The Truths we Burn (The Hollow Boys Book 2)

He doesn’t just feel like fire.

He is fire.

He is the flame, the flint, the burn.

Like the Egyptian god Ra, he encompasses all that is warm.

He is my fire god, and I live to burn for him.

Chapter 14

Sage

“Open.”

I drop my tongue out, showing the nurse the inside of my mouth, swiping my tongue from left to right, up and down. She shines the small pen light around, nodding once she is satisfied.

After three weeks inside of the Monarch Mental Health Institution, I stopped refusing the medication.

The side effects, loss of appetite, constant fatigue, migraines, they’re better than the alternative.

Everyone has this image of what they think a psychiatric ward looks like. Pop culture and movies have given a pretty damning image. The stigma surrounding these places is pretty horrid. I mean, everyone and their mother watched season two of American Horror Story.

I’m sure there are facilities that focus on helping patients, treating their issues and giving them hope for rehabilitation and an eventual release back into the real world.

But this is Ponderosa Springs.

And this is my life, and anytime fate can throw me to the wolves, it absolutely will.

This place is everything your craziest nightmares could conjure up.

A gated prison with padded rooms and no doorknobs.

They tell you when you get here, willingly or in my case unwilling, that everything they do is to help you.

That the straps that held me down on the stretcher when I arrived were to protect me. Their job is to keep me safe with their white lab coats and clipboards.

Even when you refuse to take your medication and they drag you to solitary confinement, where three men will hold you down and inject you with antipsychotics. Even when they keep you there for three days without a word.

They will sit you down on their plastic couches and tell you this asylum, this place, was built to help you. All of this is for your own good.

All the while they ask you over and over, and over and over again, why did you try to kill yourself? Do you feel like harming yourself now? Are you sure? Are you absolutely positive you’re not having bad thoughts?

God help you if you say yes—even when I was first admitted, I knew better than to say yes to those questions.

Sadly, though, the doctors and nurses are right.

They are there to keep us safe and secure.

Not to actually treat us for our underlying mental health or do anything really that requires them to go out of their way to better our lives.

A crow soars across the morning sky, the grayish clouds tethering into its wings as it swoops close to the trees. My nose starts to run from the air that’s nipping at my skin. January is always the coldest here.

Beyond the steel gates that keep the grounds secure, there is a river that you can see from the garden. Well, it’s more dead weeds and broken fountains, but I’m sure at some point, there were flowers planted here somewhere.

“You have visitors waiting for you in the dining hall.” One of the nurses on day shift, Shonda I think her name is, stands above me where I sit on the moist ground.

The cold dew clings to my faded blue scrubs, but I enjoy the feeling. Inside, you don’t feel anything. Not even temperature. Everything is middle ground and numbing.

For a few moments in the morning, I sit out here and actually feel like a human being. I listen to the crows squawk, the river rustle slowly, and the wind howl as it makes the trees groan.

Inside those walls, there are no bad days, no good days.

Just days.

Purposeless.

Time is irrelevant. It’s either a blur or a racetrack. I never know when I’m sleeping or when I’m awake. The shitty thing is when I am awake, all I wanna do is sleep.

If senior year me could see the person I am now, she’d fucking stroke out. Nails bitten to the quick, permanent purple bags beneath my eyes.

I’m no longer who I used to be, and honestly, I never found out who I wanted to be. So that leaves me cemented in limbo.

Lost.

Forgotten.

All sense of self has evaporated.

I’ve become this sort of hollow well. The only coins dropped inside are pills that echo within the walls of my core, reminding me that the only thing that fills me is emptiness.

“Visitors? For me?”

I’d been here for eight months. two-hundred and forty-three days. thirty-four weeks. and five thousand, eight hundred and forty hours.

There has never been a single soul come visit me.

Not my arranged ex-fiancé, my mannequin friends, my father sure as fuck hadn’t walked through those doors, and my mom, well, last I knew she was states away engaged to someone with more money and a small life expectancy.

