Sinful Palace: Ruthless Rulers Book 2

by Hart, Stella

  He frowned. “Willow, you really don’t have to do that right now.”

  “I need something to distract me,” I murmured. “I can’t just lie here forever.”

  “I know, but it hasn’t even been a week since your dad died. We should reschedule.”

  I lifted my chin. “No. I owe this to you, and I want to do it. Just give me a minute to get ready.”

  I slowly dragged myself out of bed and went into the bathroom to splash my face with cold water. When I looked in the mirror, I almost didn’t recognize myself. My skin was pallid, and my cheeks were hollow. I looked like a zombie.

  I took another deep breath. Then I wrapped a thick chenille bathrobe around myself and headed back out to the bedroom. Myla was standing by the main door with Logan, nodding at something he was saying. Her face was bare, and she was wearing a camel-colored wrap coat, black pants and ballet flats; a far cry from the black domme outfits and thick makeup she usually sported in the Wonderland Club.

  “Hi,” I murmured.

  Myla came over to me and tentatively rubbed my shoulder. “Hey,” she said softly. “I’m so sorry about your dad.”

  “Thanks.”

  “We can talk about it, if you want. Or we can just hang out. Whatever you need.”

  I shook my head. “I want to do what we planned, if that’s okay.”

  “Of course. Just remember, we can stop anytime you want.” She gave me a sympathetic smile and gestured to the sofas near the coffee table on the other side of the room. “Let’s go and sit down.”

  Logan followed us to the sofas and stood near Myla, watching her with slightly narrowed eyes as she took a seat and set her black handbag down on the table. I sat across from her.

  “When we arranged this session, you mentioned that you have some traumatic memories you’d like to recover,” she began, looking at me with one brow lifted.

  “Yes. It’s just one night I want to remember.”

  “Can you tell me more about that?”

  I swallowed thickly. “About five years ago, I did something… bad.” I averted my eyes from Logan as I spoke, cheeks warming with shame. “I know I did it, but I don’t actually remember it. I don’t even remember most of the weeks afterwards. My mom told me I was sick, but that’s not true.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, and I’ll probably never get the truth out of her, so asking isn’t really an option.”

  Myla nodded slowly. “Okay. I should get some bad news out of the way first,” she said. “Back at my old clinic, I was able to help a few patients recover lost memories, but the overall success rate is pretty low. It’s not an exact science, which makes it difficult, and in a lot of cases, the memories are simply gone. So I need to warn you about that. I don’t want to give you false hope and make you think I have some sort of miracle remedy.”

  “My memories aren’t gone. They’re still in here.”

  Her forehead wrinkled. “How do you know that?”

  “A few weeks ago, I started having what I call ‘flashes’,” I explained. “I’d think about the thing I forgot, and suddenly I’d see something from that night in my mind’s eye. Just for a split second. It’s only happened a couple of times, but I can tell it’s a real memory. It’s just not long enough to actually see it all properly.”

  Myla smiled. “Well, that’s a positive sign. It puts you ahead of about eighty percent of other people who want to recover lost or repressed memories.”

  “So you think she repressed it?” Logan asked, brows furrowing. “That’s why she forgot?”

  Myla glanced up at him. “I can’t be sure without knowing all of the facts. There’s a lot of reasons someone might forget something. It can be caused by physical trauma, like a head injury, or other physical conditions like thyroid issues, brain tumors, or infections.” She held up a hand and started listing more reasons, using her fingers to denote each one. “It can also be caused by severe stress and emotional issues, vitamin deficiencies, incorrect medication dosages, alcohol and drug problems, or different forms of dementia. All sorts of things.”

  “I hit my head that night,” I said. “I fell off my Vespa and hit the road pretty hard.”

  “That could be the cause,” Myla replied. “Sometimes the brain doesn’t store memories for a certain period after a head injury, which means there’s literally nothing to recover. But that doesn’t seem to be the case here, seeing as you claim to have these flashes.”

