Page 68 of No Asylum Here

“Of all the words, that’s not one I’d use to describe you.”

“And what words would you use?”

“Um. Intense? Charming. Sly. And if your journal has anything to say about it…compassionate. You’re a good man. Or, you used to be.”

He flashed me his signature ear-to-ear grin beneath his mask, the kind that didn’t reach his eyes. “Yeah, well, look where all that’s gotten me.”

I returned my attention to the task of scooping Joanie’s remains into my waste bin while I watched Mal watching me in my periphery.

“Your hands are trembling.”

“I’m fine.”

Pushing the bin back under my desk, I wiped my hands off on my pencil skirt and took a seat on the sofa with my legs crossed. I caught myself hoping that the glimpse of my thighs would distract him from my shaking hands.

“Bullshit. You’re shaking like a leaf. What’s happened?” he demanded, jerking against his restraints. “Was it Rook? Did that bastard touch you?”

My heart latched in my chest at the possessive bite to Mal’s words. “It’s not that. I’ve actually been successful avoiding him for the most part.”

There was a delicate knock at the door, and the nurse appeared with a small paper bag and a steaming cup of coffee.

"Oh, thank fuck." As soon as the nurse was gone, I tore into the bag with my teeth and sighed in sweet relief as a plethora of pill packs toppled into my lap. A fistful of Clonidine and several gulps of scalding coffee, and awareness of my surroundings came hurtling back.

I dared a glance at the masked man chained to the chair just a few feet away.

“Breakfast of champions, much?” he teased, hiking a brow.

“Oh, please. You’re a physician with an abusive father. This is our signature meal.”

He tossed up another brow to join the first. “Our signature meal?”

“My dad didn’t sink to cartoonish evil scientist-esque levels that yours borderlines, but he had a SUD.”

“SUD?” In a strangely lucid moment, Mal quirked his head with an inquisitive look on his face that didn’t match the crude leather and steel strapped over his handsome features. “I’m not familiar with that one.”

“Substance abuse disorder. It first appeared in the fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-5.”

His eyes lit with recognition. “Ah, yes. I own the second edition. It was published the year I graduated.”

I gaped at the man, bewildered silence claiming me in a momentary chokehold. “You graduated from Brown in 1968?”

A bemused smile bowed his lips. “I’m shocked you remember the year of that manual’s publication.”

I found myself mirroring his smile over my coffee cup. “I’m a bit of a medical book nut. I couldn’t afford the latest editions of anything from the school stores, so I did a lot of hunting, and it turned into a therapeutic hobby. I once had an 1858 edition of Grey’s Anatomy.”

“No shit? Impressive.”

I chuckled awkwardly. “Not really. School is prohibitively expensive these days, so I had to hock it to help pay tuition. Actually, I had to get rid of the majority of my collection to help make ends meet these last couple of years.”

“I’m sorry.” The soft bend his voice took caught me off guard. Like it wasn’t just sympathy from one book lover to another. “Surviving an abusive father, putting yourself through med school, only for you to end up in this shithole.”

For one precious moment, I glimpsed past Mal’s mask to see the man from his journal. There was more of him left than he liked to let on. “Well, that makes two of us.”

At that, he grinned wildly, and for the first time, it reached his eyes. “Oh, yeah. Two regular peas in a pod.”

I liked to think that if we’d met under different circumstances, and came from the same time, we would have been colleagues, friends. Lovers.

But the sad fact was, we weren't from the same time, and we hadn’t met under different terms. He was my patient, and I was his psychiatrist, and if I indulged my urges with this man… I shuddered to think what his father might do to me. To both of us. And even if we were to sleep together and managed to avoid getting caught, there was still the fact that Mal was unpredictable. If Rook’s Treatment had some strange side effect that turned him into the same demonic entity he’d written of in his journal, surely the chains and the straitjacket were for more than cruelty's sake.