Savage Mafia Prince: a Dangerous Royals romance Read online

  Asshole, I think.

  I look back down. His eyes are fixed on the ceiling. Back to being a heavily sedated lion. Was I imagining it? I do his BP. It’s high for how much he’s medicated. “One-twenty over eighty.”

  Zara pushes off the wall now, annoyed. “That can’t be right. Move.”

  I retreat back to where Donny stands while she takes 34’s BP. I’m starting to feel sweaty and a little bit wrong.

  Zara calls out the BP results, which are lower—right where it should be for a man on all those drugs. I note it down on his electronic medical record. She thinks I fucked it up out of nervousness.

  “Don’t worry, we gotcha,” Donny says. As you can imagine, he makes it sound like a threat.

  I just nod. No words, just a nod. You never give a creep like Donny energy.

  Zara puts the blood pressure assembly back in the cart, looking at me hard. “You up for doing the draw?”

  “Of course,” I say, moving away from creepmeister Donny. I take my place at 34’s bedside, and Zara goes back to her phone, safely out of camera range.

  Patient 34’s eyes are blank as sheetrock. Did I imagine that silent interaction? If I did, that’s bad.

  If I didn’t imagine it, it means he’s faking. I suppose it doesn’t really matter, considering they have him tied up like he’s King Kong crossed with Hannibal Lecter.

  I draw his blood. They probably had a dedicated phlebotomist on this at one point, but budget cuts have hit this sector hard. The phlebotomist would’ve been cut. I try not to watch his face at all.

  I think about Donny’s crowing words—Never a coherent thought ever again. Like Donny is a victor over 34 in some imagined and unfair contest between them. That is so Donny, to have vendettas with the patients he’s supposed to be caring for. What did 34 do?

  When I’m done, I press a cotton ball to the draw site and set a gloved hand on 34’s arm, which really is startlingly thick with muscle. I know I’m not imagining it.

  I look into his golden eyes that gaze at nothing and everything. It’s likely he did horrible things—you don’t end up like Patient 34 because you’ve been a Boy Scout. But there’s a sliver of humanity in everyone. Hopes, dreams, things that unexpectedly touch their hearts.

  This is something you learn from telling people’s stories.

  “All done.” I squeeze his arm reassuringly, because everybody deserves compassion, and Zara and Donny can fuck themselves.

  Chapter Two

  Kiro

  “All done,” she says softly. She squeezes my arm. Heat floods my body. My heart pounds out of control.

  She has piercing green eyes and hair the color of peanuts. She tries to hide it by pulling it back, but her hair is big and curly and will not be hidden. She purses her pink lips. I love watching her lips. She’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.

  Again she squeezes my arm. She seems like a dream with her gentle touch and her talk of The Hulk, like she reached back into another life.

  Is it a trick? Another one of their endless tortures? I fight for control, willing her to leave. I can’t concentrate with her here.

  I should’ve let the drugs take me under today—that would have dulled the power of her. I sometimes let the drugs take me under as a break from the crushing boredom of this dead place with its buzzers and alarms and the ticking clock that never stops.

  And the grating loneliness.

  And now her, destroying my concentration. You can never show life in here, or they drug you even more.

  She works for them. She’s just another one. I’ll kill her if I have to. I’ll kill them all if I have to. All that matters is getting home. Back where I belong.

  How do they even know about The Hulk? I haven’t thought about him since I was a kid, locked up in that root cellar.

  She moves out of my periphery. The distance makes it easier for me to get myself under control.

  I need three conditions to escape. One—a clear head. I have that. Two—the ability to break out of my restraints. The small pair of clippers I have hidden in the mattress is that. Three—some sort of chaos or diversion to take out the guards around the perimeter. I need a disaster, somebody else escaping, a power failure—something. The perimeter guards were my downfall last time.

  I don’t make the same mistake twice.

  So I wait. I’ll get my chance. It’s a matter of time.