  “Uh-huh.” I leaned forward. “So what can we do?”

  “There’s two things I’d like to suggest, and it’s up to you which one we go with in the end.”

  “Okay.”

  “The first is what I’d call the safe option. It’s the one most patients choose. It involves regular talk therapy sessions.”

  “Talk therapy?” I knitted my brows. “So we literally just sit and talk?”

  “Yes. It’s just us in a safe space, talking about all of your experiences and feelings. It can help to slowly unravel memories that are hidden somewhere in your mind, because as you talk about it and work through your feelings, the memories are able to come to the surface. When you’re ready to start remembering, that is.”

  “How long does that take?” Logan asked.

  Myla hesitated. “It can take months. Sometimes years. That’s if it even works at all. Even though it’s the safest option, it doesn’t have a particularly high success rate.”

  My shoulders drooped. “Oh. What about the other option?”

  “The other one can be much more effective, but it’s quite controversial,” Myla said, lowering her voice. “My old clinic was one of the only places in the city that offered it.”

  “How is it controversial?” Logan asked, narrowing his eyes.

  “I’ll explain. It involves a combination of things.” Myla paused to reach into her handbag, and she brought out a small tube. “See this nasal spray? It contains a micro-dose of a synthetic drug similar to dimethyltryptamine.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a naturally-occurring psychotropic drug. The synthetic one that we use is similar, but it’s far milder, and unlike DMT, it’s actually legal.”

  “Does psychotropic mean it’s like LSD or magic mushrooms?” I said, eyes widening.

  Myla smiled. “Not exactly, no. It has a much quicker onset and a shorter duration of action—around fifteen minutes. Also, a micro-dose won’t make you hallucinate wildly and trip out like you see in the movies.”

  “Then what does it do?”

  “It puts your brain in a similar state as the one it gets into when you’re dreaming. Opens things up, in a manner of speaking.”

  “And that helps people remember things?” I asked.

  She tilted her head to one side. “Sort of. Let me explain the other factors in this form of therapy first. What happens is: I give the patient the micro-dose and make them lie down. Then I use a form of suggestion and visualization to induce a state similar to hypnosis. This, coupled with the effects of the drug, can help the patient access old memories that are hidden away somewhere in the mind. They see it all playing out in their mind, just like a dream.”

  “That all sounds very sci-fi,” I said, raising my brows.

  “I know. Like I said, it’s pretty controversial.”

  I rubbed the back of my neck. “So… when people do this, they can remember things right then and there instead of waiting for months?”

  Myla held up a palm. “Yes, but before you make any decisions, you need to know it’s not a hundred percent effective. Everyone has different brain chemistry. Some people don’t actually remember anything at all. They just have something akin to a dream, and they know it’s definitely not a memory. Others feel like their memories are flooding back, but then it fades away as they come out of the trance, and they forget it all over again. It’s similar to the way you forget dreams after you wake up in the morning.”

  “Oh.”

  “That’s why I put patients in the hy
pnotic state—it’s so I can get them to talk their way through the whole experience. That way, even if they forget it again, it’s all recorded anyway. Then we can use those recordings with the aforementioned talk therapy to help them fully recover the memories once and for all.”

  “What’s the catch?” Logan asked. “You said the other one is the ‘safe’ option, so does that mean this is dangerous in some way?”

  Myla shook her head. “Not at all. It’s just the fact that it involves a small dose of this drug. That can put people off, because they grow up hearing all sorts of horror stories about psychotropic substances. In reality they’re actually very safe in small doses. They’re even testing micro-doses of LSD on people with severe depressive disorders at the moment, and it’s working very well.”

  “Wow.”

  “Having said that, there can be an issue with this particular form of therapy,” she said. “It can be pretty serious, too.”

  I frowned. “What is it?”

  “Because of the dream-like state it puts your mind in, there’s quite a high rate of false memories. The problem there is: it’s impossible to distinguish real repressed memories from false ones without corroborating evidence.”

