Page 82 of Ward D
“You found her!” Jade’s face breaks into a smile. “Where was she?”
Damon turns to look at her, and the affection on his face is unmistakable. “She was checking out the seclusion room. Admiring our handiwork.”
“What do you think, Amy?” Jade’s blue eyes flecked with yellow rest on my face. “And you thought I would never do anything significant with my life…”
“I never said that,” I mumble.
Jade comes up right beside me, her eyes boring into me. “No, you never said it. But youthoughtit. Didn’t you?”
She’s not entirely wrong. “Jade…”
“You disappointed me though, Amy,” she muses. “I always thought of you as being very smart, but you never saw any of this coming. You believedmeover that geeky reporter, even though you know I’m a brilliant liar.” She looks over at her boyfriend with admiration. “And worst of all, you trustedhim.”
Damon clutches his chest. “Hey, are you saying I’m not trustworthy?”
“You did put on an excellent performance,” she concedes. “I guess those psychology books you were always reading paid off.”
“Well, thank you.”
Jade winks at me. “Damon really is wonderful, Amy. I wish you could have known him in a different context. Of course, that couldn’t happen because you didn’t want to have anything to do with me outside of here.”
“I… I’m sorry,” I manage.
She ignores my feeble attempt to apologize. “We met in such an interesting way too. What do they call it—a meet-cute? Damon was my mother’s drug dealer. You know how she was always hooked on pills? Well, he used to bring them to her.”
I’m not sure I would call that a meet-cute, but I’m not about to contradict her.
She smiles distantly. “And he was the one who brought her the cocktail she OD’d on. She had no idea what she was putting into her system. Damon was so clever about it.”
Damon grins, showing off his dimples. “You’re very welcome, babe.”
My mouth is open. “You were the one responsible for your mother’s overdose? How could you do that?”
The smile vanishes from Jade’s face. “The woman used to burn me with her cigarettes. Do you think I feel any regret about giving her exactly what she deserved?”
I remember the way Mrs. Carpenter smashed that ashtray against the wall. The suspicious marks on Jade’s arms. She begged me not to tell anyone. I should never have listened.
I made a terrible mistake. I should have helped my friend, even when she asked me not to. There’s a small part of me that feels like I deserve everything that’s about to happen.
But no. These people are monsters. Whatever created them has already happened. I can’t let them hurt anybody else.
I back against the wall, trying to figure out my next move. Three of them and one of me. I don’t like those odds. If only Will were still conscious, I would have a fighting chance. But without him…
I’ve got to buy myself some time. One thing I know about Jade is that she’s a talker. I could probably keep her talking until the sun comes up.
“I don’t understand,” I say. “How… how did you manage this? Why didn’t anyone recognize you?”
“It was surprisingly easy,” Jade says. “The real Dr. Beck wasn’t working on the unit this week, so most of the patients had never seen him before.”
Damon jerks his head in the direction of the room full of dead bodies. “And we managed to take care of most of the people who did recognize me.”
Of course. Miguel and Mary were both convinced that Damon Sawyer was roaming the hallways long before anyone else was. Lucky for him, neither of them were terribly trustworthy. I’m guessing if I opened the door to Seclusion Two, I would find Miguel’s body in there.
“As soon as the dayshift staff left,” Jade says, “I opened the door to the seclusion room. It was almost pitifully easy for me to get that code. Just as easy as it was to give you the wrong code. And once Damon was out, we took care of the real Dr. Beck and Ramona.”
My eyes are drawn to the woman that I believed was Ramona all night. She’s looking down at her nails critically, but when she notices my attention, she looks up and smiles. “My name is Nicole,” she says. “I actuallyama nurse.”
“Before you went berserk,” Jade points out.
