The Puppeteer and The Poisoned Pawn (The Pawn and The Puppet series Book 3)

I have one hour until the staff leaves for the day.

One hour is all I need.

The hallucinations swallow me whole, a ship sinking to the bottom of the ocean. I wade my arms through the memories of each orderly, each conformist, and each board member in the vicinity. It takes time to decide who deserves to go to hell. It takes looking closely at each vulnerable moment, like the time Suseas jokingly pushed her little brother out of a tree and broke his arm. She was only nine and couldn’t sleep for a week from the gnawing guilt.

Or, Stefan, the orderly stationed outside my room—he was a kind child, always said please and thank you. Even Lyoness had his moments. Always treats his wife like a queen. Gives her anything she asks for.

But that does not make up for the evil they’ve let spread like a plague in this asylum. Suseas’s second year of being a conformist, she killed a woman. A patient with severe depression who wasn’t a danger to anyone, she shouldn’t have ever been committed to the intricate section at all. Unfortunately, the patient looked just like Suseas’s husband’s mistress. And so, Suseas might have accidentally left the patient in the scalding bath for too long.

Stefan once flogged an elderly patient for wetting himself in the hallway.

Lyoness ordered the execution of a young girl that accused an orderly of sexual harassment.

Their sins drastically outweigh any good deeds they’ve done in their lives.

And I have shed the last bit of skin that was the old Skylenna. The girl that couldn’t fight back against her father even though she knew how. The girl who cowered behind Dessin when danger neared. The girl who watched each asylum patient be treated with cruelty and torment without standing up for them.

That girl is dead. No longer in existence. No longer able to call the shots.

This woman standing in the thirteenth room… has learned to be the dragon that flies over men.

Meridei

Belinda whines next to me about gaining three pounds since last month. She can’t see me smiling to myself as I fill out my daily report.

“Anyway, heard you got in trouble with the priest,” she says smugly, reapplying her baby-doll-pink lipstick in a handheld mirror.

I snort. “He made some sort of treatment deal with the little narcissistic bitch. Must be getting sucked off after hours by her in the thirteenth room.”

Belinda cringes.

“I managed to drown her today,” I add, writing up my last treatment. “I was always too hesitant to butcher her when Patient Thirteen was around.”

I sigh at the memory of her body going limp over the tub. The image seeps into my brain and releases bursts of serotonin or oxytocin; whichever it is, I’m filled with dazzling ecstasy. Since the day I met Skylenna, I wanted to treat her as a patient. Perhaps I’m a prophet. I always knew she’d end up under my care. It was all too perfect.

“Where do you suppose he is? I mean, weren’t they inseparable? Thirteen never left her side.” Belinda’s nasally voice pulls me back into the conversation.

“I was hoping she’d tell me while I treated her.” I shrug, signing my name at the bottom of the report. “But that topic seemed to be off-limits.”

Belinda watches me for a moment. The annoyance of someone staring at me rises in the bottom of my belly, burning until I tighten my abdomen. I turn to her with a locked jaw and an agitated glare.

“You scared he’s going to hunt you down for hurting her? That seems to be his style.”

I can’t roll my eyes slow enough. “No. He clearly got bored with her and jumped ship.”

She doesn’t stop staring.

“I am the only terrifying person left in this asylum,” I bark, my fingers itching to mess with the control panel again and drown another patient, preferably Skylenna.

The way her knees bruised themselves against the sides of the tub, the way she bucked and thrashed, dulls my bad mood, softening the hard edges of my temper. I want to do it again. I want to wait until the staff leaves so I can watch her struggle for air. The temptation is delicious and uncontrollable.

“You coming?” Belinda is already standing at the door of the study, placing her report in the conformists’ slot.

But that damning urge to watch her suffer again is too great to overcome. I shake my head. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

After the door closes behind her, I wait patiently, hands fidgeting at my sides, thinking about which treatment I want to see her in next. Electrotherapy just isn’t intimate enough. Flogging might be exciting. It’s hands-on. I like that.

But the hushed voices outside of the door grow louder.

And then I hear Belinda scream.

Skylenna

It’s too easy. I thought I would be rusty. But my limbs sliced through the air, knocking into the orderly Stefan’s bad knee with grace. The muscle memory was strong and simple to tap into.

He came into my room after I lured him in with promises of sexual favors. I wasn’t satisfied with how slow he was to defend himself. I even gave him the chance to admit remorse, confess that he gained no pleasure in this particular line of work.

It turns out he enjoys his job. A little too much.

It only took three moves to bring him to his knees like a groveling, unfaithful lover.

And now, as he holds his groin from where my knee once was, I yearn to watch the life drain from his grayish-blue eyes. That seemingly harmless glare that once guarded the door while Scarlett was hazed and waterboarded. Or even the time he conveniently forgot to feed Dessin for three days.

Rage unwinds in my stomach, acidic and thick, oozing through every organ until I’m sure I might explode from a combustion of wildfire.

My fingers curl around his chin, nails cutting into his bristly flesh.

“I am so tired,” I say without the usual emotion furrowing my brow. “This city makes me lose faith in humanity.”

Stefan gasps, still holding himself. His mousy brown hair is slick with fresh sweat, and his pale features are now splotchy from his forehead to his collarbone.

“And since trying to change your ways clearly failed me…”

I let myself relax further into the darkness. My face morphing into the perfect example of calm. He watches me with suspense tightening his shoulders.

“I’ll have to kill you all.”

Stefan opens his mouth to object, but the only sound in the room is of my foot cracking into his back, like a branch snapping from a tree after a strike of lightning.

Paralyzed but still alive.

Breathing. Huffing in and out like a fish out of water.

The ghost of a smile plays on my lips, and I take in a deep, calming breath, inhaling the scent of his artificial fragrance sold at his gentlemen’s club. I suddenly have the overwhelming desire to show the rest of the asylum what I’ve done. Who I’ve become due to their arrogance. Due to their wicked ways.

The rest happens in a blackened blur. My adrenaline pumping so hard and so fast that my next movements aren’t recognizable. They are brutish and barbaric. I take a step back, blinking away the murderous daze that coats my eyes and assess the damage I’ve done.

I’m standing in the hallway, looking up at Stefan, strangling with his belt tied around his neck, dangling from the rib vault arch along the ceiling.

I did that.

He dies slowly, with loud gurgling cries and spittle forming at the corners of his mouth. But paralyzed and with no way to free himself.

I lick my lips, desperate for water to relieve the cotton dryness in my mouth. I thought this sight, being so devastatingly similar to my last memory of Scarlett, would send me into a panic, mentally sketching that puppet.

But I no longer feel the helplessness that once held me hostage.

Because I am the puppeteer. And this asylum is my stage.