  They can never know I have the clippers. They can never know I’m able to work the drugs through my system. The professor who kept me in that cage said I had a high metabolism. Maybe it’s true. The exercises help me stay clear, though. I know that. “Isometrics,” the professor called them when I’d do them in my cage.

  I thought the year that the professor kept me in a cage was bad. Wrong.

  The professor would at least read to me, trying to educate me. I would pretend not to hear, not to understand, but the things he read and said were always interesting. I would listen hard, and think things over when he slept.

  He hope to educate me and get me to understand supposedly important concepts, so that we could have discussions about how I survived in the wilderness, and mostly, how I got a pack of wild wolves to trust me. He’d guessed—rightly—that they’d let me live in their den.

  I would not confirm it. I would tell him nothing.

  I felt so lonely, caged up like a savage. Missing the pack. My only friends.

  Here is far worse.

  They drug me every twelve hours. I strain against my bonds whenever they leave—hard enough to get my blood pumping, to break a sweat. Hard enough to stay clear in the head, ready to kill everyone.

  She draws her finger along the shiny front of her computer pad. The screen flashes. Then her fingers are back, a whisper on my arm. I fight to keep my expression dull and lifeless.

  She squeezes my arm. Nobody ever touches me like this. I think my heart might explode.

  Nurse Zara: “Come on.”

  She’s gone. I follow her footsteps down the hall. I track the squeak of the cart wheels.

  You develop strong hearing in the wilderness. It’s a form of paying attention, of disciplining the mind. That’s something the professor would say, and I always felt he was right, even though I never said so.

  Back when he had me in that cage, he would give me sneaky tests on my sense of hearing and my sense of smell, too. Once I caught on that it was what he was doing, and that overdeveloped senses made me different from people who hadn’t grown up wild, I pretended not to hear or smell things so well.

  You can never give people anything. They only hurt you with it.

  If I listen hard enough, I can hear birds singing beyond these walls. Bird songs can be the most lonely thing of all in here. But on some days, on the good days, those songs help me to get back there in my mind, and I can almost convince myself I’m running through fields and forests with the sun on my face.

  Wheels squeak. Her heartbeat grows fainter. Room 39.

  Mitchell DesArmo is in that room. A dangerous man. I follow their conversation. I stay with her all the way through the rest of her rounds.

  The farther away she gets with the power of her beauty and her gentle touch, the more control I feel.

  It’s a trick—it has to be.

  Everything has a rhythm, a pulse. This hospital is a system, just like the forest. Things move. Holes appear. I’ll be ready. Nobody else will be ready, but I’ll be ready. Stillness is an effective way to hunt.

  Stillness is how I killed the professor. He thought he could write a book on me. He thought he could make a sideshow out of me. He thought he was educating Savage Adonis—he told me that was the name the reporters gave me when I was pulled out of the wilderness.

  The professor thought that if he got the Savage Adonis’s head filled full enough with words and concepts, that I would be his loyal helper.

  The professor wanted Savage Adonis’s secrets. Instead he got Savage Adonis’s hands around his neck.

  I waited for
my moment just like I’m waiting here.

  Soon.

  The squeak of the wheels.

  Nurse Ann leaving the wing. A door. Another door. Gone.

  I should feel relief. Misery gnaws at my gut instead.

  If I can endure the boredom and pain of this place, I can endure her gentle touch.

  I shut my eyes to close out the feelings. Three things to escape. The path I cut back home will run with the blood of anybody who tries to stop me.

  Does he escape by turning into The Incredible Hulk?

  It’s coincidence that she talked about The Hulk. It’s been so long since I thought of my boyhood before the forest. The piano wire. The tree. The root cellar.

  She’s a new torment, that’s all.

  A new torment that hurts more than Donny’s stun gun.

  Chapter Three

  Ann

  After we finish our rounds, Zara and I head to the general room, which is a type of rec room with bolted-down chairs and tables and a TV on the wall that only staff—meaning Donny—controls. Two dozen patients are in here, coloring and watching TV. Zara tells me about where the different groups sit, who doesn’t get along with whom.

