My father.
The Richard I knew was a piece of mind I had created. A hallucination.
"You see him. I know you do." Carl McTavish's words came back to me from all those months ago. I'd thought they were just ramblings of a sick man, but it was true. He knew. I was like him. Like Carl McTavish, the doctor that murdered all those people.
I saw the swirling, moving writhing ink on the Rorschach inkblot just like he did.
I'm a schizophrenic.
I had created Richard to help me cope, I realized that now, to keep me from falling fully over the edge of my sickness, my disease, my disorder. The warm arms of my father were the last time I felt safe in the world. The last time he hugged me before the police took him away and my mother never let me see him again.
"Guess what, Violet?"
I blinked and Aaron's face came into focus, there, just above mine.
"I was right about you. You are violent. And more than that—" he leaned closer "—you're fucking bat-shit crazy." He laughed, the sound echoed around us in time with the agonizing screams beyond us. "Your mind created someone else – it literally did everything it could to try and save you from me!" His chest shook with glee. "And now you'll never be free. You're mine now." A rough hand in my hair drug me off the table, and I realized I was no longer strapped down. My head pounded harder as he drug me from the room. The yellowed lights of Ward Z made my eyes burn, but they didn't stop me from seeing.
The pristine white hallway was no longer such. Blood. Everywhere. All the doors stood open. Ryan, the orderly, lay motionless halfway down the hall, his neck at an awkward angle. Someone screamed from a room farther down and when we passed I saw Christopher inside. He laid on his back. Raymond's hulking form on top of him. His mouth ripped and tore at Christopher's flesh. Christopher's gaze met mine, just for a moment, a split second, his mouth gaping, screaming, his crooked, mismatched teeth covered in blood.
Is this real?
I didn't know.
Is anything real?
"You thought coming to me would make would make it better, didn't you Violet." My gaze met Aaron's. "Coming into my room, but you were wrong. You thought I would fix things, didn't you, but look at the destruction I've caused. You caused." He laughed as he drug me forward. "You didn't make things better for yourself. But, my one letter away, you made them a whole lot better for me."
The images of the horror around me, the reality, the truth of them should have been horrifying, so should the dead bodies of the others whom we passed farther down the hall. Calvin lay bleeding out on the white tile, a knife protruding from his neck. Carl McTavish flitted across my vision, jerking the knife out of Calvin. But I wasn't bothered by them. The pain in my scalp grounded me.
I didn't fight Aaron, instead I went limp as he pulled me through the sticky blood on the floor of Ward Z, past the dead, the living, the irrational, the foolish, the crazy. I soaked it all in just like the blood that now saturated my clothes and smiled. My lips curled painfully in time with the pulse of agony inside my head, until my eyes sought their forced solace and my world went black.
Somewhere inside that darkness, the empty pit of oblivion, I found myself. I'd been there all along cowering in a corner. I looked at her, me, at the monster who hid there in my obscurity, with her matted hair and her violet eyes, both pretty and sad.
I held out my hand, my long fingers with the opal butterfly on the pinky. She reached forward and took it, our digits intertwining…until we were one.
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Turn the page to check out the VIOLE[N]T OBSCURITY playlist.
VIOLE[N]T OBSCURITY Playlist
"My December" by Linkin Park
"Just One Yesterday" by Fall Out Boy
"Emperor's New Clothes" by Panic! At the Disco
"Going Under" by Evanescence
"MakeDamnSure" by Taking Back Sunday
"Until the Day I Die" by Story of the Year
Still want more of Adeline and Aaron? Turn the page to read chapter one of the conclusion to the Violent duet: VIOLE[N]T OBLIVION
Adeline
Who am I?
I didn't know anymore. Life had been simple. Easy. I was a doctor, a good one – successful. I worked for more than a decade to become a psychiatrist. The one and only Dr. Adeline Violet. But somehow, somewhere I lost my way.
I'm lying.
Words are such a fickle thing. We can say them whenever we want, however we want, to whomever we want. They don't have to be true, or real, but maybe saying them makes them real, at least in the mind of the listener.
The truth is, I didn't just somehow lose my way. I wasn't just somewhere. I was with Aaron Whitman at Silent River Psychiatric Hospital for Violent Criminals down in the darkest most secret part of the hospital – Ward Z, where patients went to die.
