“I don’t know why or how you got let out, Ryan, but brother or not, if you cave to those urges I know are still in you, I will kill you. Whether I get caught and put away for it or not, I swear to you I will kill you myself before I let you do any more damage. You may have no conscience but I do, and mine eats away at me for what you did to Mel’s parents just to see her break.”
He turns his back on me and I debate tackling him for his gun and putting a few bullets in him. My blood is on fire and the itch is demanding I give into it. It becomes toxic if I don’t indulge it, embrace it and feed it. It will boil in my veins and find its own release, and that’s when I mess up and end up fucking and killing with no thought of consequence.
My feet carried me back to Grace Manor. The voices are too loud and boisterous, the lighting too bright.
“You’re late for curfew!” Jason barks at me.
Fuck off you greasy little maggot-cocked pervert that can only get laid by crazy bitches needing something in return. I want to force feed you that sign-in book one page at a time and then use your pen to staple your cock to the cover.
I rip the piece of paper from the book and hold it up to his face. He pales and then lifts the receiver on the phone behind the desk he thinks makes him safe from my wrath. I screw up the piece of paper and push it into my pocket. “Who you calling?”
“You can’t talk to me like that. You threatened me.”
“I didn’t talk to you. Fucking man up, Jason, and if you do call anyone, make sure to let them know you’re violating poor little Isabella’s cunt with your disgusting cock. I’m sure it’s all on film too.”
“Fuck you! Those cameras only watch. We stopped recording on them years ago,” he retorts, proud of himself.
“Good to know.”
I make it to the second floor without killing anyone and slip my key into the door just as Jodie comes down from the third floor and sidles up next to me. She is a glutton for punishment and deserves everything she gets. I push open the door and chin lift for her to go inside.
I lift my shirt over my head and drop it to the floor. Her eyes are fixed on the cut there; I’d forgotten I busted one of the stitches. The place is a mess, glass is still everywhere.
“Let’s go up to your place,” I tell her, grabbing the door handle and exiting. She follows me up the stairs and takes over leading when I stop at the top. I can’t remember which room is hers and which is Isabella’s. She stops at the first door and opens it. I push inside and slam the door shut. Pointing down at my wound she asks. “Why do you and Isabella both have cuts?”
“Why do you have these?” I ask, reaching for her wrists.
“You know why.”
“No I don’t. Tell me.”
She looks like a meek little girl and sadness fills her eyes when she snatches her hand from mine. “I tried to kill myself.”
I hold my finger up and wave it in her face, tutting. “That’s a lie.” I stalk over to her and pull her into my arms, burrowing my face in her hair and inhaling. “Let’s take a shower.”
It’s not a question, I’m telling her and her unsure, watery eyes search mine. I offer her a reassuring smile but the truth is, whether I gave her that small piece of comfort or not, she would still do what I asked. She’s wrapped up in me and it doesn’t matter that I’m an asshole to her. It doesn’t matter that she hasn’t known me for long or that I’m fucking her friend. She clings to anything she thinks is real, and when I taunt her then show her affection, it builds a bond. She needs me. She needs my praise and takes my cruelty just to get a fraction of fake affection.
I hear the water turn on, and Jodie moves around in the bathroom. Her shower is just a faucet on the wall above her bathtub. The razor blades she uses to mar her skin sit on the panel. She has scars everywhere; I’ve felt them inside her from the abuse she suffered as a child, and it tore her up.
She undresses and steps under the spray, her hair soaking up the water and sticking to her face, masking her tears. She’s so unstable, how is she not in a psych ward? I kick off my boots and step out of my jeans. My dick comes alive at the thought of what I’m about to do and her greedy eyes find it erect and eager.
Jodie sees sex as love because it’s the only affection she was ever shown from the one man who was supposed to love her. But there are other victims of sexual abuse that go in the opposite direction. This one guy, Callum “Ladymutilator” Edison, was placed on the same ward as me. He had a real repulsion for women and sex. If someone used sexual innuendo in his presence or a female Doctor attempted to touch him or looked at him the wrong way, he went into a rage and attacked. If you talked about fucking around him or flirted with a nurse and the guards didn’t beat you for it first, you would have to hope they medicated him and strapped him to his bed that night or you’d be sleeping with one eye open. He was a victim of abuse by his foster mother. He was there for three years and had eight trips to the E.R before anyone stepped in and assessed the situation.
He made his first kill at sixteen; a girl in his school who he claimed was too promiscuous. They didn’t even look in his direction for her murder but he skipped town anyway and became a runaway. It took the police a further eight years to tie him to hers and others murders. He’d racked up nineteen bodies by the time they caught him.
All his victims were women aged between fourteen and forty-six, all brutally stabbed in the genital area numerous times before he slit their throats. He was never getting out of there; he almost killed a guard with a shank made from the spine of a book the guard had left there because it had a woman on the cover showing cleavage. His foster Momma really did a number on him. Melissa liked to give me all the details of the patients. I hated being in that part of the prison; I like sanity with my bloodshed. I thought I would be put with people like me and we could share dinner and murder urges but it was nothing like that and most people in the main prison segment of the hospital were like caged animals. They weren’t human or aware enough to carry out a kill for the pleasure of the kill. They were just sick, born broken in the head. I was soulless not mindless. You see it all, hear it all and are put with them all. Rapists, murderers, cannibals; they have them all in the main prison, and then after years of assessments and medication, some get moved to other parts, a more humanely run part and the process resets. Evaluations and meds until eventually you’ve gone through all four segments and they determine whether you’re healed. Not many people make it to where I have. I’m an exceptional case and an exceptional actor, with helping hands inside the walls in the form of the nurses. Even one of the male guards took a liking to me. I guess when they’re faced with that much insanity I looked pretty normal to them. When you have crazy people trying to kill you every time your back is turned, someone like me became a perfect patient in their eyes. I watched, learned and molded myself into that perfect patient. Reforming and claiming sexual and physical abuse at the hand of my father, and pretending to feel remorse for my victims was ate up by the psychologists, especially Doctor Gregory Leighton.
“Ryan, what are thinking about?” Jodie’s words penetrate my thoughts and they vanish into the air with the steam of the shower.
“I’m thinking what a joke you are.”
I step into the tub, gripping one of her razor blades as I do. I pin her against the tiled wall and rub my cock across her stomach.
“Why are you so cruel?” she murmurs, wrapping her hand around my cock and stroking.
“Because I have no soul. Why did you do this to yourself?” I ask, pulling her wrist in front of her.
“Because I wanted to die!”
Bringing the razor down to an old scar, I push down with the blade of her razor and pull it across her skin. A red risen line follows in its wake. Her inhales of breath and cries feed the beast that is me. “That’s a cry for help, Jodie. You get lonely and want attention.”
She brings her other hand up to cover the seeping wound and her pupils dilate as her body floods her system with adrenaline.