Page 13 of The King of Hearts (The Raven Group #1)

Marcelo is waiting for me when I walk out of the estate’s doors an hour later. His clothes are impeccable in dark gray trousers, a matching blazer, and a black button-up shirt. His dark hair is pulled back in his usual ponytail.

He stands like a statue beside the black Mercedes with his hands shoved into the pockets of his pants. His one green eye stares at me as I approach.

“Good morning,” I greet with a smile.

“Morning,” he grunts in reply before he turns and opens the back passenger door.

Once I’m settled inside, I set the box from last night on the seat between us. “We’ll be stopping by The Cove when we leave the clinic this afternoon.”

The Cove is my secret spot on the island.

It’s on the opposite side and sits not far from the Ellington Estate on the cliffs.

Decades ago, it belonged to the founders of the island, the Ellingtons.

The rumor is that Miles Ellington gifted it to his wife, Patricia, when she developed agoraphobia and refused to leave their house in the city after she was attacked on the streets one night.

Miles purchased the island and built The Cove to give his wife a safe place to live.

She went into hysterics when anyone but her husband or their two children were around, so the island was her refuge away from the madness in her head.

The Cove was abandoned when Miles had a newer, bigger house built, and it’s been empty since.

I found it one day before I hit my teens while wandering around the island.

Dad and Mom drilled it into my and my brother’s heads to stay away from the Ellington house, but I was always a curious child and liked to explore.

The old imposing mansion on the edge of the cliff scared my young mind, but it didn’t prevent me from walking right up to the gates surrounding the property.

The wrought iron was old and rusty, and on either side of the gate were massive stone wolf heads.

It looked like it was something out of an old gothic movie.

A haunted mansion where ghosts of the past wandered its halls.

Given his wife’s paranoid nature, the household staff only consisted of a cook, a groundsman, and a single guard that Miles hired to keep watch over his wife while he was gone during business trips.

No one knows for sure, but the rumor on the island is that Miles came home one day and found his wife in bed with the guard and murdered them both.

Hacked their bodies into pieces and placed them in the walls of the mansion.

I pull myself out of my musings. Marcelo doesn’t ask what’s in the box. He just briefly glances at it before putting his eyes forward again. That’s why he and I get along so well. He doesn’t ask me things, and I return the courtesy.

He’s never been a big talker, and my thoughts are still consumed by last night, so we spend the short five-minute drive to the clinic in silence.

Once we’re there, we get out of the car and make our way inside.

He follows me from a distance. Close enough should he be needed, but far enough away that I don’t feel like he’s hovering.

I stop by the employee lounge and put my purse in one of the lockers. Leaving the room, I follow the hall down to the entertainment room.

I volunteer here once a week. We don’t have a true hospital on Hollow’s Reef, but the Hollow’s Medical Center acts as one as much as it can with the resources it has.

Within the clinic, there’s a small wing dedicated to people with mental illnesses, and I donate my time during the hours the patients spend here.

“Margie, hey,” I greet the Director of Nursing, who’s sitting behind the desk outside the entertainment room.

She smiles. “I’m glad you’re here. Lena called in because her babysitter had an emergency and couldn’t watch her kids. We’re short-staffed today.”

“Where do you need me?”

“Would you mind visiting Dara for a while?”

“Of course. You know I adore Dara.”

Pushing open one of the double doors, I make my way over to a round table in a corner.

The pretty, petite redhead that sits in one of the chairs is wearing a pair of gray sweatpants and a white V-neck t-shirt.

Her long auburn hair is braided, and the rope hangs down her back.

She sits with her chair pushed back and her hands flat on the table as she glares down at something on the floor in front of her.

Dara Kincaid is twenty-five and has been in the Hollow’s psychiatric ward since she was seventeen.

No one knows what happened to her, and they can’t get the story out of her.

One day, she was a normal young woman with friends, a boyfriend, popular, and made perfect grades in school.

She had been accepted into Harvard and had a bright future ahead of her.

Then it was like a switch was flipped, and she changed.

“Hey, Dara,” I say, approaching her from the side so I don’t startle her. “How are you this morning?”

“Shhh,” she hisses, keeping her head down. She points to a blank spot on the floor, still glaring. “They’re listening. We aren’t supposed to be here.” She keeps her voice a barely audible whisper.

I look down, seeing nothing on the linoleum floor, then back at her. I make sure my voice is low enough to hopefully appease her. “What are we looking at?”

“Don’t you see it?” she asks, tilting her head to the side like she’s looking at whatever she sees at a different angle. “That little hole. That’s where he comes from.”

“Who, Dara?” I take a seat in the chair beside her.

Dara has schizophrenia. Her first episode happened while she was in class her junior year.

The teacher was in the middle of giving a lesson when Dara suddenly stood, clutching her hair, and started screaming about a man coming from the ground to take her away.

According to her family and friends, the weeks leading up to that episode, she started acting strange.

There were days when she wouldn’t leave her room and refused to walk on floors that weren’t covered in carpet.

Since that first episode, she declined quickly, having episodes nearly every day.

For the first six months, her family tried to care for her at home, but it became too much for them, so they admitted her here.

