Copyright ©2016 by Annika Martin
Kindle Edition
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author.
Cover art: Bookbeautiful
Interior layout: BB eBooks
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or business establishments, organizations or locales is completely coincidental.
ISBN-10: 1-944736-01-8
ISBN-13: 978-1-944736-01-9
Where is Kiro?
He’s the lost Dragusha brother, heir to a vast mafia empire—brilliant, violent, and utterly savage…and he’s been missing for years.
Ann
I’m supposed to be doing simple undercover research at the Fancher Institute for the Mentally Ill & Dangerous, but I can’t keep my mind off Patient 34. He’s startlingly young and gorgeous, but it’s not just that. He’s strapped way too tightly to that bed. And there’s no name or criminal history on his chart. What are these people hiding? My reporter’s instincts are screaming.
Here’s the other thing: the staffers here believe he’s so sedated that there’s not a thought in his head, but I catch him watching me when nobody’s looking. Our connection sizzles when I enter the room. When our eyes meet, I know he understands me in a way nobody else ever has.
I’m supposed to follow my editor’s orders—I have secrets, too—but everything about Patient 34 is suspicious. How can I not investigate?
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Savage Mafia Prince
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Book 3
Annika Martin
Table of Contents
Copyright Page
About the Book
Title Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Books by Annika Martin
Books by Carolyn Crane
Acknowledgements
About Annika
Chapter One
Ann
Randall is a rosy-cheeked man with a long gray beard and kind eyes. He sits on a bolted-down bench at the corner of his room in the Fancher Institute, formerly known as Fancher Institute for the Criminally Insane.
Thirty years ago, Randall killed three people on a city bus, then tried to poison a group of office workers with arsenic-laced cookies, gravely sickening five.
Today he is heavily medicated and confined to the small room twenty-two hours a day. To his right, there is a large window where you can see the face of an orderly peering in, one of two orderlies whose entire job it is to sit in the hall and watch Randall during his waking hours. Randall’s one burning goal in life is to behave well enough to reduce it to twenty-one hours.
I decide that’s how I’d start the story if I were writing it as a human interest feature on the patients in the mentally ill and dangerous (MI&D) wing of the Fancher Institute. You always hook a story up to one person’s drama and try to find one killer detail. The ever-present watching face is a killer detail.
Stories about people have power. They humanize people, connect people. But I’m not here to do a story about a person.
I’m here to do research on a story about things. A supply-chain story. The most boring type of story.
A supply-chain story in the middle of nowheresville Minnesota is what you get for kneeling in the rubble in Kabul crying and holding a kitten while you miss the most important meeting of your career.
Everyone called it a breakdown. It’s as good a word as any.
Just complete the assignment, I tell myself. Put your head down and do the work.
Because I was lucky to get this assignment at all. No reputable editor will touch me these days. This assignment was set up by an editor at Stormline, which is not a reputable publication.
A nurse named Zara is introducing me to the patients I’ll be monitoring. She thinks I’m a nurse, and in fact I am. I was a nurse before I decided I really just wanted to be a journalist.
I wear a plastic face shield and gloves, and I’m doing a little something with each patient so that Zara can ensure none will react poorly to me. She also wants to make sure that I can handle these MI&D guys.
The MI&D guys won’t be a problem. The antiseptic smell might be, though. It’s so overpowering, I feel like I’m swimming in it. I don’t do well with antiseptic smells these days.
Nurse Zara doesn’t want me here, and she’s not trying to hide it. “Nurse Ann is going to take your blood pressure now, Randall,” Zara says. “You’ll be seeing a lot of her.”
The HR guy warned me that the staff would resist my presence. Nurse Zara’s friend was supposed to be promoted to this job. Everybody on the team thought she’d get it. Then I swooped in and stole it. So I’m a little bit of a pariah.
I’ve handled worse.
“Hello, Randall,” I say softly. Randall’s face is flat affect—that’s psych-ward talk for no expression. His eyes are vacant as I fit the blood pressure cuff around his flabby bicep. Randall is on a cocktail of drugs they call B-52, which does exactly what you’d imagine it would do—sedating him and slowing his thoughts so much that he’s more garden plant than human. He gets extra medication at night. That’s the only time an orderly doesn’t need to watch him.
I note his progress in a tablet, clicking boxes and entering in the numbers. “Great job! Looks like if you behave well for the rest of the week, you’ll get three hours out in the general room,” I say to him.
Randall grunts and mumbles something that sounds like agreement.
