I walked down the hallway. My heels clicked loudly on the linoleum, a rhythm that felt too cheerful for this place. I stopped outside the last door.
It wasn't a door. It was a wall of reinforced glass.
I looked inside.
The room was sparse. A bed bolted to the floor. A toilet in the corner. No windows to the outside, only high vents.
And there, in the center of the room, was Julian Sterling.
He was kneeling on the floor, his back to me. He was wearing a straitjacket, the heavy canvas straps pulled tight across his broad shoulders. Chains connected his ankles to a bolt in the floor.
He wasn't the monster Brenda had described. He was a tragedy. Even through the jacket, I could see the sharp angles of his shoulder blades. He was tall, his frame massive, but he was skeletal now, the muscle wasted away to wiry, desperate cords. He looked like a famine victim, not a killer.
His hair was long, matted, hanging over his face.
I swiped the key card. The glass door hissed and slid open.
Julian spun around.
I stopped breathing.
His face was gaunt, pale as death. But beneath the grime and the hollow cheeks, the bone structure was devastating. High cheekbones, a strong jaw. But it was his eyes that froze me. They were a piercing, unnatural blue, but the pupils were blown wide, swallowing the iris. The whites were veined with red.
He looked at me, and he didn't see a person. He saw a threat.
He roared. It was a raw, animalistic sound of pure rage. He lunged at me.
The chains snapped taut. He stopped three feet from where I stood.
I let out a scream-a theatrical, terrified shriek-and scrambled backward, falling onto my butt.
"Please!" I cried, covering my face. "Don't hurt me!"
I peeked through my fingers. The camera in the corner was tracking us. I had to sell it.
Julian pulled at the chains, his breath coming in ragged gasps. He was sweating profusely. Diaphoresis. A symptom of the toxin.
"Get out!" he rasped. His voice was like gravel grinding together. "They sent another one? Get out before I kill you!"
I crawled into the corner of the room, curling into a ball. I stayed there for an hour, trembling, while he paced the length of his chain, muttering to himself. He was hallucinating. Fighting invisible demons.
Eventually, exhaustion took him. He slumped against the padded wall, his eyes closing.
I waited ten more minutes. Then, I sat up.
I checked the camera. It was a high-end model, covering every inch of the room. There were no blind spots.
I reached into the hem of my dress. Sewn into the fabric was a thin, metallic disc. A signal jammer modified with a looping algorithm. I pressed it between my fingers, activating it. For the next twenty minutes, the security monitors would show a seamless loop of me cowering in the corner while Julian slept.
I stood up and moved silently toward him. I stripped off the pink dress. Underneath, I was wearing a black tank top and leggings I had worn under the dress.
I moved toward him.
He smelled of sweat and fear, but underneath that, there was a scent I remembered. Cedar and rain.
I knelt beside him.
"Julian?" I whispered.
His eyes snapped open. He snarled, trying to bite me.
I didn't flinch. I moved with a speed he couldn't track. My hand shot out and clamped onto his jaw, my thumb pressing into the pressure point behind his ear.
He froze, his eyes widening in shock. His body went limp, paralyzed for a moment by the nerve pinch.
"Shh," I hissed. My voice was no longer the scared girl's. It was low, commanding. "Look at me."
He looked. He saw the focus in my eyes. He saw the intelligence.
I pulled a small penlight from my bra and shined it into his eyes. No pupillary constriction.
"Toxic encephalopathy," I muttered. "Induced by scopolamine and... something else. Synthetic."
I ran my hands over his neck. I felt it. A small, hard lump at the base of his skull.
A neural implant. They were stimulating his amygdala, keeping him in a permanent state of fight-or-flight.
"You're not crazy, Julian," I whispered. "You're being piloted."
He stared at me, confusion warring with the madness in his gaze. "Who... who are you?"
"I'm the wife you didn't ask for," I said. I turned off the penlight. "And tonight, I'm going to perform surgery."
