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“Please.” The doctor trembled, his eyes filled with tears as he looked up at the man standing opposite him. “Please.”

“She trusted you to help her, and you betrayed her, and sold her to a fucking monster. You killed her, Doctor T.”

I should have left by then; I should have run screaming bloody murder. But something in his voice pulled me closer. Maybe it was the rage laced with desperation. It was familiar.

“I-I didn’t. She was sick in the head,” Doctor T’s voice ended in a whimper when the hilt came down hard on his skull. “None of it was real. She was hallu-hallucinating.”

The man standing opposite Doctor T wore a black mask, which covered his entire face.

“Hallucinating?” he growled, grabbing Doctor T by the hair. “I found the letters you stole from Riley in your cottage, Doctor T. She wasn’t hallucinating. You knew everything, and you fucking used her,” he growled, low, vicious.

Trembling, cursing, I pulled the coat tighter around me, keeping to the shadows.

Doctor T looked up, his face crumbling under the weight of his fear.

“No, no, Asher. Pl-please.”

I stumbled back, lips parted, heart pounding.

Oh.

Asher. Asher Maddox, my delightfully brooding patient, who never spoke a word during the four months I’d treated him. And here he was, talking so eloquently.

I always knew he was trouble, even when he sat on my couch, all squinty-eyed and silent, I could tell. Now, here he was, bathed in shadows and sins, neither broken nor haunted… in all his twisted glory.

Asher had been the star of my wet dreams for months now.

It was unprofessional and unhealthy.

As a psychiatrist, I was familiar with how obsession worked and the way it consumed rational thoughts and distorted your senses.

Did that stop me from craving him, dreaming of him, letting my thoughts spiral down dark, tempting paths? No.

“Don’t lie to me, Doctor T. I’ll make this as painless as possible, but only if you give me something in return,” Asher said.

The fury in his voice was a mating call to the long-buried need within me, making my body burn alive with adrenaline. I hadn’t felt this alive in a while.

“As-Asher, I don’t know anything. Please.”

“If you want to play it like that….” Asher said, chopping off Doctor T’s middle finger. “Are you still going to say you know nothing?”

This man was raving mad, and I was mesmerized by the last stitch of sanity lingering in his eyes, and the lunacy just beneath it, clawing to break free.

I bit my lip, swallowing a gasp as the dagger sank into the doctor’s shoulder. He let out an ear-piercing scream that echoed off the wooden walls.

“Tell me now, and I’ll make your death painless. Do you want to go through this for another hour?” Asher growled.

“Pl-please. I don’t know anything. You have to trust me. She killed herself.”

“I told you not to lie,” Asher said. “One more chance. I want a name, and then I’ll put you out of your misery.” Doctor T howled when Asher pressed the dagger into his right eye.

“He made me do it,” the doctor whimpered, his resolve finally breaking.

“Who made you do it?”

“I don’t know. I only had to open the back door when everyone’s as-asleep and someone else would take the girls out.”

“So no name? Okay. Die, then, Doctor.”