Zara grumbles. I’d put her age at around twice mine—twenty-nine—so nearly sixty. She has short dyed-blonde hair held back in a bright polka-dot hair band. She told me the guys like when she switches around the pops of color like that. She cares about the guys, but she wants me gone.
In addition to the hostility, I’m starting to sense that Zara smells my lie, or maybe she just s
enses my unease. Nurses can be really attuned to people’s mental states like that, and Zara’s good. Spend three decades in a mental ward, and you grow some pretty fierce antennae. She doesn’t know about my breakdown, of course.
But Zara’s not going to be my biggest problem.
My biggest problem will be Donny, the hulking head of the orderlies. The man has “twisted motherfucker” written all over his face. As far as I can see, the only thing separating Donny from the men strapped to these beds is a conviction in a court of law and a commitment order.
The next patient is a schizophrenic in his early twenties. As a college student, he blew up a highway rest station, killing three. He’s in a two-point restraint, which means his wrists are bound to a strap around his waist. He, too, gets the B-52 cocktail, and he has those same flat B-52 eyes.
Zara stands at the door texting on her phone and half watching me as I take his blood pressure and do a blood draw. The skin prick doesn’t even seem to register with him. I wonder whether he knows I’m here. I pull up his progress chart. He’s working toward having his hands loose for sleeping. “If you behave this well the rest of the week, you’ll have a hands-free sleep,” I tell him brightly.
“Thank you,” he mumbles.
We pause in the hall between each stop to discuss patients. Zara watches my eyes a little too closely during these discussions.
“You can’t do this job if you let these guys scare you,” she barks.
She’s picking up on all the ways I don’t belong, or maybe my fragile, fucked-up state of mind. She’s picking up on something.
I try for a serene smile. “These guys are fine. I’m good.”
What with all of the sedation and restraint, not to mention the watchful orderlies at my beck and call, I couldn’t be safer from these men, especially compared with a lot of the subjects I interviewed out in the field in my long-ago days as a reputable journalist.
A lot of those interview subjects were just as imbalanced as these men, except they usually had assault weapons. And the only meds they were on was coffee and maybe alcohol, not the greatest combo when you’re a dangerous madman.
And yes, Donny, twisted king of the orderlies, will probably try to push me as far as possible.
But it’s the antiseptic smell that’s my kryptonite.
Six months ago, I would’ve laughed if anybody had tried to hand me an assignment like this. I was the intrepid girl reporter you sent to Bhutan or Somalia or Syria. I was the one riding around in Jeeps and Hummers, sitting with fixers in shitty little cafés waiting to meet some of the most interesting people in the world, chasing that fucking story. I lived for the story.
And if it involved the underdog, or the crazy militia leader, or somebody going for the impossible? Sign me up!
Now I’m counting supplies for an editor with a conspiracy theory he thinks the cops are ignoring. I was lucky Stormline needed somebody with a nursing degree.
But this is how I’ll dig myself out of the burnt and blackened crater of my career. I’ll investigate the shit out of this supply-chain thing. I’ll do it like it’s the best, most important assignment I ever got. The Stormline editor will vouch for me on the next one. Then I’ll investigate and write the shit out of that one, and so on.
I’ll focus on the story in front of me like it’s the most important one ever—that’s how I’ll dig out.
I close my eyes, heart pounding. The antiseptic smell is still getting to me, six months later. I thought I was ready.
I knew the smell would be here, but I thought it wouldn’t be a problem. This hospital is not under attack. Nobody will be getting trapped in here. It’s a world away from any war zone.
Worse, the smell is making me think about that kitten. I shake it out of my mind. I remind myself the kitten is fine. You stepped up and saved the kitten. You are a badass.
Well, I used to be a badass.
I don’t feel like a badass. The antiseptic smell is seriously fucking me up. I’ll be smelling it all night—I know it already. I won’t be able to sleep.
You don’t have to tell me how sexy a good downward spiral story is—I’m a journalist. I know.
There is nothing more delicious than the rich Ponzi-scheme guy in handcuffs. The arrogant rock star sliding into drug addiction. The high school heartthrob who was cruel to you who’s now cleaning your toilet.
I never thought I’d star in a downward spiral story of my own. I guess nobody does.
We head farther down the hall. I meet a hippie orderly who monitors four guys from a hub. I can tell that he would make an interesting subject, but I’m not writing that kind of piece. Meth. Supply chain. Stormline.
Donny, twisted king of the orderlies, comes up. Donny has neon running shoes, several empty ear piercings, and a strategy of showing you who’s boss by looking really hard at your tits. His eyes are small and frontally placed. Predator eyes.
“They’re ready for 34,” Donny says.
“Come on,” Zara says.
