Page 50 of No Asylum Here

"I thought better of you, and I'm in awe, really. Because the bar was so low before this, it's in Hell. And if you call her or any of my patients for that matter, imbecilic again⁠—"

"Mal, my dear boy. You're blowing this out of proportion. Just like your mother used to. You're so much like her."

"Don't bring my mother into this."

"See? You're like a woman, without all the useful parts. Doesn't matter how fancy an education I buy you, or that I raised you exactly as my father raised me. Squandered effort on my part." He rose from his chair, buttoning his pants while holding my eye contact. That patronizing grin he wore had me barreling dangerously close to my last nerve.

“You're a pussy, Mal. And I'm ashamed to call you my son. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if your whore of a mother cheated on me. You have the stink of a bastard to you."

Something inside me broke.

He strode past me, arrogant enough to turn his back on me. I lunged, hands wrapping around his throat. A strangled grunt of surprise caught in his throat, the vibrations against my palms practically goading me to squeeze harder.

He threw all his weight backward, sending me crashing into his desk. He whipped around, faster than I'd ever seen him move before. Reaching for me, his hand wrapped around my throat and hoisted me high into the air so that the tips of my shoes barely scraped the floor. How—? It wasn't possible for a man of his age, with his lifestyle, to be this absurdly strong.

With his arm stretched over his head, his sleeve slid down his forearm to reveal veins that looked as though his blood had been replaced with a toxic sludge, so bright they were nearly incandescent.

"My experimental drug," he said, answering the silent question written on my reddened face. "The one you called a waste of time and money. Does it look like a waste now, Dr. Rook?"

I tried to fire off a curse, only for it to lodge in my blocked airway, coming out as a gurgle.

"You know what? I'm feeling magnanimous today. Instead of killing you, because that would be a waste, I'm going to make you strong, like me. I'm not even going to fire you. That would be too easy.” His frame loomed over me, and peering into his hooded gaze, I saw no trace of the man who’d raised me. He pressed his foot to my throat, making me wince at the pressure applied to the rapidly forming bruises his iron-grip left.

Dark pin pricks spotted my vision, spreading until the darkness was all I could see. Despite the fact that I was seconds away from passing out, I could hear the click of the phone and my father’s voice a few beats later. “Send two orderlies to fetch Barbara Reed. She’s in the Bell Tower. Have her delivered to the surgery ward for an immediate operation.”

He fell quiet, simmering in a brief silence. My heart lifted with hope. Was he reconsidering? Had he come to his senses?

“Oh, one more thing, Nurse. Confiscate that raggedy bunny rabbit from her, and throw it in the incinerator.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

Tuesday

I’d retreated to my room early and locked myself inside the darkened space. With a flashlight as my light source—a reading light was pretty much its only use out in the boonies with no service to speak of—I pored over Seventeen’s journal.

I inhaled the entries like a drug, curiosity snowballing into pure blown obsession. Each entry sent me on a rollercoaster of emotions. He’d documented everything. Patient notes. Grievances with his douchebag father. His thoughts on magazine clippings he’d saved from The Lancet, his favorite medical journal. He’d even scribbled lyrics into the margins and practiced his gorgeous signature on random pages.

It was all there: How his family had turned Saint Bart’s into a very profitable sanatorium, starting with his grandfather, who really was the skinned corpse on display in the lobby. How he’d come to Saint Bart’s, living under the shadow his father’s expectations cast. How his father worked longer and longer hours, sometimes disappearing into his lab for days at a time. How Mal had protected Bunny and his other patients from Rook’s madness as best he could.

He even reported Saint Bart’s himself, several times. No one answered him. It was heartbreaking how the outside world ignored him, so he stayed to shield them the best he could.

These people deserve better. How sad it is that I alone can’t save them. For I am all they have.

The compassionate man who’d written this journal didn’t feel like the same man in the mask, who looked at me like I was something to be eaten.

I flipped a page, and an old news article fluttered loose with the headline “BRUTALITY AT ST. BARTHOLOMEW’S.”

My spine chilled seeing a monochrome photo of Seventeen and his father, side by side.

The article went on to talk about an investigation. Missing patients. Unmarked graves scattering the grounds. Failed lobotomies, too much electroshock therapy, macabre experimentations, suicides...

Saint Bartholomew’s dirty secrets seemed to have bled out into the public eye all at once. The article went on to say that the day the police moved in to shut the hospital down, they found an abandoned building.

No sign of the patients or staff.

All of them, gone. Vanished into thin air.

It was hard for me to come to terms with something I couldn’t explain with logic. My running theory for the dates was that Rook’s Treatment somehow froze cells, lengthening a person’s lifespan. That didn’t explain Bunny, though. Or why everyone had simply up and vanished without so much as a hair left behind.