Page 1 of Lonely (Wellard Asylum #4)

I had seen plenty of patients in my career.

They came from all walks of life. Old and young.

Rich and poor. Some were dangerous, others harmless.

None of it mattered when insanity became a companion on the road to Hell.

Some had been locked inside their decaying minds for decades; others were lucid enough to participate in group therapy and form shallow friendships.

Aware of the young man seated in front of me, I slipped on my reading glasses and opened the patient’s file on the desk.

“Mr. Carter.” I peered at him.

He was young. Twenty-three years and sixteen days, to be exact.

His unruly dark hair contrasted with his pale skin and piercing green eyes. Tattooed knuckles hinted at a rebellious nature. He was well-built beneath his generic outfit, I noted, as he studied the certificates on the far wall.

“Let me introduce myself, Carter,” I said. “I’m James, and I’ll be overseeing your treatment.”

“You have a lot of certificates,” he said, swinging his eyes in my direction.

I removed my glasses, set them carefully on the desk, and eased back into my seat.

Autumn rain smattered the window to our left, and I let the sound unknot the tension in my shoulders.

When I’d woken that morning, sunlight had streamed through the blinds.

A rarity in that part of the country. But it hadn’t lasted.

As I drove up the winding path to the asylum, heavy clouds had already begun to roll in and smother the daylight.

“I’ve worked here a long time,” I replied, and he let his gaze drift around the room while jiggling his knee.

“Do you know why you’re here, Carter?” I asked, interlocking my fingers on my lap.

It was late afternoon. A storm was raging. The gloomy weather darkened the room. I rose from my seat to shut the window. The nurse who had been in earlier must have opened it to let the room breathe. She always complained about the stuffy air.

It shut with a click, and I lingered for a moment, watching the rain punish the glass. Behind me, the young man’s outfit rustled softly in the silence as he shifted in the armchair. The nurse had given him sedatives to calm his anxiety, but he still fidgeted.

Most patients were agitated when they first arrived at Wellard. No one liked their freedom confiscated, especially not young blood like Carter, with all that raging testosterone.

“Do you know why you’re here?” I asked again, as thunder rumbled in the distance like a bowling ball.

When I glanced over my shoulder, he was looking down at his hands, rubbing his thumb over his tattooed knuckles. Another nervous trait. Veins mapped a network over his hands and forearms.

I stared a moment too long, thinking back to when I was a young man with energy buzzing in my veins. I used to be strong.

“Are you always this quiet, Carter?” I asked, leaning back against the windowsill.

A lightning strike filled the room with a brief silver flash, but it was gone just as quickly. Moments later, as he glanced at me, thunder rattled the window. The storm was moving closer.

Strands of curly dark hair obscured his brows, giving him a youthful look—an intoxicating mix of sexual maturity, strength, and naivety.

I imagined plenty of young women had run their fingers through his hair.

One thing was for certain: the nurses would gossip about this one when they thought I couldn’t hear.

The walls were thin. I heard everything.

“I’d like to talk about your parents.”

“No,” he said, dismissing me as he looked back down at his hands.

“No?” I asked, straightening up.

Another lightning strike streaked across the clouds, and he flinched.

I studied him as I walked closer, noting the breadth of his shoulders and the dark scruff along his jaw. He looked too big for the armchair. His frame swamped the deep green leather.

“Why don’t you want to discuss your family?”

He finally looked at me, his nostrils flaring. “It’s none of your business.”

Touché.

I circled behind his chair, hands in my pockets.

It wasn’t unusual for patients to take time to open up.

Time and patience. After all, it took trust to admit the horrifying truth: the world was full of horrors, but there was no place darker than the mind.

And no truth was harder to swallow than the truth of who we were at our core.

With time, this young man would have to face himself and what he had done to those three men he killed. But not until he was ready.

“You’ll soon learn that I’m not the enemy here,” I said as I came to stand beside the armchair.

He white-knuckled the armrests, and I studied his hair, imagining how the strands might feel between my fingers.

It looked thick but soft. I had once had thick hair too, before time touched me with its cruel, gnarled fingers.

But now, when I studied my tired face in the mirror each morning, I was confronted with graying hair and a receding hairline.

