Secret Unleashed

drawing lines on me.

Until he stuck his hand inside me.

The pain was tremendous, and I couldn’t have screamed if I wanted to. I was used to external pain, the kind caused when the nerves on the surface of my skin were in charge. Inside my body there were a million new nerves, and I couldn’t compute what I was feeling. It wasn’t pain like a cut or a gunshot. It was an invasive, squirming agony. My whole body wanted the unfamiliar presence of his hand out but could do nothing to stop his exploration.

I gagged, unsure if the clenching in my stomach was a reaction to what I was seeing, or if he’d physically done something to it. He made two other incisions before peeling back my skin and whispering, “Marvelous.”

When he stuck his hand under my ribs, my brain decided enough was enough, and the room went black.

A sharp scent snapped me back into reality, though I had no idea how much time had elapsed. The Doctor stood over me, his bare hands covered in a thick coating of my blood, reminding me precisely where he’d just had them. A nurse backed away with a bottle of smelling salts still clutched in her hand.

Glancing down in panic, I was relieved to see my stomach wound had closed, the angry red lines of his incisions beginning to heal.

“It really is fascinating to watch your kind patch themselves back up again.” He was staring the same place as I was, watching the skin regrow, building itself over the wounds until nothing was left but pink irritation marks which would soon fade away as well. “But you’re different. Different from the rest of them.”

He stepped out of view, and the only sound in the room was running water and my pulse loud in my ears.

When he returned, his hands were clean, but he was holding another scalpel.

“Don’t. Please, please…please.”

“How wonderful. You’ve learned some manners after all. Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks?” He winked at me, but of all the things he’d said to me since I’d met him, none had been half as scary as that idiom.

He knew what I was.

When my gaze met his, he must have seen something in my expression—shock, perhaps, or comprehension—because his smile turned into something almost comforting and paternal.

“You will be my greatest discovery,” he whispered, squeezing my shoulder. “Take comfort in that.”

He rested the scalpel on my chest between my exposed breasts, and I stared at the point of it aiming up at my chin.

“Subject was able to heal a series of fine incisions in a matter of thirty minutes. All major organs appear to be normal size and are identical to a human counterpart. Subject’s stomach is below average size for a human woman of her same build and apparent age, but this is likely an evolutionary advancement due to her mainly liquid diet. We’ve taken samples from the subject’s stomach, liver and kidney to assess whether any unique traits exist within, but I hypothesize they will resemble those of a normal vampire.”

He stopped speaking and stared down at me again, reclaiming the scalpel. “Next we will have a look at the heart.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

My reward for not dying was a pint of blood and the cool reprieve of my cell. Since my bustier had been discarded I was given a thin blue scrub top like those the nurses were wearing. At some point prior to the surgery I must have been prepped, because my hair was no longer matted with blood.

It was a small favor, one I couldn’t fully appreciate right then.

I had a graphic imagination when it came to torture. Though I didn’t enact my plots often, I had come up with a few doozies in my time. More than once I’d fantasized about ripping someone’s heart out and showing it to them before they died.

Never again.

Not now that I’d seen it. The Doctor had cut open my chest cavity, split my rib cage open…

He’d lifted my heart without severing the arteries or veins, and he’d held it in his bare hands just high enough I could see.

I whimpered, rubbing my still-healing chest with the tips of my fingers. I’d lost consciousness seven times, and every time I’d been forced back so he could run his experiments on me while I was awake. Healing was the only thing he didn’t seem to need me alert for.

He’d cut out my heart.

My whimpers became sobs, and I wrapped my jacket tighter around myself, grateful it had been left for me. It felt like decades ago Dominick had given it to me. Since then, it had been to hell and back with me.

If a jacket could survive my life without falling apart, surely I could too.

I huddled in the corner, relieved to finally be able to cry. I knew it was a useless waste of energy, but I needed it. I’d spent days with no sign of rescue, no word on Holden or Maxime. If they were dead, how would anyone find me? The council would be looking, but what would they come up with if they went after me? Was there any trail to follow from the Winchester Mansion to wherever we were?

Since I hadn’t the faintest fucking clue where I was, I couldn’t imagine anyone else having an easy time locating me. My sleeps had been near comatose, and I hadn’t dreamed once. The psychic energy it took to reach out to someone was exhausting. In the past I’d been able to see things, communicate with my loved ones when I’d thought the end was near.

But this was real. This was the end of my days reaching out to me with arms spread wide, and I couldn’t talk to anyone. If I couldn’t find Holden now when I needed him most, I feared that meant the worst. He would stop at nothing to find me, to reach me by any means possible, but if he was dead, his fight for me was over.

If he was dead…

I didn’t want to think about it, but it made sense.

Unless The Doctor was holding him, starving him the way he starved me. Holden was a full-blooded vampire and could last infinitely longer than I could without blood. If he was being starved, it stood to reason he wouldn’t be able to reach out to me, or me to him. Two nearly dead batteries can’t complete a circuit, not the way fresh ones could.

A starved vampire was an appalling sight. It was considered a fate worse than death for most, but right then I was wishing that fate on Holden. I wanted him to be starved, prayed for him to be in agony.

I didn’t want him to suffer, but if he was suffering, he wasn’t dead.

All alone, with enough blood to be lucid, I started contemplating what I knew about the man who held me captive. I’d seen him before he took me, dressed as a homeless man, so it was possible he’d been following me for a long time, disguising himself to avoid recognition. But how long? Was it just in California, or did this go back longer?

Was he acting alone, or had someone hired him?

Sutherland had told me in his dream he’d been taken by The Doctor, which I believed now that I’d experienced those blistering emotions for myself. I understood why he’d told me to stop looking. Was he still here somewhere, or had this room been his first, until The Doctor finished with him?

I zipped my jacket up to my throat, like the leather could protect my chest from further penetration.

The entire time he’d been cutting me open, he prattled on, making notes and comparing my parts to those of other creatures. He seemed fascinated by my normalcy in a lot of ways, commenting on how similar my organs were to those of a human.

What did he want from me? Did he want to open the hood to see how the gears worked before sending me on my merry way? It was unlikely.

I suspected once he got bored of timing my healing process, he was just going to dismantle me entirely. And I couldn’t fight back. Between the minimal amount of blood I was being given—barely enough to recover what was being lost in the surgery—and all the healing my body was forced to do over and over, I didn’t stand a chance.