There’s no one who cared enough to stop by and check on me. Once I was thrown into this place, they threw away the key.

After what I’d found out, because of what I know now, I had mentally prepared to spend the entirety of my life here. They won’t let me out, and even if I do get out, they’ll kill me before I had a chance to do anything with my life.

The sad truth is, I’m actually fine with it.

While I’m inside here, at least I can convince myself that Rose is alive.

Death had snuck into our lives and severed the bond between us.

One second I was a twin, and the next, I wasn’t.

No one prepares you for that. For what it feels like when the other half of your soul dies. When the person you came into this world with leaves before you do.

It’s hard to explain, but it’s like there’s a phone constantly ringing inside my chest with no one to pick up the other line.

All I have left is the guilt. It’s what haunts me at night, keeping my insomnia working.

Incessant guilt for being alive while she rots in the ground.

I’m getting served cold oatmeal every morning, playing checkers with myself, while maggots consume whatever is left of her corpse.

“Sage, hello? Sage, are you feeling okay?” The nurse snaps her fingers in front of me. “I said yes, you have visitors. Your father and his friend. They brought you outside breakfast. You should be excited.”

My father? And his friend?

It’s almost a contradiction.

My father doesn’t have friends, and he knows better than to visit me. Even if he wanted to, he knew I would stab him.

It was the last thing I promised him. The last thing I promised Rose even if she hadn’t been alive to hear it.

If I was ever given the opportunity, I wouldn’t hesitate to end his life, and it would be brutal.

I’ve had a long time to think about how I’d do it. Those thoughts are the only thing that bring me real joy.

Thinking about the way he’d look, begging for his life as I press a knife to his throat. I’d give anything to see the way the light in his eyes would drift away as my hands tighten around his throat.

There are millions of ways to do it and narrowing it down is practically impossible. None of them feel right—death feels like too much of a reward for what he did to Rosie.

Although our access to the internet here is restricted, we can read, and I’d done my best to use the facility library to find out what’s the slowest way of killing someone. The most painful, the most graphic, the most aggressive.

No matter how dark or how twisted it got, none of it seemed to be the answer to what he had done. Even being eaten alive by dogs felt too humane.

“Are you sure it’s my father and you haven’t gotten it confused?”

“There is only one mayor of Ponderosa Springs, and his face is plastered on a billboard downtown. There is no getting it confused with your family. Shouldn’t you be excited?”

To see the man who had my sister killed?

“Overjoyed,” I say sarcastically.

She leads me back inside, and my washed-out blue scrubs rub against my thighs as we waltz down the dull hallway.

It always reeks of sterilizer out here, the pungent scents of alcohol wipes and latex gloves. It pisses me off that out of all things, that’s the one thing I can’t get used to.

The hall is loud today, sort of chaotic for a place that’s meant to promote peace of mind.

Almost all of my fellow patients are more dangerous to themselves than to anyone else. This notion that mental illness is a warning sign of psychotic behavior was a myth debunked years ago. I read about it when I first got inside of here. I’ve read about a lot of things I never thought I would since leaving the outside world.

However, there are times when some tremors or hallucinations get out of hand. Usually always when one person is having a bad day, it triggers everyone around them.

I hear Hallmark Harry inside of his room, singing Humpty Dumpty repeatedly. He’d gotten his name for the same reason women cry on their couches during Christmas—he loves Hallmark movies.

One patient is banging on their door, demanding a shower; another is fighting a nurse about how the CIA is watching him through the radios, broken radios that don’t even have antennae, mind you.

Reagan in 3B is quiet this morning, sleeping off the sedatives they’d filled her up with last night. Some people never learn, and she’s one of them. She’s been here longer than I have, but every single night, I can hear her screams.

Bloodcurdling.

They make my teeth ache.

I toss and turn in my sleepless state, covering my ears with the flimsy sheet while waiting for the night shift nurse to come on shift and knock her out with medication.