At least I wasn’t completely bald. Not yet.

The urge to sift my fingers through the strands had me fisting my hands in my pockets. “I’m here to help you,” I said, and he looked up at me. “Admittedly, the past cannot be erased. What’s done is done. But you can atone for your sins. That’s why you’re under my care.”

A muscle jumped in his jaw, but he remained silent, and my fingers twitched in my pockets as seconds stretched into minutes.

“Although,” I continued with a soft sigh, if only to break the trance that rooted me to the floor, “I can’t do it without your help. You must want to get better. Here at Wellard, we have the means to treat your disorder. But treatment only goes so far.”

Sliding my hands from my pockets, I crouched before him. “You have to trust me.”

His green eyes excavated my face in the silence that followed.

I thought back on all the unfortunate people with troubled pasts who had sat in this chair.

Some never left these grounds, doomed to aimlessly roam the hallways.

Ghosts of their former selves. Others, like this young man, were contained because they were deemed a danger to society.

The mind was a maze with many twists and turns. This man alone could lead us to the exit.

Until I deemed him fit to leave, he would remain within these walls, for his safety and for society’s.

He might not have realized it yet, but he was mine until I chose to set him free.

That word, mine , whispered in the recesses of my mind. Outside, the storm continued to batter the stone walls of the asylum while raindrops trailed down the glass like tears.

The young man flicked his eyes between mine, his face expressionless. When he looked away, dismissing me, I reached out and placed a reassuring hand on his shoulder, feeling him stiffen beneath my touch.

Power thrummed beneath my fingertips, subdued by the strong medications coursing through his veins.

But it was still there. I could feel it.

This young man was in his prime—strong and capable—with big hands, muscular thighs, and a broad chest. As my gaze drifted down the length of his body, his chest heaved with the effort of controlling his emotions.

He fisted his hands on his lap, drawing my attention to the bulging veins and his white knuckles.

Violence simmered beneath his skin. I pictured him unleashing the evil inside him, letting it spill out and wreak havoc like he had on those nights. The judge overseeing his trial had owed me a favor and granted me access to the crime scene photographs.

All that blood. Splattered everywhere.

Red. Red. Red.

There was beauty in destruction. The Devil had good taste. He had proved as much when he chose this fine specimen to act as his vessel.

I could almost taste it . . . the evil in him.

The urge to bury my face in the crook of his neck and breathe in his pheromones stirred my dick.

Yes, sending him here had been the right decision.

A fine young man like him, with such capable hands, would have been popular in prison.

I could only imagine how the others would have eyed him in the shower, seduced by the curve of his toned ass, narrow waist, and broad shoulders as he scrubbed his hair.

At least here, under my care, he was protected from predatory men.

I retook my seat behind the desk, pretending to be engrossed in his file while palming my solid length beneath the table.

Red. Red. Red.

When I looked up, he was staring out the window with a faraway look. What’s going on inside his head? I wondered. What does a young man like him think about?

Thoughts were pesky, elusive things. Always hidden just out of reach. How I wished they were solid. If they were, I could have extracted and examined them under a microscope. I would have taken my time, dissecting each one until I reached the core of his being.

I shook my head, disgusted by the twitch of my dick at the thought of removing the top of his skull just to poke at his brain, the squishy feel of it beneath my fingertips.

It was useless. I couldn’t taste his thoughts. Not even if I cut his brain into neat cubes and consumed each piece like cheese and crackers. No, they belonged to him alone.

“Are we done here?” he asked, his husky voice cutting through the heavy rain and distant thunder.

The storm was moving away.

I wet my lips, watching the flutter of his pulse at his throat, just above his collar. “Maybe next time,” I said softly, “you’ll be willing to share some of your thoughts with me, Carter.”

Legs parted, he said nothing, but I couldn’t help noticing how the cotton strained against his muscular thighs. They looked hard. All of him did.

A knock on the door tore me from my straying thoughts, and I peered past his shoulder to see Nurse Anna smiling. “Are you ready for your next patient?”

I frowned at the stray lock of hair that had escaped her bun. She noticed and reached up self-consciously, then lowered her hand as a flush spread across her freckled cheeks.