by Trisha Wolfe
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, or he’ll self-destruct.
The forest rot has leeched 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.”
I’m weak and exhausted and damn near broken—but I can’t just give in, give up. I get to my feet and lift my chin, ready for when Alex comes for me with what fight I have left.
He stops far enough away that I can’t touch him. He removes his glasses, placing them on the cart, then takes me in curiously. I’m wearing the same clothes I had on the day before. I plan to wear them again tomorrow. I’ve stopped caring to wash my hair, and it’s a snarled mess with grown out dark roots. But he’s looking at me like he sees none of it. Not the dark circles under my eyes. Not the pallor of my skin.
No, to Alex—right here in this moment of maddening discovery—I’m the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.
I’m his answer.
And when he moves toward me, I lash out with all the fight that my body can muster.
In the end, it’s not enough. I’m subdued and dragged to that gurney where he injects me with his cocktail brain drug, and my heart careens against my chest as I see those paddles coming closer.
“Everything in nature has a defense mechanism,” he says, a crazed gleam in his eyes. “You’re strong, Blakely. Stubborn. The most resilient subject. Your mind refuses to crack. But even the strongest defense mechanism can be broken. Just have to find your weakness.”
I try to push myself below consciousness, to some distant place far away from him and this hell. But when the current comes, I feel every electrifying pulse. My body is a lightning rod for pain.
I hear music. Cords plucked in a frenzy, bows scraped across strings at an earsplitting decimal. An agonizing symphony of torture, and Alex the conductor.
A scream claws past the guard in my mouth, and it doesn’t stop until my throat flames raw. Alex dials the voltage up until my body can no longer withstand the torment, and mercifully, this psychotic level of hell goes black.
Tiny pinholes of light bathe an endless expanse above.
I’m weightless. Bodiless. There’s no pain, no memory. Only the knowledge of existence, and the cool sensation of touch. Dark puffs move across what I now realize is the night sky, and the serenity is smashed.
For a brief moment, I thought I was dead.
I curl my fingers toward my palms and hear a distinct splash.
I’m suspended in water. Then the feel of his arms beneath me comes into my awareness. I stare at the stars to shut out the reality that I’m still here, locked in Alex’s realm of torture and madness. I want the river to swallow me.
Nyctophobia is the fear of night. I learned that from Alex, who is full of trivia when it comes to the brain and phobias. My mind is spinning with useless thoughts.
“Who could fear the night?” I suppose I say this out loud, because suddenly Alex’s face materializes from above.
“More than ten percent of adults have a fear of the dark,” he says. His face is shadowed. He’s a dark silhouette against the cobalt sky.
I look into his eyes—that are brilliant despite the absence of light—and then turn my head away. Water covers my ear, and I appreciate that it muffles half my hearing.
“When you didn’t wake up, I thought the water would help revive you.”
He’s searching for approval, or some kind of acceptance from me. I can hear it in the frail tone of his voice, that irritating need for forgiveness.
He’s like some sinister version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and this is his Jekyll side, trying to mitigate the damage.
The more awake I become, the more I feel that damage. My muscles are weak and tender, my head throbs as sharp pain ricochets around my skull. I remove my hand from the water to touch my temple. The skin there is rough. Scorched, I think. From over four hundred volts of electricity.
“I have a cream to treat the burn,” he says, as I move out of his grasp, my feet searching for the riverbed.
I remember him applying that electrode jelly shit to my temples before he ruthlessly clamped the paddles to my head. It didn’t work then, and I don’t care about the scars now.
“How do you feel?”
The same. Only tired, and bruised, and submerged in a thick layer of indifference. I want to sink beneath the water and never come up. But as the tiny pricks of light project a glow over the rocks, I can see the shadow on the wall. How this all works. Suddenly, the answer is illuminated by the faintest stars.
It’s faded and hard to grasp—but it’s there, the solution, buried just below the gauze shrouding my thoughts.
I bury my face in my wet hands, clearing some of the fog.
Alex would never fall for a ploy so basic. But really, if I fail, I’ll have lost nothing. It’s a chance—and that’s a reason to try.
“I feel strange,” I say, as I wade through the water. I notice where the trickling is stemming from, and look up at a cascade of water sheeting over a jutted crag in the rock face.
“Strange how?” Alex probes. “Immediate side effects should wear off within a day.”
My gaze stays on the waterfall. “I don’t know, just strange. My chest feels heavy, but it’s not in a terrible way. I want to go into the waterfall. It’s so beautiful and serene.”
“Blakely, you’re worrying me. Maybe I should take you back—”
I push through the water toward him and grasp his face between both hands. I stare up, making my eyes wide, my lips trembling from the cold and onslaught of emotion. And before I say what’s right on the edge, I hear Mrs. Fisher’s voice in my head.