That’s the worst side effect of the meds.

The insomnia.

The nightmares.

Lying awake hearing the cries, the screams, and knowing I don’t belong here.

We make it into the dining hall, where the smell of cinnamon is pouring from the kitchen.

Circular tables, the grayscale decorations, and an older gentleman whose wheelchair is parked next to the only window.

His name is Eddison, and he has schizophrenia.

It had gone untreated until he was well into his thirties, and now they keep him so doped up, his brain can’t even form complete sentences. There are rare times when he doesn’t seem any different from me, but most of the time, he sits silent, trapped inside of his head.

Sometimes, I like to think it’s better in there, that he’s happy and not locked inside of a facility, but I know that’s not the truth.

I’ve spoken to him once, and in that one conversation, I swore that I’d never say schizo ever again even if it was a joke.

“Pip.”

Trauma stabs its claws into my heart.

With my routine panic attacks, it’s a gradual plunge into different bodies of water. Sometimes it’s a lake; other times it’s the ocean. More often lately, it’s inky black sludge that absorbs me, eating me up limb by limb until I disappear beneath.

This is anything but gradual.

I can feel his sticky hands on me, just before he shoves me completely under the surface. The abrupt water my lungs inhale catches me by surprise, so much so that my eyes start to water.

Sitting next to each other, across the room from me, are two of the men I hate most in this world.

Two faces I had never wanted to see again, two faces that I want to obliterate off the face of this fucking planet.

I’m angry that they’re even able to breathe oxygen right now.

One of them stands, stepping a bit closer so that when he reaches his hand forward, his pointer finger with the class ring around it swirls a piece of my hair.

“What did you do to your hair, Pip?” His face is filled with sorrow, and I know it’s because he actually cares about it. I remember just how much he used to like my hair.

“I stole a pair of bandage scissors from a med cart and hacked it off before the charge nurse sedated me,” I say, staring vacantly. “And if you don’t remove your hand from me, I will bite your finger clean off.”

Cain McKay was what some might consider an honorable guy. Once a small-town officer for Ponderosa Springs, he’d worked his way up to the FBI. Everyone here could not have been prouder, yet the day he left for training had been like waking up from a three-year-long nightmare.

A lucid dream I had no control of. One I was fully aware I was stuck inside of and could do nothing to wake myself up.

“You’ve gotten bigger,” he breathes, making me feel slimy inside. Probably thinks I’m joking about ripping his finger off with my teeth. What he doesn’t know is that wouldn’t be the craziest shit I’ve seen around here. It would be another day at the Monarch psych ward.

I tongue the inside of my cheek, noticing that the years had started to age his face. Most women who don’t know him would call him handsome in his button-down shirt, neatly knotted tie, and slacks.

Most women don’t know he isn’t into women at all or men.

He prefers little girls he has power over. Ones that wouldn’t tell anyone, that couldn’t.

Little girls that have everything to lose.

“From when I was thirteen?” I cross my arms in front of my chest, wanting to shield myself. I’d been too young to stand up to him before, too afraid, but now I have nothing to lose. “Yeah, that is about the time you stopped coming into my bedroom, wasn’t it? I thought you’d just gotten bored, but it’s because I hit puberty, isn’t it?”

I watch the way his face changes, how only a moment ago he was composed and looked like a caring family member coming to see me. I watch as the filth and spiders that fester beneath his skin begin to sneak out.

The number of times I’d thought about the moment of pure joy that would run through me as he was publicly castrated was infinite.

The mask he wore was my least favorite.

One of the protectors, the guardian, the one who is supposed to keep you safe from the monster under the bed.

Yet, the only boogeyman I ever faced in life was him.

“That’s how this is going to be? After everything I’ve done? You used to love me so much when you were little.”

I tilt my head. “Did you expect it to be any different?”

“Sage, can you sit down, please. Cain has driven a long way, and we have so much to talk about.”