  These are the most well-behaved patients, but still, orderlies hover all around, watching, tracking things on tablets. This is a place of immense bureaucracy and paper trails denoting every action of every patient right down to when they take a piss, and I mean that literally.

  We head to the staff room, where it’s a little easier to breathe thanks to the cooking smells overpowering the antiseptic smell. In a way, though, it’s worse, because I’m in a room full of people who don’t want me here.

  I hold up my head. Stay pleasant. This isn’t my life, right?

  There are more than a dozen nurses and nurse aides: a few guys out of the army, some older women from the float pool—substitute nurses, basically. There are full-timing young mothers—the sister hospital across town has a great free day-care program they get to take advantage of.

  Sometimes in a strange group of mostly women, I’ll try to get the talk around to kids and get people pulling out pictures. It’s nice as an icebreaker. And the truth is, I really do love seeing the kids. I love the way women’s faces look when they show you. I love to hear the little stories they tell about pictures. Stories bond people, humanize people to each other.

  When I first entered journalism, I believed that understanding each other’s stories could solve all of the world’s problems.

  It takes strength to believe big things like that, and I don’t have that kind of strength anymore.

  And I have a feeling that, in this group, my questions will be seen as nosy.

  When they ask me whether I have kids, I tell them no, I don’t have kids. The truth. I tell them I’m from Idaho and that I did a ton of travelling and volunteer work around the world, which is close to the truth. I know my story doesn’t make sense to them, to go from worldwide travel to a notorious MI&D facility in an impoverished rural northern Minnesota town, a place where I have no friends or relatives. They may not acknowledge it consciously, but deep down, they know I don’t add up.

  The best lie would be to say that I’m really into camping and that I want to be at the edge of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area and Quetico, the massive swath of pristine wilderness between Minnesota and Canada. But I can’t talk outdoors talk, so I tell them instead that I think it’s gorgeous, and that I want to buy a canoe and explore this beautiful area. Zara warns me about winter. It’s early October and already cold as fuck. She asks me whether I’m ready for the true cold.

  “So far, so good,” I say.

  She proceeds to tell me the horror stories about six-foot snowdrifts and stretches of subzero temps. The group joins in; they seem to enjoy telling me how bad it’s going to be, like, you made your bed, now lie in it.

  Will this be their attitude if I have trouble with Donny?

  Somebody has brought cake along with bright paper plates and plastic forks in celebration of a young nurse’s birthday, and I find I’m hugely conflicted about taking a piece. Will they dislike me even more if I pass up this offering or if I take one? I decide it won’t matter either way, so I take one.

  Talk ceases as we eat our cake. Back in the magazine office where I worked in New York, we would celebrate birthdays just like this, except nobody would actually eat the cake.

  The cake is delicious, and in spite of their vague hostility, I’m seriously hoping that if there is a meth supply pipeline running through here, it’s all Donny.

  If there’s a pipeline at all.

  Murray Moliter, my editor at Stormline, could be smoking crack with the whole thing. He got a tip he felt was credible for whatever reason, and the tipster suggested the cops weren’t investigating because they’re in on it.

  Fine by me. I’m getting double pay here—my nursing wage along with a per diem from Stormline. I’ll get Murray the facts he needs on what’s going in and out of here. I’ll do a good job. Work my way back.

  Each of the ten nurses under Zara oversees the medical care of ten patients. They all seem to know I have Patient 34. I suspect I got him because I’m new, and he’s the dangerous one nobody wants.

  I was surprised when Zara called him an escape artist. The layers of security here are insane—how could anyone escape? “So how many times has Patient 34 tried to break out?” I ask. “Has he actually gotten close?”

  They glance at each other the way people do when there’s juicy gossip. Soon the stories are flying.

  It seems Patient 34 once used a ballpoint pen to wear down his canvas wrist restraint. Another time he got free and tied up orderlies and nurses. He has smashed through the supply closet door and two walls. He has jumped through safety glass. He once beat up five stun-gun-wielding orderlies.

