Page 25 of Say You're Mine

"No, you don't." My mother's voice is sharper now, laced with impatience. "You only think you do. But we can fix that, Juniper. We can make you see the truth."

She nods to someone I can't see, and then there are hands on me, cold and impersonal as they wheel me out of the room. The hallway scrolls by in a sickening blur, the lights overhead strobing and pulsing in time with the throbbing in my skull.

We come to a stop in a room that smells of antiseptic and ozone. A man in a surgical mask looms over me, a bone saw whining in his hand.

"Juniper Deveaux," he says, his voice muffled and distorted. "By order of your mother and in accordance with the powers vested in me by the Deveaux Corporation, I hereby sentence you to a complete prefrontal lobotomy. May God have mercy on your soul."

Terror, pure and primal, rips through the drug-induced haze. They can't... they wouldn't...

But even as the denial screams through my mind, I know the truth. There's nothing they wouldn't do, no line they wouldn't cross, to maintain their power. To keep me under their control.

The saw descends, the whine rising to a deafening shriek. I squeeze my eyes shut, hot tears leaking down my temples as I brace for the end. For the oblivion that will rip away everything I am, everything I love.

And in that final, desperate moment, I see her. Cara, my fierce, beautiful warrior, cradling the swell of our child as she smiles at me with love in her storm-grey eyes. The image sears into my mind, a burst of light amidst the encroaching darkness.

I love you, I think, pouring every ounce of my heart, my soul, into the words. I'll always love you. In this life and whatever comes after. You're my forever.

The blade kisses my skin, icy and sharp. And I-

Wake with a strangled gasp, my body jackknifing off the thin mattress of my cell. For a moment I'm disoriented, my mind reeling as I try to separate nightmare from reality.

But then it comes rushing back. The ECT session. The threats of lobotomy, of some twisted new drug that would strip away my free will. The sickening helplessness, the soul-deep terror of losing myself, losing Cara.

It was a dream. A horrific, gut-wrenching dream, but a dream nonetheless.

I'm still here. Still whole, still sane. Still clinging to the memory of my love, my child, with every shredded fiber of my being.

I draw a shuddering breath, scrubbing my hands over my face as if I could wipe away the lingering images. The ECT sessions are bad enough, leaving me fractured and raw and aching in every cell. But this...

This was something new. Something I know, with a bone-deep certainty, is a harbinger of worse to come.

I have to get out of here. Have to find my way back to Cara before they break me, before they hollow me out and fill me with their poison. But how? Faulkner is watching me closer than ever, the noose of his control pulled taut against my throat. And without Sarah, without Dr. Brenneman's negligent leniency, I'm cut off from any allies, any resources I might have used to stage another escape.

I'm well and truly trapped, a rat in a maze with no way out, and I can feel the walls closing in, feel the sickening certainty in my bones that time is running out.

It burns through me, an inexorable tide, scouring away the stains of fear and despair. I cling to it, to her, a drowning man scrabbling for driftwood in a storm-tossed sea.

They can break my body, ravage my mind. But they can't touch my soul. Can't tear out the core of me, the part that belongs to her, that pulses in time with the tiny heartbeat sheltered beneath her skin.

I am hers, and she is mine. And no force on this wretched earth will keep me from her side.

Not Faulkner, not my mother. Not even Death Himself.

Time slips away, blurs into a smear of blood and sweat and the distant, tinny echo of screams. My screams, I realize dimly, an endless animal howl scraping my throat raw. They come for me again and again, a relentless tide of agony, until my neurons fry and my synapses shred and the world dissolves into an impressionist nightmare of harsh light and grasping hands.

But through it all, I hold fast to her.

To the smoke-velvet warmth of her gaze. The ripe-peach sweetness of her lips. The steady drum of her heart against mine, the metronome to which my own stuttering pulse yearns to beat in time.

She is the lighthouse on my shore, the celestial body around which I orbit, helpless and yearning in the void.

And though I am unmade, though I am broken on the wheels of their ambition and cruelty...

I will find my way back to her.

No matter the cost.

No matter how long it takes.

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