My father speaks for the very first time since they arrived, ignoring my announcement of Cain’s sexual advances towards me. It doesn’t faze him though—why would it?

One, he probably already knew about it.

Two, he’d sold his daughter into sex slavery without even blinking.

Three, he doesn’t care.

He looks the same as the day I was taken away. Not an ounce of guilt or remorse has affected his ability to smile for the people of Ponderosa Springs.

I bet he even uses it to his advantage.

I bet the woe is me act is gaining him tons of sympathy. The man who’d lost his wife to an affair, the father who’d lost one daughter to death and the other to mental defect.

How fucking sad.

“I’m not sitting down.” I stare at him, really looking into his eyes so that he can see the reflection of what he has done. I want him to feel it, to see what his actions have caused. “What do you want?”

I’m not stupid—he didn’t come here to check on me or to see how I’m doing. He’s the reason I’m locked inside of here in the first place. The reason I’ll never get out.

Not because I’m sick or I need help either. He shoved me in here to keep me quiet so that I can’t tell anyone what I had found out.

What I know he did.

Frank Donahue had painted me as the crazy daughter who lost her mind after the accidental death of her twin sister.

Even if I’m let out, no one would believe a word I said, and that’s exactly how he wants it.

“Please.”

Chills decorate my spine, little bumps of irritation along my skin.

“Please?” I spit out at him. “I should kick you in the balls right now for even thinking you could say that word around me. Please? You don’t deserve to ask for anything.”

“You always did have a flair for the dramatics, even as a little girl,” Cain mutters as he waltzes past me, returning to his seat next to my sperm donor. “Sit. It’s for your own good.”

One thing this place has taught me or, well, what I have learned is I really just don’t give a fuck anymore. I do not care about what people think of me, how others view me, or what is expected of me. I have no regard for anyone else but myself.

So, I don’t care to show my anger or my disgust when it comes to these two. There are no cameras to act for, and even if there were, I would do the same thing.

I slam my hands down onto the table, fuming beneath my cool exterior. I’m in shock at how entitled they truly are. The man who molested me as a child and the man who’d had my twin killed to pay off his debt—how could they think for a moment I would do anything for either of them? They have nothing to hold over my head, nothing to bribe me with.

My teeth start grinding together as I spit out, “Either tell me what it is you came here for, or I’m going to stab you both to death with a plastic spork.”

There is no bluff. No fabrication.

My dad looks at my extended arms. Self-consciously, I look down as well to make sure my horrible orange zip-up hoodie is covering them. Then I think, why should I have to hide the scars he caused?

Rosemary died on April twenty-ninth, and almost a month later, I was admitted to Monarch after having a “psychotic break.”

Everyone was told it was because of the loss of Rose and the abrupt divorce my parents were getting. It had been too much for an eighteen-year-old girl to handle, and the town thought I’d finally snapped.

What had actually gone down was something far more sinister. I’d gone innocently into my father’s office with the intention of printing a paper for school. Something I’d done a million times before, expecting the same blown-up image of our family portrait on the monitor.

But that time was different.

When I’d logged in to the computer, there was a video pulled up, already halfway played, and I remember thinking it looked like a Jason Statham movie.

My dad sat tied to a chair, hair disheveled and clothes filthy, while Greg West, a professor at Hollow Heights, interrogated him for money that he owed his boss. Money that he’d borrowed from a sex ring, and now, they were short on product.

And when there was no chance of payment, he gave my father a choice.

“You die, or you sell one of your daughters as settlement.”

I wanted to be surprised, but I hadn’t been. I knew that my father was capable of corrupt things. Willing to do whatever he had to in order to keep up appearances. To stay on top.

With ease, he chose Rose.

Like she wasn’t a human being, his own flesh and blood, as if she was just a name.

I wish he would’ve picked me.

My sister had been killed to settle my father’s debt, and I’d never tasted anger so bitter in my mouth before.

