“When you didn’t wake up, I thought the water would help revive you.”
He’s searching for approval, or some kind of acceptance from me. I can hear it in the frail tone of his voice, that irritating need for forgiveness.
He’s like some sinister version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and this is his Jekyll side, trying to mitigate the damage.
The more awake I become, the more I feel that damage. My muscles are weak and tender, my head throbs as sharp pain ricochets around my skull. I remove my hand from the water to touch my temple. The skin there is rough. Scorched, I think. From over four hundred volts of electricity.
“I have a cream to treat the burn,” he says, as I move out of his grasp, my feet searching for the riverbed.
I remember him applying that electrode jelly shit to my temples before he ruthlessly clamped the paddles to my head. It didn’t work then, and I don’t care about the scars now.
“How do you feel?”
The same. Only tired, and bruised, and submerged in a thick layer of indifference. I want to sink beneath the water and never come up. But as the tiny pricks of light project a glow over the rocks, I can see the shadow on the wall. How this all works. Suddenly, the answer is illuminated by the faintest stars.
It’s faded and hard to grasp—but it’s there, the solution, buried just below the gauze shrouding my thoughts.
I bury my face in my wet hands, clearing some of the fog.
Alex would never fall for a ploy so basic. But really, if I fail, I’ll have lost nothing. It’s a chance—and that’s a reason to try.
“I feel strange,” I say, as I wade through the water. I notice where the trickling is stemming from, and look up at a cascade of water sheeting over a jutted crag in the rock face.
“Strange how?” Alex probes. “Immediate side effects should wear off within a day.”
My gaze stays on the waterfall. “I don’t know, just strange. My chest feels heavy, but it’s not in a terrible way. I want to go into the waterfall. It’s so beautiful and serene.”
“Blakely, you’re worrying me. Maybe I should take you back—”
I push through the water toward him and grasp his face between both hands. I stare up, making my eyes wide, my lips trembling from the cold and onslaught of emotion. And before I say what’s right on the edge, I hear Mrs. Fisher’s voice in my head.
Cruelty is a disease, Lauraleigh. It will fester inside you like cancer.
This may be the cruelest thing I’ll ever do, but Alex has earned my cruelty.
“If I could rip your throat out right now, I would. I would carve out your jugular and watch your blood stain the water, and I would feel….nothing.”
Alex swallows, his throat works hard, his gaze unwavering. “Then what’s stopping you?”
I crush my body to his and run my fingers through his damp hair. The spray off the waterfall makes the droplets look like the stars in the dark sky. I lick my lips slowly, tasting the river water, and his eyes fall to my mouth.
“What you did to me…what you’ve been doing to me…” I trail off. “No one has ever done such things. No one would ever dare hurt me the way you have. No one would, because no one cares about me that much to try to help—” My voice cracks, and I glance down at the ripples of water barely separating us.
His hands are clamped to my shoulders, holding me at bay. When I look up at him, his brow is furrowed as he studies my expression. I wonder if he can discern the lie there—if I have a tell that he’s already labeled in his journal.
“We should go back to the lab.” He looks past me. “Run tests. Get updated scans.”
I smile at that. “I said you were the rabbit.”
His fingers press into my skin. “I don’t understand—”
“Did you ever realize how Alice never stopped…couldn’t stop chasing the rabbit? It was a compulsion. Even though that world was crazy and frightening, she kept chasing. You’re not the rabbit, Alex. You’re Alice. Chasing your compulsion to some deranged Wonderland.”
His hands drag over my shoulders and slowly travel up to clasp my face between his palms. His mouth parts as hunger sparks in his eyes. The air charges around us. “You’re my Wonderland.”
“And you’re a hypocrite,” I say.
Confusion creases his forehead, and I grip his shirt in my hands. “I should rip your fucking throat out, but I can’t, Alex. Not because you don’t deserve to suffer. And not because of any law or self-preservation. I can’t…because it would cause me to feel something I don’t even know how to describe.”
And there it is—the smallest glimmer, the hopeful well in his pale-blue eyes. He wants to believe. I just have to give this delusional fuck a reason.
“Touch me, Alex,” I say, a hot whisper against his lips. “If you don’t touch me, my chest will explode. There’s too much…just too much all at once, and I need you to siphon off the overflow.”
“Christ, Blakely.” He tries to pull away, but I cling to his shirt. He places his hands over mine. “Don’t do this to me.”
A strangled laugh escapes. “Do this to you? You fucking coward. You torture me. Sadistically subject me to scans, drugs, and literally cook my brain, and now you can’t handle the… What’s the thing you scientists are always touting?”
His gaze flits over my features, his breath slices in and out of his lungs. “Results,” he says, a hint of awe in his voice.
I palm his face, thumb pressed right below his bottom lip. I force his face so close to mine, he can feel the fire of my words. “This is your result, Alex. Everything you ever wanted me to feel, I’m yours to make feel. I’m your monster, waiting for your command, and now you want to abandon me in the dark to suffer—”
His lips crash against mine. The force of the kiss rocks through me, a collision of vicious want and loathing and pure desperation to make the relentless longing end. His lips are steel on mine as his fingers splay into my wet hair. I tilt my head back to meet his demand, my tongue sweeping out to touch his, the assault liquid fire in my veins.
It’s unexpected, and unsettling, the way my breath stills in my chest, the building ache painful and gratifying all at once. I shove any uncertainty down, far down below the disdainful voice in my head chiding that this is a mistake.
His arm locks around my lower back and I’m lifted up. My legs wrap around him to fuse us together in the water. Our bodies are ice and fire, friction from one extreme striking the other and merging until the burn loses distinction. Pain is pain—pleasurable and consuming and agonizing.
Oxygen is combustible, and my lungs will either burst or implode if I take a breath or keep allowing Alex to steal it. He feels my struggle because it’s also his, and he breaks the kiss long enough to pull in a lungful of air.
His forehead rests against mine, his grip a vise around my body as if he’ll lose me to the current. “It worked,” he says, breathless. “You’re cured. I cured you.”
He repeats this, over and over, relishing in his conquest over science. Then: “Wait. This isn’t right.”
A sprig of panic branches through me, and I try to stutter a response.
“This shouldn’t feel right, but nothing has ever felt so right before,” Alex says.