Her eyes look crazed when she tilts her head to the side so she can see me. “The bad man,” she says gravely. “He’s coming for me. He’ll come and snatch me away.”

An eerie sensation slithers up my spine at her haunted voice. I lean forward. “Who’s the bad man? Why does he want you?”

“He wants to eat me up, so I’m always with him.”

As soon as the words leave her mouth, her eyes glaze over.

She blinks twice, appearing dazed for a moment, and then the look is gone.

She sits upright in her chair and pushes away the strands of hair that have fallen from her braid away from her face.

Her eyes slowly move around the room before they fall on me.

“Hey, Savina,” she says cheerily, her demeanor doing a complete one-eighty. “When did you get here?”

I smile softly at her. “Just now.”

My heart breaks for this girl. To be plagued with such an illness at so young of an age.

“How are you doing today?” I ask, setting my elbows on the table and propping my chin in my hand. “Anything special going on?”

“Not really.” She grins, and the cute dimples she has pop out on her cheeks. “I got a new book yesterday.”

“Oh yeah? What’s this one about?”

One of the first times I came to volunteer here, Dara and I discovered we both share a love of romance books. Whereas my interest lies in the dark romance category, she prefers sexy and sweet.

She gushes over her latest book, telling me about the meet cute between the two lead characters. I don’t miss the wistfulness in her eyes as she talks. It’s sad to think that she’ll probably never have her own happily ever after with a man who adores her.

As if reading my thoughts, Dara props her chin on her hand with her elbow on the table and sighs wistfully. “I wish I could have a love like that.”

Her words make me want to cry for her. “Maybe one day it’ll happen,” I tell her.

Her brows drop, and her lips follow suit with a frown. “You know that can’t happen. Dead people can’t love. They don’t have happily ever afters.”

She doesn’t say that because she thinks the bad man in her head is going to kill her. Dara’s not only plagued with schizophrenia, she’s also been diagnosed with Cotard’s Syndrome, better known as walking corpse syndrome. She thinks she’s already dead.

Loud laughter interrupts our conversation, and we both glance over at Willy, an older gentleman in his sixties.

The other patients are laughing and cheering because he’s stripped off his shirt and is currently working his sweatpants down his legs.

Luckily, he’s wearing underwear, or we’d all get an eyeful.

His name, Willy, is aptly given, since he has a habit of whipping it out and twisting his hips so it flaps against his thighs.

His actions aren’t in the least bit sexual.

He simply does it for entertainment purposes.

Thankfully, having heard the commotion from the patients, one of the nurses rushes over before he can completely strip. The boos that fill the room echo off the walls.

Dara and I look at each other and laugh.

“I see Willy’s himself today,” I comment, trying to stem my laughter.

“A couple of days ago, he managed to get his underwear down before a nurse noticed. When she started across the room to stop him, he spun around to get away. He whacked Steven on the side of his face with his dick.” She giggles.

“His underwear was still around his ankles, so when he tried to run, he tripped and fell.”

I sputter out a laugh before I can stop it. “I bet that was a sight to see.”

“It was. Especially since when he fell, there was a chair in his path. The chair caught his fall, but it left his bare ass sticking up in the air.”

“Oh, no. He wasn’t hurt, was he?”

I look over at Willy as he half-heartedly tries to keep the nurse from pulling up his pants. He laughs hysterically as he wiggles his hips back and forth, making it difficult for her. When one of the male nurses walks over, his movement stops, and his eyes grow wide.

“He was okay,” Dara says.

We sit for a bit longer, talking about unimportant things.

Most days, I’m not able to have a normal conversation with her because she’s stuck in a dark place in her head, or she refuses to talk because dead people can’t speak.

On the rare occasions that we do, they feel like talks between two girls hanging out.

I have no doubt that if things were normal, she and I would be great friends.

I already consider her a friend; it’s just not a typical friendship.

We’re closing in on two hours and the end of my time here when Jackson, the male nurse who helped the other nurse tame Willy, walks over to our table.

He’s a good-looking guy in his thirties with dark, shaggy hair and eyes the color of a rainforest. He’s tall and muscular, with a broad chest and defined arms that threaten to rip the seams of his white scrub top.

Out of the many times I’ve been here, I’ve never seen him smile.

He always wears a serious expression, which he uses to intimidate the patients when they’re misbehaving.

He dips his chin at me in greeting and then faces Dara. “You ready for your session with Dr. Madison, Dara?”

Some of the light-heartedness fades from her face, and I hate to see it go. “If I have to,” she grumbles.

For some reason, when he takes her arm like she’s an invalid and helps her up from the chair, it irritates me.

“Will you be here next week?” Dara asks with a hopeful light in her eyes.

I grab her hand and squeeze it. “Of course I will.”

“Thanks, Savina. See you then.”

Jackson leads her away, and I don’t miss the way his body is too close to hers. Dara’s head is tipped down, and her steps are more like shuffles, as if she’s being led to a place of doom. I also don’t miss the way she tries to pull her arm from Jackson’s grasp. He doesn’t let her go.

Getting up from my seat, I press my lips together, watching them walk through the door.

Jackson has always given me a weird vibe, and I don’t like the way he looks at Dara.

Like she’s a possession that he owns.

I decide right then to find and talk to Margie about the situation before I leave today.