  Twice Patient 34 has made it to the parking lot. The electrified fence stopped him once. For the most recent attempt, he created his own rubber mitts with art materials. He smashed Donny’s head on a wall, knocking him out, and almost made it, but the guards around the perimeter took him down with tranquilizer guns.

  It seems the Fancher Institute has implemented quite a number of new features thanks to Patient 34. The general consensus is that he won’t be trying to escape anymore, but people are a little voodoo about him.

  “Why doesn’t he have a name?” I ask.

  “Because he’s a John Doe,” one of them says, like I’m stupid.

  “But surely he knows his own name,” I say. “He could’ve told you it before he was so sedated.”

  “Patient 34 cooperates with nobody.”

  “What was his original conviction?”

  “We don’t have that,” Nurse Zara snaps, like it’s an outrageous question, which it definitely isn’t.

  It’s important to know whether a patient is a firebug, whether they have women issues, various triggers, all of that. All they know about Patient 34 is that it was some sort of violent assault around a year ago. “A year and some change” is how Zara had put it.

  “The rumor is that he’s in WITSEC,” one of the guys says. “That the stuff is sealed for his own protection.”

  I nod like this sounds reasonable. It’s not. If he was in witness protection, he’d have a fake name and a fake history. “Who handles his board hearings?”

  “Fancher,” one of the nurses says. “You could ask him about it,” she adds with an innocent shrug. People’s faces are carefully blank. Which tells me that going all the way to the top of the Fancher Institute—to Dr. Fancher himself—is a bad idea.

  Still, I think about it. I pass Fancher’s office on my way to HR to drop off my insurance forms. His door is cracked. I pause. I tell myself not to get curious. I tell myself Patient 34’s story is irrelevant.

  And I knock. And then I think, fuck fuck fuck.

  A booming voice: “Come in.”

  Dr. Fancher is a man of about fifty with a military haircut, strangely wet lips, and frontally placed eyes just like Donny. I
n fact he looks a lot like Donny. Possibly a relative. Great.

  “I wanted to introduce myself. I’m Ann Saybrook—I just joined the team on the MI&D wing.”

  “Welcome.” He taps his pen. He doesn’t get up.

  “Are you and Donny—”

  “He’s my nephew,” Dr. Fancher says. “So far, so good?” He asks this in a way where you know the only answers he wants to hear is “yup-thanks-bye!”

  “Yup.” I smile. I should go away. I’m not here to draw attention to myself. At least that’s what I’m repeating over and over in my head. But I keep picturing Patient 34 in his crazy restraints, and Donny’s hatred of him, and the way he looked at me.

  The way he felt. So intense. So alive.

  I suck in a breath. “Patient 34 is one of my cases, and I noticed there’s not much on him in terms of family history or incident history. The more I know, the better care I can deliver.”

  Fancher levels his gaze at me. “If we were at liberty to add that information to his chart, we’d add that to his chart, don’t you think?” He says it as though I’m just a little slow-witted. “I don’t imagine you could have any issues with him already…”

  “Everything’s going great.” I give him my best “no-threat-here!” smile. “I just want to deliver the best care possible.”

  Fancher rocks back in his chair, relaxing. “He’s an extremely troubled and dangerous John Doe. Of course we do everything we can to locate family and get family members involved in the patients’ care, but they’re not always out there, Ms. Saybrook.”

  I nod like I’m swallowing his utter bullshit. “Of course.”

  “You let me know if you have trouble with him.”

  Smile smile smile. “I will! Thank you!”

  I leave, telling myself I’m here to count supplies, not draw attention. Supply chain!

  That afternoon, I learn that there are two places medications are kept. Pharma One is controlled by a staff pharmacist during the day and locked at night. Pharma Two is where we get medications that don’t require a pharmacist’s sign-off—the kind of stuff you’d find in a drugstore, including ephedrine, which is one of the substances I need to keep an eye on. I’ll figure out who’s doing the ordering and set up a ghost system for tracking it.