I push off the stool and have her in my grasp. She attempts to wrap the chain around my neck, but I step on the length, locking her wrists by her sides. Hand clamped to the back of her neck, I stare down into her face. Those piercing eyes promise malice.

“I’ll try to be gentle.”

“Go to hell.”

I sink the needle into her arm and watch as her pupils dilate. Blakely becomes docile, her body going slack, and I quickly wrap an arm around her waist to catch her. I carry her to the gurney and lay her on the bedding, removing the chains and securing her cuffs to the side bars.

As I ready the drip bag with anesthesia, she croaks out a word.

“What did you say?” The combination of the drug and the anesthesia is dangerous, and I have to adjust the dose carefully.

When she says nothing more, I clip the bag to the bar and insert the needle into her arm. She’ll be completely under in less than a minute.

“I was thinking about time earlier,” I say, as I place adhesive over the tube on her arm to keep it in place, “and how if I could only send you on a course at the speed of light, I could slow the necrosis in your brain. Maybe even reverse the process.”

She swallows, straining to keep her eyes open and locked on my face.

“That’s absurd, I know. A foolish, whimsical theory that has no basis.” I stroke her hair, my fingers splaying the blond layers over her shoulder. “If there was a way to do this differently…for you, I assure you, I’d try.”

But that’s not our reality. The desire to cure her must outweigh the risk. No matter the pain, no matter the torture for us both.

I won’t fail her.

“I think about that moment between us outside the warehouse,” I say, as she starts to fall under. “When my emotions were soaring, when you asked me to describe how I felt to you. What you were truly asking me for was this right here. You were pleading with me to help you, Blakely—and I’ve never wanted anything more.”

Her lips move, and I lean in closer.

“The doctor was always the real monster,” she whispers as her eyes flutter closed.

A reference to Frankenstein. I make a sound of consensus deep in my throat.

I stay close to her as the drug infuses her bloodstream. I watch her chest rise and fall, her breaths deepening as the drug drags her further down.

I inhale her scent, filling my lungs with the searing ache of her, then reverently touch the scratch marks on my cheek before I click my pocket watch open to record the time. “In this moment, we are both monsters.”

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19

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THE LITTLE DEATH

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BLAKELY

I don’t have to mark my walls with the days to know how long I’ve been here. The measure of time is all around me.

Every time Alex checks his watch. Every time he drives a hand through his hair in frustration with an unwanted result. Every cruel procedure he subjects me to is logged with date and time. After nearly three weeks, I’ve underwent twelve electroshock sessions, including the first where I felt every millisecond of torture.

Today’s treatment will be unlucky number thirteen.

My mind is foggy and detached. I touch my forehead and blink hard, trying to recall the last conversation I had with Rochelle. She’s the closest thing I have to a friend, or had. Our talk in her office comes to me in fragments, her ironed face a blur and difficult to picture.

My whole life before feels distanced.

Side effects of the drugs and electroshock. Memory loss one of the most prominent. Alex claims he’s curing me of my illness, but if he doesn’t kill me, all he’ll achieve is frying my brain.

I’ll become a hollow vessel. Vacant and lifeless. I suppose he can then claim I’m cured, as I’ll have nothing left that makes me me. I’ll be one of those drooling, empty-eyed, comatose patients in a constant stupor.

I hope he kills me.

Night is the only time Alex allows me out for fresh air, like some caged animal. And only at the top of the basement stairs, not daring to risk another attempted escape. I spend my fifteen minutes staring at the stars. They’re brilliant here, unlike the city, where they have to compete against the big, bright lights.

After that night in the staircase, Alex hasn’t looked at me longer than the seconds necessary to mark an observation. He hasn’t touched me other than to get an updated brain scan. By keeping his distance, he’s assuring he won’t make a mistake—that he won’t give me the chance to get close to him again.

With what mental capacity I have left, I open the notebook to the marked page. Alex did give me a journal. And a pen. I know he reads it while I’m under, so today I write a passage I hope will reach him. One last attempt to unchain myself from this fate.

For some reason, as I touch the pen to the page, an image of Ericson in his wrinkled business suit pops into my head. I can smell the coffee, feel the metal spoon in my hand. I close my eyes and see the words on the page, the notes I’d taken of my target.

That’s who I was. I despise the fact that a memory of Ericson—the piece of shit that he is—is what awakens me, but I hold on to it regardless, because it’s what binds me to Blakely and her life.

Then I write:

The forest sky is blood, the trees black veins. Decay is the wind that whispers through the limbs, corrosive, destructive. Like the rotted soil devouring the roots, he poisons my body, stealing that vital essence which makes me alive.

Shadows can’t exist without the sun, yet the stars burn like an inferno against the inky black, casting me in the deepest shadow of darkness. An inescapable void where he chains the lock.

Alex believes I’m sick, but his infection is even more dark and monstrous.

Her murder is his ailment—a festering disease seeping from his pores. Letting go of his taste for retribution is the only cure he’s seeking, or he’ll self-destruct.

The forest rot has leached into him and only the cleansing water will free us.

At the sound of his approach, I stop writing. Hopefully my thoughts are abstract enough to be concerning, and even a little bit tempting. I’ve asked him before to take me to the water, but every request is met with silence. Before my mind is completely broken, I need one last chance at the outside world.

“The results don’t lie,” he says, as he enters the room. He’s wild and unkempt today. He hasn’t shaved, his face scruffy, hair disheveled. “I’ve tried to reproduce them, over and over…but the data is staring me in the face.”

He paces the room as if I’m not here, rambling and hands waving. I sit up and scoot back on the cot, trying to be unseen. It makes me feel weak, pathetic. It makes me loathe Alex in a way I’ve never experienced before—because no one has ever made me feel this powerless.

He yanks on his lab coat and pulls the computer cart around. He’s lost in thought as he clicks through pages of data. I look past him to the keys hanging on the wall. They’re so close, but just out of reach.

“That’s the variable. That’s the only difference,” he mutters to himself. “I have to recreate the first session.”

A sense akin to dread crawls over me, a million hairy spider legs walking over my skin. My flesh is tight and hot at the thought of experiencing that torture again. “Alex.” I try to get his attention, but he’s absorbed in his work. “Alex—”

With a jolt, he looks up from the screen. “We’re wasting time,” he says. “The anesthesia affects the molecular structure of the compound. The only way to achieve breakthrough is to recreate the first treatment. But this time, at a higher level.”