  “Oh. So I could wake up thinking I was kidnapped by a biker gang two years ago, because I might’ve ‘remembered’ that when I was under, and it would feel like a real memory even though it definitely isn’t one?”

  She nodded. “Yes, and like I said, unless there’s corroborating evidence, I won’t have any way of knowing if what you’re telling me is a real memory or not.”

  “But if we can back it up, you can be pretty sure it’s real, right?” Logan asked, scratching his jaw. “So if Willow recalls a bunch of stuff from that night that I know definitely happened, we can safely assume it’s a proper memory?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  Logan looked at me. “What do you think?”

  “I think it sounds good.”

  He stepped over to me and knelt near my spot on the sofa. “Are you sure?” he murmured. “I really don’t mind waiting a while longer. You need to grieve.”

  “I know, but I want to do it,” I said, boldly lifting my chin.

  He nodded and looked back at Myla. “Okay. We’re in.”

  “You want to go with the second option?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “I want to remember as quick as possible.”

  “All right.” She motioned toward the windows. “Logan, could you please draw all the curtains? The darker it is in here, the better.”

  “Sure.”

  Myla turned her attention back to me. “Before we begin, there’s a few things we need to go over. After I give you the micro-dose, we’ll start the hypnosis process, and while that’s happening, you need to concentrate very hard on the memory you’re trying to recover. For example, you can think about all the events that you remember leading up to it. The week, the day, the hour… everything up until the point you start to forget.”

  “Will that make me more likely to remember the right things while I’m under?”

  She nodded. “That’s exactly it. If we don’t do that, your mind could wander anywhere, and then you could remember a whole bunch of irrelevant things.”

  “Okay.”

  “One other thing. These flashes you say you’ve had… what exactly do you see in them?”

  I twirled a strand of hair in my fingers as I thought about it. “The clearest thing is the road I was on at the time,” I said. “And lightning. There was definitely lightning.”

  “Try to picture that, then,” Myla said. “The road and the lightning, as well as everything leading up to the part you’ve forgotten.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Are you ready?”

  I chewed on the inside of my cheek for a second. Then I nodded. “Yes.”

  “Great.” She smiled. “Don’t worry, nothing bad is going to happen. It will only last fifteen minutes, and the absolute worst-case scenario is you simply failing to remember anything.”

  “Okay.”

  She stood and brought the nasal spray over to me. “When I give this to you, you might feel a little sleepy for a minute or so. That feeling will intensify as we go through the hypnosis visualizations. You might also feel a sudden rush of euphoria.”

  I smiled thinly at that. Considering the horribly depressive state I’d been in for the last six days, I could use all the euphoria I could get.

  “Ready?”

  I nodded. “Yes.”

  I tilted my head back and let Myla spray the micro-dose into my left nostril, and then I lay down on the couch. Logan had drawn all the drapes by now, and the room was quiet and dark.

  “Close your eyes, Willow,” Myla said in a warm, soothing tone. “I want you to focus on your breathing for now, and nothing else. In, out. In, out.”

  I did as she said, breathing deeply and trying to push everything else out of my mind.

  “Now I want you to picture yourself floating in a bubble. It’s warm, safe and cozy in there, and it’s just you. No one else can get in, and no one can hurt you. Can you see that?”

  “Yes,” I murmured, visualizing it as much as I could. I was starting to feel drowsy, and darkness seemed to be closing in around me.

  “Everything about you is contained somewhere in that bubble. Every memory, thought, and experience. You just have to look in the right place to find the right one.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “I’m going to help you get there.” Myla’s voice was a soothing murmur now, and it sounded like it was coming from miles away. “Keep focusing on your breathing, but on top of that, I want you to think about the day you’re trying to remember. It’s in there somewhere, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.” Vivid, colorful spots were appearing in my mind’s eye.

