Page 23 of Beautiful Deception

His chapped lips, with flakes of skin peeling from the center, struggle to form syllables as he continues to advance toward me. As the lantern shines into his mouth, the missing tip of his tongue bubbles with gushing blood. I recoil, disgust rising in my stomach.

“K—”

As Peter’s incensed eyes feast on me like a diseased parasite, strings of crimson saliva sputter into the air and onto the satin pajama collar. “Kid-kidnapped you.”

Something shifts dangerously fast in my mind, a gear being taken from its fundamental position, yet the disassembled pieces build themselves onto his sinned confession.

I raise a hand and slap him across the face. It does nothing to quash the venom gushing in my veins, torturing my skipping heart with diabolical whispers, and the pendulum of time freezes a little too much on the left.

It’s an awful feeling. Stressful, irritating—it’s not right. It has to be in the center, just like the splintered crack in the nailed-tight wooden box. It was not centered on the spiral design, the oxygen mask wasn’t on correctly, and the dirt wasn’t a constant flow.

Not right, a booming voice screams above the beating heartbeats in my temple. Getting kidnapped and buried alive isn’t right.

“Fix it,” a gentle whisper of reassurance reaps behind my ears.

Mercy bounds the curve of my wrists, a chain of sanity’s last defense, but resentment births unspoken sin from the coarse touch of black satin.

Each step down the beautiful stairwell, tarnished with splashes of scarlet, is the bittersweet shards of torment bidding farewell.

“Good girl.”

***

“I didn’t think Peter would be stronger than you.”

Dr. Kian’s voice floats through my groggy head as sleep ebbs away like a stroll down the sandy beach.

“Did it look like drugs to you?” Remo asks after there’s a dip in the softness I’m resting on. “I discovered an old unmarked ampoule at the bottom of the trash in the kitchen. Five unopened ones in a flour bag.”

“There are drugs that, when used in high doses, might create hallucinations,” Dr. Kian says with the sound of plastic being torn apart.

“What’s the fastest the drug can take effect?”

As I fight to open my eyes, the surface changes even more, angling my body into the dent. Sleep holds me delicately, lulling me deeper into sweet sways of fluffy clouds and drowsy kisses.

“Minutes,” Dr. Kian answers duly, “or hours.”

Remo grunts and the other man hisses at him to stop moving, which Remo counters by asking if he’d like to get stabbed with a piece of wood as well.

My lashes flutter uncontrollably when I hear him being hurt, and weariness smears mistiness across my vision. The room sculpts itself, the air permeates a pungent scent of antiseptic, and there are two color combinations in front of me.

My eyelids, however, are too heavy to stay open. At the very least, they are Dr. Kian and Remo, not impersonators. I’ve experienced dreams where strangers claim that I’m their daughter.

Puzzling but harmless dreams.

“We can rule out the staff,” Remo begins as another hiss leaves his lips. “I watched them prepare and serve whoever was there first.”

Dr. Kian hums a contemplative tune. “Peter was targeted, I presume?”

“Looks that way,” Remo agrees.

My finger twitches when Peter’s name registers in my head, but my body feels like wet cement in my blood. The hand I’m holding softly squeezes, and neither man acknowledges the minor movement if it’s their hand.

“Ms. Junnie has never met Peter before,” Remo points out introspectively, “but I can’t rule her out.”

“And Maya?”

My nails dig into the back of someone’s hand as Dr. Kian says my name, emphasizing that I can’t get preferential treatment because I’m his patient.

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