Cruelty is a disease, Lauraleigh. It will fester inside you like cancer.
This may be the cruelest thing I’ll ever do, but Alex has earned my cruelty.
“If I could rip your throat out right now, I would. I would carve out your jugular and watch your blood stain the water, and I would feel….nothing.”
Alex swallows, his throat works hard, his gaze unwavering. “Then what’s stopping you?”
I crush my body to his and run my fingers through his damp hair. The spray off the waterfall makes the droplets look like the stars in the dark sky. I lick my lips slowly, tasting the river water, and his eyes fall to my
mouth.
“What you did to me…what you’ve been doing to me…” I trail off. “No one has ever done such things. No one would ever dare hurt me the way you have. No one would, because no one cares about me that much to try to help—” My voice cracks, and I glance down at the ripples of water barely separating us.
His hands are clamped to my shoulders, holding me at bay. When I look up at him, his brow is furrowed as he studies my expression. I wonder if he can discern the lie there—if I have a tell that he’s already labeled in his journal.
“We should go back to the lab.” He looks past me. “Run tests. Get updated scans.”
I smile at that. “I said you were the rabbit.”
His fingers press into my skin. “I don’t understand—”
“Did you ever realize how Alice never stopped…couldn’t stop chasing the rabbit? It was a compulsion. Even though that world was crazy and frightening, she kept chasing. You’re not the rabbit, Alex. You’re Alice. Chasing your compulsion to some deranged Wonderland.”
His hands drag over my shoulders and slowly travel up to clasp my face between his palms. His mouth parts as hunger sparks in his eyes. The air charges around us. “You’re my Wonderland.”
“And you’re a hypocrite,” I say.
Confusion creases his forehead, and I grip his shirt in my hands. “I should rip your fucking throat out, but I can’t, Alex. Not because you don’t deserve to suffer. And not because of any law or self-preservation. I can’t…because it would cause me to feel something I don’t even know how to describe.”
And there it is—the smallest glimmer, the hopeful well in his pale-blue eyes. He wants to believe. I just have to give this delusional fuck a reason.
“Touch me, Alex,” I say, a hot whisper against his lips. “If you don’t touch me, my chest will explode. There’s too much…just too much all at once, and I need you to siphon off the overflow.”
“Christ, Blakely.” He tries to pull away, but I cling to his shirt. He places his hands over mine. “Don’t do this to me.”
A strangled laugh escapes. “Do this to you? You fucking coward. You torture me. Sadistically subject me to scans, drugs, and literally cook my brain, and now you can’t handle the… What’s the thing you scientists are always touting?”
His gaze flits over my features, his breath slices in and out of his lungs. “Results,” he says, a hint of awe in his voice.
I palm his face, thumb pressed right below his bottom lip. I force his face so close to mine, he can feel the fire of my words. “This is your result, Alex. Everything you ever wanted me to feel, I’m yours to make feel. I’m your monster, waiting for your command, and now you want to abandon me in the dark to suffer—”
His lips crash against mine. The force of the kiss rocks through me, a collision of vicious want and loathing and pure desperation to make the relentless longing end. His lips are steel on mine as his fingers splay into my wet hair. I tilt my head back to meet his demand, my tongue sweeping out to touch his, the assault liquid fire in my veins.
It’s unexpected, and unsettling, the way my breath stills in my chest, the building ache painful and gratifying all at once. I shove any uncertainty down, far down below the disdainful voice in my head chiding that this is a mistake.
His arm locks around my lower back and I’m lifted up. My legs wrap around him to fuse us together in the water. Our bodies are ice and fire, friction from one extreme striking the other and merging until the burn loses distinction. Pain is pain—pleasurable and consuming and agonizing.
Oxygen is combustible, and my lungs will either burst or implode if I take a breath or keep allowing Alex to steal it. He feels my struggle because it’s also his, and he breaks the kiss long enough to pull in a lungful of air.
His forehead rests against mine, his grip a vise around my body as if he’ll lose me to the current. “It worked,” he says, breathless. “You’re cured. I cured you.”
He repeats this, over and over, relishing in his conquest over science. Then: “Wait. This isn’t right.”
A sprig of panic branches through me, and I try to stutter a response.
“This shouldn’t feel right, but nothing has ever felt so right before,” Alex says.
I swallow down the hard ache in my throat, my lips swollen and throbbing from the kiss. “Is it supposed to feel wrong?”
He pulls back to stare at me. “Oscar Wilde said, I can resist anything…except temptation. You are temptation, unadulterated and wrong in all the most alluring ways, and I’m too weak to resist you.”
I’m supposed to feel hurt or insulted. Maybe if I was born of flesh instead of stone I could feel the injury, but all I hear is the crack in his voice, the waning of his will. My opening to slip inside and take charge.