  “You’re going to start seeing things in the bubble soon. That’s normal. I want you to talk to me while you watch it all happen. Tell me what you see.”

  I could see flashes of light and color now, and I felt like I was on a carousel, spinning faster and faster as the world went blurry. Dulcet melodies played all around me, and a wash of warmth swept over everything, leaving a golden glow in its wake.

  “I see everything,” I murmured. “My whole life. It’s racing past me.”

  “Good. Think about that day, Willow. Think about the road. The lightning.”

  There were too many lights in my vision to count, dancing on a vast ocean stretching for miles in every direction. Somehow I knew that each light represented one day of my life, all of them unique and flashing brilliantly.

  I strained as hard as I could, trying to picture the exact moment I decided to go out for a ride on that fateful evening five years ago. I saw my mom giving me a disapproving look as I told her what I was doing, and I saw my shiny Vespa in the garage, gleaming in the darkness like a beacon.

  Suddenly it felt like I was being sucked into a vortex, and I was right back there, all those years ago. I had no idea if I was still talking out loud to Myla. Right now, she didn’t exist. Only this memory did, and it was happening all around me.

  “You know I don’t like you riding that thing in the dark,” Mom says. She’s watching me put my helmet on in the garage, hands on her hips.

  “It’s not like it’s actually late. It’s just getting dark early because it’s fall.” I roll my eyes and clip the helmet strap under my chin. “Besides, I won’t be gone long.”

  “The news said it’s going to rain tonight.”

  I peer out at the sky. “Looks pretty clear to me.”

  She huffs and waves a hand. “Fine, you can go. Usual route?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Okay. But don’t be gone any longer than an hour. I don’t want you caught out in a storm. Also, your dad said he’d call us from LA at nine, so I want you here for that.”

  “That’s fine. I’m never gone for more than an hour anyway,” I reply with a grin, glad she isn’t stopping me from going out. The
re’s nothing I love more than riding my Vespa. I love the way the air whips through my hair and over my skin, and I love the way I feel so free and powerful as I zoom through the dim streets. They’re mine. The whole world is mine.

  But only in those moments.

  The rest of the time, I’m just regular Willow Rhoades, the girl everyone at school gossips about thanks to Chloe Thorne. A couple of days ago, she told everyone I have herpes or chlamydia, and my date for the Fall Fling ended up ditching me because of the rumor. Joke’s on Chloe, though—I wound up hanging with her brother Logan all night instead. He’s so sweet. So hot. And that kiss… oh my god.

  Why hasn’t he called me yet? He said he’d call.

  It’s only been a day, though, so I shouldn’t worry too much. Someone once told me that most guys wait three days before they call, because they don’t want to look desperate.

  With a deep breath, I switch on my Vespa and pull out onto the driveway. In my mirror, I see the hulking Governor’s Mansion falling away behind me as I speed up. Soon it’s nothing but a distant silhouette. Now I’m free, out on the open road and away from my overbearing mother.

  Goosebumps break out all over my neck as I head out to my favorite riding spot in the old industrial area near Odenton. It’s getting colder and colder with every minute that passes, and dark clouds are blotting out most of the moonlight. Mom was right. It’s going to rain soon. I guess tonight’s ride wasn’t such a good idea after all.

  I might as well keep going, though. The rain hasn’t started yet, and I’m already halfway to my spot. If I’m lucky, I’ll be able to zoom around for a while and then make it home before a single drop of rain falls. If I’m unlucky, I’ll wind up a bit wet. It’s not that bad.

  Ten minutes later, I’m nearing the industrial area. Dark blue and gray warehouses line the street to my right, and on my left, there’s a long line of multi-storied red brick buildings. They used to be apartments and storefronts, but now they’re mostly used for storage.

  I blow out an irate breath as it starts to rain. The hair peeking out from my helmet is whipping furiously in the chilly wind, and my body is starting to ache from the cold. Once again, I’m starting to regret my decision to ride tonight.