Page 28 of No Asylum Here

Her attempt to remain polite and professional crumbled, and her scowl returned. Mmm, my doctor didn’t like being interrupted by a man. Too bad she was so sexy when she was angry. I would most definitely do it again.

“I understand that your circumstances might feel a bit dehumanizing⁠—”

I scoffed, and she continued after a tense pause.

“But I get the feeling that you’re an intelligent man capable of respect when you’re lucid, so during our sessions you’ll act like the gentleman I know you can be. Is that fucking understood?”

“Gentleman? Have they told you nothing about what I am or what I’ve done?”

Her perfectly shaped brows knitted together. “I know very little. Your patient file seems to be missing some important papers. I do know that you're well educated. You attended Brown University, though I don’t know your major. And I know why you’re here. You killed someone, and then you ate their flesh.”

Only some of that was true. “I killed someone, alright.”

“I also know you’ve been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.”

I wasn’t when I’d been admitted. The truth was, sometimes I didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t anymore.

Did she know they made me dream of her? I considered telling her. Tempting as it was to see the face she’d make when I told her about the things I did to her in my dreams, I opted to keep that ace stowed in my sleeve.

The best game plan for now was to crawl beneath her skin and slither into her brain. I’d make her crack. If she were here to be my personal demon, I’d become hers too.

I’d destroy her mentally. And as soon as I got my hands on her, I’d break the rest of her.

“Tell me about your childhood.”

My fists clenched around the armrests. It was about the only movement I could manage, but the audible cracking of my inked knuckles had her lashes fluttering. “Ask me something else, Doc.”

She glanced up from her legal pad. “What?”

“Ask me the question you really want the answer to, Dr. Beckett.”

“Tell me about your relationship with your father,” she said with a smile, which was just as much of a mask as the one plain on my face.

I was getting under her skin. Her beet-red cheeks were a dead giveaway.

“You don’t want to know about my father.” I flashed her an unhinged grin that had her blush deepening a shade. “You want to know what I’d do to you if I weren’t in this straitjacket.”

Chapter Thirteen

Tuesday

I deserved a goddamn Oscar for the straight face I was able to keep through Patient Seventeen’s psych evaluation. My brain, my body—fuck, my whole world—was on fire. Those orderlies had seen Lauren. Which meant…

No. I had no clue what it meant.

I couldn’t just blame it on the pills this time. Too bad there was no time to unpack it.

One of the most dangerous men in the country was in my office, bound and masked as I’d fallen into an alternate Silence of the Lambs parody.

If I let my guard down, he’d eat me alive. And somehow, I believed his Houdini remark. The mask may not stop him from gobbling me up if he resolved to do so. By the dark hunger gleaming bright in his steely eyes, he would.

He saw me as a particularly delicious meal, surely.

I hated how that had my thighs clenching, forbidden thoughts swirling like a dangerous storm at the back of my troubled mind.

No matter how much I lied to myself that his face was obscure—that stranger coincidences happened all the time—there was no denying that his face was the one from my dreams.

I set down my pencil and flattened my shaking hand on my legal pad to steady it. It would be a mistake to show any weakness, and I was too distracted to take notes anyway.