My fingers work the buttons of his shirt open and I shed the soaked material off his shoulders. “Wilde suffered for his conflict.” I lay my hands on his bare chest. He shivers at the intimate touch. “Don’t make me suffer, Alex. Not when we know how to cure our ailment.”
I glide my hand down his taut stomach, my fingers discovering the firm V of his abdomen, and undo the snap of his slacks. That one action decimates the tentative control holding him back.
With a low groan, Alex tears at the wet clothing separating us. He recklessly removes my shirt to bare my breasts to the elements. My nipples find heated friction against his chest as we move through the water, losing the remaining pieces of our clothing.
His mouth is on mine as we pass under the waterfall, the kiss tasting of river and mist. The intoxicating mix of icy water and our heated lips arouses something ravenous inside me, a starvation I sense in my flesh as I tangle myself around him.
As my back hits the rough surface of rock, Alex grasps my thighs and hoists me up against him, driving a needy ache deep inside. I moan against his mouth, the sound muffled by the kiss and the fall of water around us. He feels the need in it, though, because his tongue delves deeper as his fingers dig into my skin.
He’s hard and pushing at my entrance. I undulate against him, sliding my sex over his length and eliciting the sweetest growl. Alex is all strained muscle and heavy breaths as he grinds against me, working past the water to reach my wetness and, when he gets the satisfaction he’s seeking, exhales a fervent curse.
A tender pain pinches inside my core. My thighs clench around him, coaxing him closer. “I need you inside me,” I say, my voice thick with that demand. “Alex, now—”
It’s the plea of his name that levels him. With aggressive urgency, he reaches above to grip the rock overhang, gaining leverage as he lifts me onto the smooth precipice of stone to position me right where he wants me.
A moment where our eyes lock and everything between us—past and present, lecherous desire and venom—is said in that exchange before he slams inside me with a devastating thrust.
I sink my nails into his back as his face hovers above mine, those intense blue eyes regarding every shift in my expression. For once, I have no control over what he sees.
He’s inside me, and I’m shaking.
I’m numb and yet I feel everything. He releases his hold on the rock and places his hand alongside my head as he pulls out only to drive in deeper, filling me completely. I want him to smother me with his body so he can’t read me—but his gaze won’t stray. He’s greedy and wants to observe every reaction.
My knees dig into his sides as I lift my hips to meet his forceful thrusts. The sound of our flesh crashing against each other ricochets off the rock and water, amplifying every lustful craving.
I’m just as greedy, loving the way his eyes crease, the way his features tense, straddling the edge of elation and torment. Then he’s kissing me with a fire meant to sear, meant to make me feel all the anguish and carnal sin devouring him.
And I want to feel it. For the first time, I’m envious of his ability to experience such intense passion. A bitter seed burrows in the hollow shell where those dormant emotions lie and take root.
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He’s touching me everywhere, as if he can’t decide where to focus. Fury brims in his gaze, a wanton rage that begs to be sated. “Fuck, Blakely. You’re so damn beautiful it kills me.”
I close my eyes. I don’t want to see him or hear his breathy words of admiration. I focus on the physical indulgence only, letting the hedonist within dominate. The first burst of yearning crests, sending a pleasurable shockwave through my body.
The rock beneath us is cold and ungiving, but our bodies are furnaces, creating a torrid den out of the harsh elements. We’re unfeeling of anything other than the unbearable hunger that makes us slaves to our senses.
His weight bears down on top of me as he kisses a tantalizing trail to my neck. He tastes my skin, moving down to suck my breast, where he flicks his tongue over my nipple. Charged waves crash over me. My hands are on him and then the rock, searching for something solid to grip as the sensations tear through me like an electric current.
And with that thought comes a flash of the last session. Strapped to the gurney. Paddles clamped to my temples. Severe pain stabs at my head, blinding white light webs across my eyelids. Panic is a lead weight in my chest, fear that it will concave under the pressure.
“I can’t breathe,” I say around a gasp, but my body claims differently, my lungs struggling to drag in each inhalation. The higher I climb, the heavier the weight pushes down, and I cling to Alex, unable to stop the onslaught. “Oh god, more. I need you deep inside me, Alex.”
He answers my demand with a powerful thrust as he buries himself inside me, shattering the fragile and tenuous insulation that’s been holding me together.
I break.
We’re flesh and bone. A conflict of soft and callous. Every tender surface of our bodies grates against rigid rock, shredding us bare layer by layer. The sharp edge of stone slices into my hand. I smear my palm along his bicep, across his chest, fascinated by the dark trail of blood staining his skin.
It’s intoxicating, and I’m intoxicated with his scent and his arousing sounds. His groan rumbles against my ear as he grows harder inside me, and I arch my back, needing him to touch every inch of my skin.