Page 83 of No Asylum Here

"Don't you fucking touch me!" I snarled, jerking away from him. "This is all your fault."

“All his fault? No Mal. You're to blame too. You shouldn't have let him live. If you had killed him when you first found out she was pregnant, he never would have had a chance to give her the Treatment. Let me take over. I’ll fix this.”

“Fix this?” For the first time, I responded to the monster out loud. “Can you bring Bunny back to life? Can you make these last two years as if they never happened? Can you make it so that I became a painter, instead of a discarded doctor that can’t even save myself, let alone my patients?”

I was shouting, while my vision went in and out, as the demon within pushed for control. When my vision flickered back, I jerked my attention up to see every eye in the room on me. All of them, looking at me like I was every bit as insane as I felt.

“No,” the mad thing answered. “But I can avenge her.”

“Everyone out!” When the staff began to file out of the room, my father—with the baby still in his arms—I added, “Not you.”

Reluctantly, he obliged, lingering in the middle of the O.R.

“Give him to me,” I demanded.

“No.”

“Give me the fucking baby, Father.”

“You have no use for him,” he said dryly, regarding me like I was nothing to him. I was nothing to him.

“No use? Fuck you. I’m going to raise my sibling, and you’re going to get the fuck out of here.”

“Raise him? He’s a monster. What, are you going to keep him in your bell tower?”

Was I? My brows knitted with confusion as my gaze dropped to the baby in his arms. It had gone frightfully quiet again. Its eyes were closed, its skin pale, and the veins no longer glowing.

Dead.

Then I noticed the imprint of a hand around its throat.

Rook had strangled it while I was distracted with Bunny.

“Why…? Wha—” I could barely process everything that was happening. One tragedy after the next. I couldn’t keep up. I couldn't stand it. “Why did you kill him?”

“I don’t need him alive for the tests I’d like to run. Better if he’s dead, actually.” The bastard laughed, fucking laughed. “We don’t need a crying, shitting mutant around here.”

My vision turned black as rage possessed me like a demon. The mad thing inside me was taking over, spreading through me like poison.

It wanted to take over, and for the first time…I let it.

I reached for the bloody scalpel abandoned on the surgical cart and whipped around, swinging my arm in a sweeping motion. Rook’s eyes expanded with shock. Still holding the baby, he leaped back to avoid the weapon.

He wasn’t fast enough.

The blade sliced across his throat so deeply that I’d severed his carotid artery. Blood sprayed in a gory fan, coating everything in close proximity. Pulling my surgery mask around my neck, I grinned at him—uncaring that his blood was in my eyes.

His mouth gaped, opening and closing like a fish out of water, gulping for air. He staggered, and before he could collapse to his knees, I tossed the scalpel on the floor beside him, stepped forward and took my brother from his arms.

He reached for me, or the baby—I wasn’t sure which, and I didn’t care.

When he fell forward, lifeless in a pool of his own blood, I turned and left the room. A passing nurse stopped, her face chalk white as she looked to me, then peered into the surgery at the body.

“He couldn’t handle the death of his baby. That or he was so disgusted by it, he killed himself. Whichever is easier to believe. Have the bodies brought down to the morgue. Barbara Reed will be buried beside her baby on the grounds.”

“And your father, Doctor?”

I pulled my mask back over my face so she couldn’t see me smile. “Throw him in the incinerator.”