Page 81 of Ethereally Tainted

I don’t know how much time passes as I sit there, my nerves making my heart race, but after what feels like forever, I hear the door open behind me. I turn my head sharply, my gaze lingering on the sight before me.

My blood turns cold, and my face drains of all color.

Behind me, a man enters, dressed in a sophisticated suit in which not a single part of the garment is wrinkled. He has a brown leather portfolio firmly grasped in his hand.

“Good day, dear.”

Emilio Ricci’s voice thunders inside me, an unwanted and unwelcome gesture that sends me further into a state of panic. What am I even doing here? I want to scream at him, but words fail me in his presence.

He sets the bag on the floor before taking the seat in front of me in the other chair.

“How are you?”

But all I can do is stare at him. “What the fuck do you think?”

Irritation washes over me, along with my broken heart. How can he ask something so absurd after what I witnessed?

“Now, now, you don’t need to have an attitude.” His lips part in a smile, showing his teeth, and making my skin crawl.

His words leave me completely speechless because I can’t understand how he can say such a thing after seeing Rebecca’s body.

“You said Rebecca transferred programs!” The anger is rising within me, enough to make me want to strangle him to death, but my hands are restrained to the table in front of me.

“And she did. It’s such a shame to see a young soul like hers taking her life.”

I know she didn’t kill herself, she couldn’t have. The new program was supposed to help her, not make her worse.

“What am I doing here?” My voice is draped with poison just to spite him.

“Patience, dear.” He leans forward and spends several seconds staring at me. It makes me uncomfortable. “How are you enjoying yourself here at the Dankworth Institute?”

“Great.” My words are full of sarcasm, and he stares at me.

“I understand it must have been an adjustment coming here after the accident.”

“It was no accident.”

It took me a while to understand it, but after I stopped eating my own food, the memories returned. Some were more nasty than others, and I now know it wasn’t an accident. I was taken from Grimhill Manor after Frederick Grimhill was killed by a doll master who collected the strawberry-blonde girl, Aurora. And that leaves me with sick and twisted satisfaction in this moment of chaos.

“Excuse me?”

“It was no accident,” I repeat plainly, leaving no room for arguments.

“What makes you say that?” He leans forward, placing his elbows on the table as he stares at me with those blackened eyes.

He is the devil himself.

I don’t answer his question, not feeling the need to explain myself to him. This place is fucked up. I know they lied to me this whole time.

“Well then,” he grabs the portfolio from the floor, dusting it off before grabbing a bunch of papers. “I want you to look at this and tell me what you see.”

He places one of the photos on the table in front of me.

As I stand in the room, an overwhelming sense of numbness takes over, almost as if time has stopped and I am no longer connected to reality, my eyes transfixed on the picture before me. My abdomen feels as if a knife is twisting inside of it, leaving no space untouched as the knife plunges into me over again in frantic movements, slowly stealing the life away from me. A whimper escapes my mouth.

“What do you see?” Mr. Ricci prompts, but I cannot reply.

In the picture is a dead body covered in blood. It is a woman whose bleached hair is sticky with the crimson liquid, hanging together in clumps and giving off a messy appearance. Her gaze is fixed on endless darkness.

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