant he was chuckling along with me.

“My associate treating you well?” I glanced over to the empty IV bag. “Dr. Michaels is preoccupied at the moment, and it appears our patient care here has been lacking. That’s on me. I apologize. I’ll be sure to rectify that… as soon as I’m done fucking your wife, big brother.”

No, the fucker wasn’t dead. He was just… barely alive.

I grinned before flicking off the light, which was more for my benefit anyway, and slammed the door closed. Clanking the lock extra loud so that Tate was sure to hear the ringing in his perfectly-preserved ears long after my footsteps disappeared down the hall.