Page 82 of Bells
“You keep saying that but something tells me you don’t really mean it,myshka.”
He was wrong. I did mean it. Iwasgonna kill him for what he did to me. I thought I knew what pain was. I thought I liked it. But what he did to me in the bathroom… that was different. It wasn’t enjoyable. I didn’t get that rush. He did. He got off on hearing me cry, on holding me after.
And I would kill him for that too.
“I, however,” Casper hummed to himself, “meant every word. Remember what I told you? What I said it would be like when I finally decided to put you down?” He reached out a hand and brushed my damp hair from my cheek.
I gnashed my teeth at him, and he laughed.
“I think the exact words you said to me were…that sounds nice…” He paused, looking off in the distance as though he could picture it.
I took that moment to glare past him at his friend. His back was towards me as he moved some things around on the metal tray. It wasn’t Adrian. Adrian was leaner, more put together. He also had a full head of hair the last time I’d seen him. This guy didn’t. One side was bald or shaved down and the other was thick and full. His upper body was wide at the chest and he had a bunch of scars running up his right arm. I caught a glimpse of them every time he lifted a hand to move something on the tray.
He must have felt me staring. Because he turned to glance at me over a shoulder, and I lurched back. I didn’t have anywhere to go but that didn’t stop my body from trying the second I saw that he was missing half his face.
Technically,it was still there. It just wasn’t pretty, and his eye was gone too. Which led me to wonder why he bothered to look. If he really wanted to see what was behind him, he would have turned the other way. The slight curve of his scarred lip told me he hadn’t done that on purpose.
He was the guy Vee marked down as “Frankie.” Another doctor. She’d showed me his picture that time in her office but it was different seeing him in person. Like having a horror movie villain walk off screen and stand in front of you.
The problem with that was I’d been so distracted by his face, I hadn’t been paying attention to what Casper was doing until he was crawling up onto the hospital bed, squeezing between my legs, and leaning over me with a set of paddles in his hands.
“You’re gonna shock yourself like that, idiot,” Frankie called out. I flicked my eyes in his direction before flicking them back. I didn’t want to look at the guy any more than I had to.
“You take the fun out of everything,” Casper grumbled as he kicked his feet over the side of the bed and landed next to me.
Frankie flicked a button on the cart to my right, and the paddles hummed to life.
“Are you scared?” Casper asked.
“Of what?”
“Dying.” He shrugged a shoulder. “I’ve always wondered what it was like to be scared of dying. So, are you? Tell me what it feels like.”
I shook my head and narrowed my eyes. “You aren’t going to kill me.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that, baby girl.” He grinned, dropped the paddles to my skin, and then I felt like I was being kicked in the chest by a two-ton horse.
It took a few seconds for the pain to go away, and then I felt nothing at all.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR
CASPER
“Is she dead?”
“I dunno. Does she look dead to you, asshole?” Franks grunted, his eye fixed on the machine with a dozen or so buttons and the green line that went from squiggly to straight as an arrow a few seconds ago.
I dropped the paddles onto the cart and tucked my hands into my pockets. It seemed too easy. Not much different from plucking a fly out of the air and squashing it between your fingers.
Then again, I didn’t know what I was expecting. It wasn’t like shooting someone in the head. There was no blood and guts spilling out on the floor. No turned-over furniture or mixing of DNA. No real cleanup required. Just a body lying there as though it was gonna wake up at any moment and start talking. Or, knowing Bellatrix, cursing me out.
“She looks like she’s sleeping,” I said mostly to myself. But Franks threw his two cents in anyway.
“Yeah, permanently,” he grumbled before he went back to putting his tools into his fancy doctor bag. A mix of variousneedles and glass bottles, metal instruments and some alcohol wipes.
Didn’t know what he needed it all for, but then again, fixing people up wasn’t my specialty. Killing them was. Which was why I told her this was the way it was always going to end. I didn’t know what to do with something once it was broken. Once it couldn’t do what I was used to it doing anymore.
I knew how to press it to its limits. Watch it bounce back or shatter. I knew how to force square pegs into round holes—no pun intended—but I didn’t know what to do with it once the edges were gone. When a square was no longer squaring and it wasn’t a circle either. Because squares didn’t become circles just 'cause you changed them a little.