He was just supposed to be my patient. It was supposed to be simple – but somehow it became complicated quickly and now, now I didn't who I was anymore. I wasn't Dr. Adeline Violet, no that title had been stripped from my skin by the government itself when they found out about my relationship with Aaron. A relationship I hadn't acted on in over a month – if it could even be called a relationship. It was something – sure, but a relationship? It was more than that and less at the same time. It was both everything and nothing.
I blinked. But this time the world that surrounded me was fuzzy, dim, bloated figures I couldn't make out. I blinked again. Over and over until the world finally came into focus – but it wasn't my world. It wasn't the white walls of Ward Z, the snow covered Aspen trees of Silent River that had become my home. I was somewhere else.
I moved, my body lying awkwardly across a seat.
Murmured words filled my ears and that's when I saw them. Him.
Aaron Whitman sat across from me next another man, an incredibly muscular dark-skinned man whom I'd never seen in my life. But he didn't hold my attention. Aaron did. Aaron, with the dark tattoos that covered his skin. The words And the monster stood out in stark contrast on his right jawline. The new man nudged Aaron and his twitchy gray gaze zeroed in on mine.
"Well, look who's awake." His voice was like music to my desperate ears. Aaron loved me – at least he did before I ruined everything. Before I dug around in his mind, desperate for answers, desperate for a truth that revealed the woman he used to love, Ruby. I had wanted to look inside those memories and find that their love hadn't been real – but all I found was disappointment. Through that disappointment I had spawned something else – I had triggered Aaron's darkness, sending him into a manic low, an extreme of his bipolar disorder.
"Where are we?"
"Oh, just five thousand feet above ground."
I blinked again, attempting to sit up. "We're on a plane?" But something stopped me. Handcuffs. They were hooked around my left wrist and attached to the bottom of one of the seats a laid across. "Aaron—"
"Surprised that I would chain you up, Violet?" There was something wicked in his gaze, taunting. He still wore the bloody white jumpsuit I'd last seen him in when he drug me out of Ward Z. Some of it had splattered on his face, making him appear eerie, scary, terrifying. "You shouldn't be, considering how the whole of our existence together, up to this point has been characterized by confinement – at least of one of us."
"But what does this mean?" I jerked on my wrist, feeling the metal bite into my flesh. "Where are you taking me?"
The man sitting next Aaron raised his eyebrows, he wore a puzzled look on his face as he glanced between Aaron and I.
"I'm taking you where I promised, one letter away." He gave me that eerie frowning, smiling face. "To a
place of which you'll never return." He leaned forward until there was only a few inches of space between us. His face lingered over mine. His perceptive eyes seeming to burrow into me. "To run your body and soul through the shredder. I'm taking you to pain, Adeline. To the place where love and hate mix together into something ugly and broken – you."
"Well, fuck." The words came from the other man. "That's some pretty intense shit."
Aaron leaned back, but his gaze never left mine. I didn't miss the promise in them. It emanated from his irises as he began to hum his song. His fingers tapped their rhythm. He meant every word he spoke. He wasn't wasting his breath, his time.
He intended to rip into my soul, to break me, to hurt me how I hurt him. I should have been afraid, terrified. I should have been begging him to free me. But I wasn't. Instead I laid there, my body spread awkwardly across several seats on an airplane with my wrist handcuffed to the seat, headed for an unknown destination. A destination where Aaron intended to hurt me. A thrill of something thrummed under my skin – not dread or worry – something else.
Anticipation.
Be on the look out for VIOLE[N]T OBLIVION this coming July (but most likely sooner!)
Add VIOLE[N]T OBLIVION to Goodreads.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
It's no secret I haven't written in a long time. After my last publication, THE FILTHY SERIES, I took a break from writing. That was over two years ago. It's been a strange time for me without writing. I am so pleased to be back with VO - Thank YOU for taking the time to read my words again, after all this time. You are amazing.
Jade Eby. My writing soul mate. Without your critiques and support I don't know where I would be.
Najla Qamber. You are so creative - thank you for taking the vision in my head and making it tangible with this cover.
Special thanks to Alexis Durbin for being an awesome editor.
And last (but for f'ing certain not least) my filthy readers Facebook group. Yes, ladies! I'm talking about y'all! I love reading all your discussions in the Facebook group. You all seriously rock my world. Love love love you guys!
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