“What’s 34?”
“Patient 34,” Zara says. “Come on.”
He doesn’t get a name? I grab the cart and push it down the hall to where three orderlies are assembled, talking in low tones. They all have stun guns.
“What’s up?”
“We go three on standby for hellbeast,” Donny says, looking at me a little too hard. He’s the kind of guy who’s always up to something and who therefore can sense when you’re up to something.
I ratchet him up from problem to definite danger. And I see how things will play out, like a perfect storm—dangerously lechy Donny sensing a chink in my armor, Zara’s antagonism toward me, the indifference of the few other staff members I’ve met, the fact I’m on probation and, worse, not who I say I am.
Handle it.
Donny opens the door. The antiseptic smell is always worse in the rooms. I’m feeling hot, suddenly.
I thought I was ready.
Donny unhelpfully guides me in, hand at the small of my back, except a little too low. I stop and spin. “I got it.”
He puts his hands up, like I’m being unduly aggressive.
I turn and push the cart into the tiny room. The door clicks shut, closing us all in.
Donny takes up a post at the corner.
“We got it,” Zara says. She doesn’t want him in here, either. Donny just stares at her with his scary, frontally placed eyes.
Fuck it all, I think. And I turn to the patient.
And the breath goes out of me.
Patient 34 has a violent halo of dark curls and a short, unruly beard. Sooty lashes line his amber eyes. His energy is…intense, wild, like he was created in some brilliant hellfire. Something about him pulls at me. He’s gorgeous in a furious way. He’s gorgeous in a stunning, suck-you-in-and-spit-you-out way.
The highest level of restraint is typically a four-point restraint, but Patient 34 is in more like eight points, arms to waist, waist to bed, wrists to bed, ankles to bed, neck to bed.
He stares at a fixed point on the ceiling like the other B-52 patients, gaze blank, but he feels utterly different to me. He feels truly alive.
I look up to find Zara watching me sternly, like she caught me doing something wrong. Did I stare at Patient 34 too long?
I lower my face shield and take my place next to his bedside, ready to take his vitals, though I have half a mind to look around for a camera crew, like this is one of those elaborate joke shows where they play tricks and see what people do. He’s just…not at all like the others.
Not like any man I’ve ever seen.
According to 34’s chart, he’s on B-52 plus a few muscle relaxants and something extra I don’t recognize. Enough medication to take down an elephant.
I wrap the BP cuff around his shockingly muscular arm. Shocking, because this is the kind of guy who’ll be unhitched from that bed exactly twice a day—to use the restroom and eat. And he’s so heavily sedated. When and how is he working out? And what did he do to get himself thi
s level of restraint?
I scroll to the history section of his chart. Blank. I really want to know what he did to get in here. There’s no age, though I’d put him younger than me—twenty or twenty-one. I can’t even find his goals program chart. “Where’s his goals?”
Donny laughs from the corner. “He doesn’t get goals. He will never have his meds reduced, he will never have his restraints reduced, and the only way 34’s getting out of this room is feet first.” If I have anything to do with it is the unspoken part of it.
Donny returns his attention to his iPhone.
This guy—so heavily sedated and restrained with a man like Donny hating on him. How does he endure it? I lay a hand on his arm and feel the warmth of him through my latex glove.
“Escape artist,” Zara mumbles, not looking up from her phone. The people working on the wing aren’t supposed to have their phones, but they all do. They know how to avoid the cameras when they’re on them.
“What’s his escape technique?” I ask. “Does he turn into The Incredible Hulk?”
Neither of them responds. Well, I thought it was funny.
I slip the cuff around 34’s arm, rest my gloved hand on his forearm, and start pumping it. The patients here all wear blue pajama-style shirts and pants. The shirts are short-sleeved and snap at the sides for access.
I glance at his face again.
And the world stops.
Because 34 is there—really there. He’s watching me with intelligence, lips quirked like he thought my Hulk comment was funny.
My heart pounds madly. “Hey, I’m going to take your BP, and we’ll draw a little blood, okay?”
“He doesn’t know what you’re saying,” Zara snaps from the corner, like I’m this huge idiot. “He’s not going to answer. Read his chart.”
I read the fucking chart, I think at her. Why don’t you look at his fucking face? But when I look back down, 34’s eyes are blank again, and the shadow of a smile is gone. Was I hallucinating? “It seemed like he was there for a second.”
“He hasn’t had a coherent thought in his head for months,” Donny says. “And he never will again.” And again, that unspoken end to the sentence: If I have anything to do with it.
Savage Mafia Prince: a Dangerous Royals romance Page 1