Chapter 6 No.6

She 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 her. 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, she 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.

Serena swiped the key card. The glass door hissed and slid open.

Julian spun around.

She 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 her. They were a piercing, unnatural blue, but the pupils were blown wide, swallowing the iris. The whites were veined with red.

He looked at her, 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 her.

The chains snapped taut. He stopped three feet from where she stood.

She let out a scream-a theatrical, terrified shriek-and scrambled backward, falling onto her butt.

Please! she cried, covering her face. Don't hurt me!

She peeked through her fingers. The camera in the corner was tracking them. She 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!

Serena crawled into the corner of the room, curling into a ball. She 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.

She waited ten more minutes. Then, she sat up.

She checked the camera. It was a high-end model, covering every inch of the room. There were no blind spots.

She reached into the hem of her dress. Sewn into the fabric was a thin, metallic disc. A signal jammer modified with a looping algorithm. She pressed it between her fingers, activating it. For the next twenty minutes, the security monitors would show a seamless loop of her cowering in the corner while Julian slept.

She stood up and moved silently toward him. She stripped off the pink dress. Underneath, she was wearing a black tank top and leggings she had worn under the dress.

She moved toward him.

He smelled of sweat and fear, but underneath that, there was a scent she remembered. Cedar and rain.

She knelt beside him.

Julian? she whispered.

His eyes snapped open. He snarled, trying to bite her.

She didn't flinch. She moved with a speed he couldn't track. Her hand shot out and clamped onto his jaw, her 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, she hissed. Her voice was no longer the scared girl's. It was low, commanding. Look at me.

He looked. He saw the focus in her eyes. He saw the intelligence.

She pulled a small penlight from her bra and shined it into his eyes. No pupillary constriction.

Toxic encephalopathy, she muttered. Induced by scopolamine and... something else. synthetic.

She ran her hands over his neck. She 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, she whispered. You're being piloted.

He stared at her, confusion warring with the madness in his gaze. Who... who are you?

I'm the wife you didn't ask for, she said. She turned off the penlight. And tonight, I'm going to perform surgery.