“Almost exactly?” Bruno asks.
“Well, like I told you, I was not as experienced, and Vittoria’s case was… shall we say extreme? Hannah will be delivered exactly as you want her.”
I like these Stepford Wives vibes less and less.
“How was Vittoria’s case extreme?” I ask, focusing on what I need to get out of this meeting.
He hesitates.
“Geno Russo is dead, Dr. Tilbury,” I say, leaning my elbows on his desk. “I have no intention of sharing anything I learn here about Vittoria. I just want to be sure this is the right place and the best treatment for my sister.”
He nods. “I was unable to isolate the event in Vittoria’s case.”
We wait.
“In the end, more time was erased than ideal, but it was erased. Now as to my methods,” he says, changing the subject. I put a pin in it and watch as he directs our attention to the side wall, where a screen silently descends from the ceiling. “I use a specific type of hypnosis coupled with electroconvulsive therapy, ECT as you may know it…” he continues, but I stop listening because the room darkens, and an image fills the screen.
Vittoria.
My heart misses a beat as I take her in. She looks a lot like she does now just younger. So much younger. Her face is softer, more rounded, hair cut like a kid took scissors to it, and it looks like it hasn’t been brushed in days. She’s barefoot, wearing a hospital gown that is too big on her and she’s alone in a padded room with a cot in one corner. Everything is pristine white and too bright. And Vittoria is pacing, pacing, pacing and muttering to herself. Every few minutes, she stops to look at her hands back and front, back and front, like I’ve seen her do a few times. But I see how red the skin of her hands is, and the blotches look raw. Her lips move, and although there’s audio, we can’t make out the words.
Dr. Tilbury, looking much like he does now, enters with two men in scrubs, and it’s like a fucking horror movie. Vittoria stops dead, looks at him, then at them. She takes a step back and shakes her head. But then her expression changes. It softens. And I see Geno Russo come into the screen behind the doctor.
“Daddy.” She tilts her head, then looks at her hands again, back and front before scratching her head almost violently. When she looks back up, her eyes are wet with tears. Against the doctor’s orders, Geno Russo hugs his daughter, and I see him squeeze his eyes shut.
This is the same man who ordered his men to slice our faces, to smash my father’s knees. The same man to whom a human life, a child’s life, was worth fifteen hundred dollars. I can’t reconcile the two.
“Daddy. I can’t get them clean. I can’t,” Vittoria says, drawing back. “Tell them I need the bleach. Tell them I need it. I need it, or it won’t come off. Daddy, tell them…”
“That’s enough,” I say, turning back to the doctor. He’s watching as if entertained, as if all that’s missing is a fucking tub of popcorn. I’m going to fucking kill him.
“But my methods—”
“Shut it off!”
He pauses, surprised. Vittoria’s face freezes on the screen, and I can’t look at it.
“What happened to her?” I ask in a voice I don’t recognize.
“That’s personal—”
Before I can think, I’m on my feet slamming both hands on his desk. “What the fuck happened to her?”
The doctor leans backward, and I see him reach for what I imagine is a button alerting security under his desk.
“Amadeo,” Bruno says with a hand on my shoulder. He’s up on his feet too. He shifts his attention to the doctor. “You can imagine how upsetting this is to Amadeo, considering his sister is the same age.” He turns to me and gives me a look that says I’m about to fuck this up. “Sit.”
Fine. But instead of sitting, I pace, and in the corner of my eye, I see the young Vittoria with her hair shorn, and the skin of her hands cracked and blotchy and raw and in her eyes a look I don’t have words for.
“Perhaps this treatment isn’t for Hannah,” Dr. Tilbury says in a lowered voice to Bruno.
“We’ll decide that. Can you be more specific about Ms. Russo’s case, Doctor? How is it similar to my niece and how is it dissimilar?”
Tilbury nods, switches off the screen altogether, thank fuck, and sets his hands on his desk as the lights come back up. I sit on the edge of the couch set farthest away from the desk, lean my elbows on my knees, and lock my fingers together to keep from killing him before he gives us what we need.
“Vittoria Russo was attacked. Kidnapped, held prisoner, and raped by two men over a period of six days.”
“Jesus,” Bruno says.
I just stare at the man whose lips are moving but whose face is frozen as my brain tries to work out what I’m hearing.
“They kept her in a basement in one of Russo’s properties. Abandoned still. I don’t think he had the stomach to develop it after what happened. But that’s not all. That’s not why she keeps looking at her hands.”
The image of her snatching Bastian’s gun and shooting that man comes to mind. The look on her face. The determination with which she did it. The lack of hesitation. Lack of any emotion. And I understand.
“She killed them, didn’t she?” I ask.
Tilbury looks at me for a long minute before he nods.
“How?”
“Got ahold of one of their guns. Her father found her soon after. Mere hours later. She began scrubbing her hands with bleach for days afterward. It’s why we had her in there, nails clipped short so she wouldn’t rip off skin. She’d use anything she could to scrub at her hands to get the blood off that only she could see.”
“Which property?” I ask.
He looks confused. “I’m not certain, but it’s in the city. I don’t know why he didn’t sell it. Get rid of it.”
“The memories, can they return?”
“They’re erased.”
“Are you certain?”
“Well, of course the human mind is complex, isn’t it?”
“Is that how you cover your ass?”
He ignores my comment. “There can be unforeseen triggers.”
“Like?”
“Like a similar event happening to her or someone she knows. A news story. Stress. It can be any number of things. Like I said, the mind is complex,” he reiterates.
“Do you have more video footage?” Bruno asks.
Tilbury hesitates, then looks at Bruno. “I record all my sessions. So I can learn from them of course.”
“I’m sure. Who has seen these?” I ask.
He looks at me, then at Bruno.
“Who have you shown these to?”
“A few prospective clients like you.”
“You fucking advertised using a fourteen-year-old girl’s trauma?”
“I… it wasn’t…”
I stalk across the room and swipe my arm across the desk, knocking his laptop and everything else to the floor. “You fucking used a fourteen-year-old girl’s trauma to fucking promote yourself?”
He succeeds in pushing that button to call security as I lean over to grab him by the collar and drag him to his feet then over the desk. I get one good hit on his over-Botoxed face before two hulking men drag me off.