To not be healed more than a week after a fight … My heart clenched and I reached out to him, fingertips brushing his jaw.
For a moment everything was quiet, everyone still, the few wandering patients of Pecan Place frozen in speculation. The world faded away and there was only Pietr.
And me.
The guards moved as if thawing out after independent thought had stunned them. Pietr glanced at the tattoo exposed on the guard’s wrist and then at his face.
Pietr’s jaw tightened.
He knew something.
The nurse, hands on her hips, glared at Pietr as he did the finest display of passive resistance I’d seen short of school DVDs about the civil rights movement.
The guard lumbered toward the door with his more-than-human burden. He pushed one door open, inside the first set of reinforced glass doors, bracing it with a huge booted foot. He pulled back his arm and tossed Pietr unceremoniously out.
Anyone but a Rusakova would have landed badly. But the grace and strength of the wolf within—that wildest part of Pietr—was ever-present.
Especially when he stared down into my eyes and crushed his lips to mine.
The few patients in the hall near me went wild with whooping and cheering—for which side, I couldn’t tell. And babbling. Both the patient who obsessed over ceiling fans and light switches and the nurse who was taken totally by surprise.
“Gonna have to up everyone’s meds this afternoon,” she snapped, shuffling her papers back together.
“It’s love! It’s love! Crazy, crazy love!” a woman shouted as she danced in circles.
I tried not to agree with the already medicated population of Pecan Place, Junction’s one and only mental institution. But, watching the woman dancing her loose-legged jig, I thought she just might be right.
Crazy, crazy love.
My guards took a single step toward the thin but rebellious crowd and everyone fell silent, eyes wide. Patients hugged the wall, slinking back to their rooms.
Terrified.
And the list of questions slowly developing in my mind doubled.
Jessie
When my door opened and the nurse appeared, standing beside a laundry cart, emotions battled just below my skin. Having seen Pietr made me itch for activity. The journal rested under my bed, page after page filled by my thoughts after having seen—and kissed—him. But there were strange things going on here. Maybe staying in the solitude of my room was the best bet.
“Laundry detail’s really simple,” the nurse encouraged me. She patted the stack of folded clothing. All the same lifeless shade of blue—the one color Pietr’s eyes never became. “You’ll deliver the laundry to our clients with your guards nearby, of course.”
I touched a shirt on the top of the stack. “Color theory. It’s supposed to keep us subdued, right?”
“Same reason the walls are painted eggshell or ecru,” she said with a shrug.
Oddly like Junction High’s decor. I rubbed at the goose bumps dotting my arms.
She pulled the cart to the first stop. “Sheets have all been changed, so don’t worry about that. Clients on this wing are currently either in the common room or in private sessions. All you do is—” She pulled out a card that dangled from a lanyard around her neck and slid it through the lock.
A twist of the handle and a push and we stepped inside, the cart’s wheels squeaking. The room looked exactly like mine. Sterile. Indistinct. Dull, dull, dull.
“Here.” She withdrew another lanyard and electronic key from her pocket and hung it around my neck. “Don’t get any ideas,” she warned. “It only works on interior client doors.”
“Ideas? Me? Not at all. Absolutely no ideas.”
She sighed. “Just look at the list and take two sets of pants, two shirts, and a single pair of socks and lay them on the bed. The doors lock automatically, so you’ll have to slide your key to open it.”
“What if I wedge the cart in the door?”
“An alarm triggers. Extra paperwork for all.”
“So let the door close. Got it.”
“Your guards have a master key in case there’s a problem.”
“Are there usually problems doing laundry? I mean, other than mixing reds and whites, which”—I tapped the stack again—“obviously isn’t an issue here.”
“No problems to date,” she remarked, “but it seems you have a knack for getting into trouble.”
I couldn’t disagree. At least not honestly.
“Don’t take too long. Some clients get aggravated if they realize someone was in their room. So in and out.”
I nodded, put a checkmark on the list, and took the cart. It wasn’t a difficult job and it reminded me of my service learning assignment at Golden Oaks Adult Day Care and Retirement Home, a place I’d met many great older people dealing with issues my mother never had the chance to face and fight. My fingers tightened on the cart and I pushed out a breath, refocusing.
Except for the checkmarks that differentiated patients by number—not name—everything mercifully began to blur.
It was as I was setting clothes on yet another nondescript bed that I heard movement behind me—
—too late.
The bathroom door opened the rest of the way and the occupant of room 26, the odd import named Harmony, stared at me, narrowing her eyes. “You will not take me back.”
I dropped my gaze—totally nonconfrontational. “I’m not—”
“Liar!” Enraged, she lunged at me, snarling. With a savage kick she knocked my feet out from under me, taking me to the ground. My left knee burned so hot I cried out and my breath snared in the back of my throat, rattling.
Bent over to straddle me, her mouth frothed, and she drew an arm back, rolling her fingers into a fist.
I raised my hands in front of me. “Sorry, sorry,” I said, trying to avoid direct eye contact, hoping submitting might work. But as my gaze flicked back to her raised and quaking hand I saw something in her change.
“Guards!” I shrieked. Reaching up, I grabbed her upper arms and rocked back onto my shoulders hard, throwing her off balance and over my head.
She hit the floor, but even as I screamed again for the guards and jumped to my feet, she scrambled to hers. She was fast and she was strong.
Crazy strong.
Spittle foamed at the corner of her mouth as she worked her jaw, an eerie red light rising in her eyes, and I stumbled backward, slamming against the door as she came at me. “Sorry,” I whispered, narrowly avoiding her charge. “I thought you were out. Guards!”