Retaliation. Vengeance. The hunger to make him pay.

I would do anything to have it.

“We need a favor, Sage,” Frank says gently as if soft-spoken words will make me forgive him.

I sneer. “Go fuck yourself.”

“I wanted to be civil about this, Pip. Remember that.” Cain calmly folds his hands together. “Your father is asking nicely. I’m not. You are going to cooperate with us, or I’ll send you somewhere a lot worse than a mental institution.”

Pip.

I hate that name.

“Like where, a sex trafficking ring?” I laugh, not needing to hide it from either of them that I know about it. “You know, I’m not even surprised that you’re involved in this, Cain.” I lean down closer to him, the smell of his aftershave making me nauseous. It’s the same one that clung to my sheets at the lake house. “Do you buy little girls from them? Is there a video of you being blackmailed out there too? Is that how they have the big bad FBI agent in their pocket?”

Eyes like pits stare into my own, his jaw clenches, and his composure slowly melts away. “I never hurt you. I loved you, Sage.”

“Is that what kind of sick lie you tell yourself? Is that how you’re able to look at yourself in the mirror?”

My gut twists, entirely bewildered at how fucked in the head a person must be to justify what he did.

“Regardless of what happened in the past, you will help us, or you’ll be wishing you did. There are people out there who are capable of things a lot worse than I am, trust me.” His voice is scornful, something he probably uses on criminals on a day-to-day basis. He thinks he will be able to scare me into helping him.

“Leave.” I glare. “There is nothing I can do to help you and nothing you can say that will change my mi—”

“Rook Van Doren.”

A pen drops in the corner of the room.

And I choke on everything I wanted to say before this moment.

My agitation becomes fuel to his memory.

Being trapped inside padded walls with nothing from your past life means your mind is your best friend and, for me, my worst enemy.

I feel him like a third-degree burn all over. My skin blisters in remembrance. My charred bones rattle as they turn to ash all over again.

His name, a thought of his face, a nightmare, it shoves me into an incinerator every single time.

The worst part is he’s the only relief to the stinging.

The flame and the extinguisher.

“What would I know about a Hollow Boy?” My interest is piqued, but I keep that to myself.

“Easton was nice enough to let us know about your…relationship with him last year. We know you were involved.”

Fucking prick.

“Even if I was—” I shove my hands into the pocket of my jacket. “—I don’t see what it has to do with you two or your fucked-up lives.”

If they found out about Rook, I would have to play this smart. They can’t find out how much I cared about him. They would use him as leverage, and he’s the last bit they have.

He’s the last thing I have any regard for.

“Certain members of the Halo—”

“The Halo? You’re kidding, right? You named a sex trafficking organization the Halo?” Shock is on my face, but neither of them bats an eye.

All those girls missing, their lives ended for cash, and there is no one looking for them, while these assholes walk around calling it Halo as if it’s just another business.

“The name is trivial, Sage. Members have gone missing. One of them has just turned up dead.” He clears his throat, pushing a cream folder towards me to look at. “Greg West, his body completely dismembered and soaked in bleach, left at the same place your sister’s body was found. Whoever did it is trying to send a message.”

It takes me a few moments to really hear what he is trying to tell me.

I’m confused why this has something to do with me, why they are telling me this. A part of me is happy that he’s dead—it’s the least he deserves.

I open the folder, flinching a bit at the pictures. You think you’re desensitized to enough things that death won’t bother you until you see what certain people are capable of.

Greg’s body is on the rotten wooden floor, perfectly laid out even though his limbs are not attached to his torso. Legs, arms, thighs, head, it’s all sliced into sections.

I cringe at the eyes, how they are just empty sockets with dark red splotches, completely gouged from the sockets.

More than the gruesome state of the body, I notice how methodical it all is.

It’s cut pristinely, not hacked off or chopped with an axe. They look almost surgical. And there isn’t any blood; the body is almost white.

They took their time, and they knew what they were doing, minus the trauma to the eyes, which look to be done with aggression.

It’s then all of it clicks together.

I shift my eyes to my father.

“They found out, didn’t they?”

He doesn’t say anything, only stares at me with eyes that are swelling up with fear. The wider they become, the more they resemble growing fruit that is ripe for the picking.

My tongue tingles with anticipation, my body unable to stop the grin that spreads across my lips.

I bet he’s spent every second looking over his shoulder. Heart pounding, hands sweating with anticipation. The waiting is killing him, constantly wondering when they are going to take their pound of flesh from his body.

Nothing is more enjoyable than watching a man who always thought of himself as a wolf become the scared, frightened lamb in the pasture.

Real wolves are coming for him now.

“Oh, you really are fucked,” I add, laughing almost joyfully.

“Yes, we believe your friends have found out about the organization, and that has posed a problem for us.” Cain looks like he wants to begin discussing the logistics of what he needs from me, but I don’t let him get that far.

“No.” I shake my head, chuckling. “They found out what you did to Rose. There is nothing I can do to help any of you now. Silas Hawthorne is not just some heartbroken boyfriend. He will slaughter anyone who had a fraction of involvement, and his friends will be right behind him.” I roll my tongue across my bottom lip, meeting my father’s gaze. “You killed the wrong twin, Dad.”

A flare of hope kindles in my stomach, knowing that even though I can’t do anything inside of this place, there’s someone out there getting justice for my sister.

Silas knew. He knew Rosie, and she wouldn’t have just overdosed, and now he could prove it.

“No one would have blinked if you’d picked me. Easton would have been married to Rose. You still would have got your money from the Sinclairs. Mom wouldn’t have left your sorry ass. You would never have been in this position had you just picked me,” I continue, the heat in my voice building.

Jealousy cures in the pit of my stomach, envious that I can’t help them give him his due.

That I can’t be the one that ends the man who’d given me life.

“Now you’ve got hounds from hell coming for your throat, Dad. And they aren’t going to stop, no matter what you do.” I look over at Cain, driving my point home. “Not until everyone who hurt Rose is dead.”

They both stare at me, one scared of the death he knows will be coming for him soon and the other warily, not knowing if my words are truthful or a bluff.

“Good luck,” I finish, stepping back from the table so I can ask my nurse to take me back to my room for the day. There is nothing else that needed to be said.

“Not so fast, Sage,” Cain speaks, “They won’t be killing anyone else. Because you’re going to help us put them behind bars.”

I shake my head. “Oh, you think?”

They must be fucking stupid to think I would help stop them. They’re doing the job I wish I was doing.

“If you want out of here, then you’re going to go back to Hollow Heights and work for us. You’re going get them to trust you and figure out their plan. You’ll be providing us the evidence we need to convict them, and then you’re done. You’re free to do whatever you want with your life. We can help each other here,” he offers, bribing me with freedom that I no longer want.

“I’m not helping you. I’ve accepted my fate of staying here.”

The pressure becomes too much. He stands abruptly, the chair squealing and nurses looking at him oddly. He tries to smile at them, but he’s too annoyed to do damage control.

He walks to me, wrapping his arms around my body and pulling me into his chest, a one-sided hug that makes me want to puke all over his shirt.

“Then we will pull you out, and I put you up for auction,” he grits out, tone low and dangerous. “Either way you will cooperate. Aid us in our investigation, or I’ll sell you dirt cheap to the ones who don’t care about what the girls look like. Ones that only care for the torture. The choice is yours.”

This could be it.

My path for avenging Rose.

All I have to do is act, pretend, fool them into believing I’m cooperating.

When in reality, I have the chance to work with four people just as resentful. I have the opportunity to help them, to help Rosie.

The only problem is…

“He’s not going to trust me. He is never going to trust me.”

“You’re a clever girl, Sage. Figure it out.”