62. Cohen

62

COHEN

I should have just left her bare ass to rot in that room, stopped feeding her and waited until she slowly withered away to a pile of fucking bones. Borrowed Donnie's wheelbarrow, the same one he used to drop her at my bedroom door, and tossed her in the incinerator. Watched as that pile turned to ash. Along with the poison she injected into my veins every time she looked at me like I was the villain in this story. When she was the one with a perfect face, flawless fucking skin, not a visible scar to indicate all the ugliness beneath her surface.

Instead, I slammed the door and stomped into the freight elevator, pushing the button that would take me out of the basement and land me two floors up. Right outside Adrian's office with Emily's records tucked under my arm and a fifteen blade concealed by my sleeve. First lie flung my way would have me popping out his eye and using as a stress ball.

I didn't have patience for anymore bullshit today. Least of all from the fucker currently smirking at me from behind his desk.

Adrian didn't spare me another glance as he tossed a small cardboard box in the air, catching it twice more before shoving it into his desk. "Finally coming up for air, Dr. Michaels?"

I dropped the brown folder in front of him, the pages worn by both time and obsession. Truth was the file itself didn't have much purpose anymore. Not when every word was archived in the deep recesses of my brain, imbedded there like a core memory I couldn't forget even if I wanted to.

I didn't want to. I wanted to remember what she did. And I wanted her to remember it too.

Adrian flicked his eyes downward. Blinked once and then pinned me with a glare. His expression as cold as the organs we had packed in ice a couple of rooms down.

"Something you wanna tell me?" I ground my teeth, feeling the ache radiate up my jaw and make itself at home at the base of my skull.

There was that pounding again.

Tension thickened the air until Adrian slammed his palms down on the piles of paperwork spread across his desk before pushing up from his chair. "No, Dr. Michaels, is there something you wanna tell me? Thank you would be a good start."

"For what?"

"For bringing your little chick home to roost…" He walked his fingers across Emily's folder, a single brow arched with the same arrogance that curled the top of his lip. One of these days, I'd cut that smirk right off his fucking face. I just wasn't sure if that day was today. "You didn't think you'd find her without me, did you?"

"You don't know that."

We both knew it was a lie. But only one of us cared to admit it. And it sure as hell wasn't me. Adrian had given me the occasional picture over the years. Always blurry. Always at a distance. Always promising me more. If I rolled over and showed the fucker my belly. Didn't really have any choice but to play nice. At the time. He had the resources, the funds, and I had an addiction to feed.One that had been building up and was close to exploding.

So I did what I had to do to get here, jerking off to those same images and the memories I'd had so engrained in my brain I could still smell her cunt, all while the fucker shoved more empty promises down my throat and cash in my hand. The latter I squirreled away, slowly adding to the room that had become her cell. Maybe even her tomb, depending on how things went.

I liked to plan but I wasn't afraid to improvise if it came to that either.

"Five years, Cohen. Might as well have been an eternity of watching you obsess over that girl. And now that you have her, you come bursting into my office with that sour expression on… half your face. Why?"

I uncrossed my arms and gestured to Emily's folder, my fingers itching to tug my blade free and see the gray steel turn red. "I want the original."

"Why?"

"I wanna know what you're hiding, what parts you took out."

Adrian lifted a shoulder into a half-shrug. "It's all there, Dr. Michaels. Just because you don't see something doesn't mean it's missing."

"What the fuck is that supposed to mean?"

"It means take another look with a fresh set of…" He trailed off while twirling a dismissive finger in the air. "Well, you know how the saying goes. No need to open old wounds."

He extended an arm, and I snatched the folder out of his hands before throwing my ass into the closest chair.

Female patient, age nineteen, seen at Mercy General on the 28th of October for a scheduled D&C. Four- hundred micrograms of misoprostol administered orally three hours prior to scheduled procedure. Evacuation completed by attending without incident. Patient alert and oriented…

I could recite this shit word for word. Nothing was different. No annotation missed. I threw the chart back across the room, watching the pages flutter towards the ceiling before scattering along the floor.

This was a waste of my fucking time, a way for Lambert to get his rocks off by watching me squirm in my seat. No matter how much she may have wanted to, Emily couldn't argue facts. Everything was right there in black and white.

Adrian didn't spare me a glance as he yanked the bottom drawer of his desk open and withdrew a duplicate file. Though something told me it wasn't the original either. Fucker probably had a stock room of those things just waiting for the right moment to shove them in my face again.

He cleared his throat before repeating the same words I'd already read for myself. "Female patient, age nineteen, seen at Mercy General on the 28 th of October for a scheduled D&C?—"

"I already?—"

He slapped another heavy palm down on his desk. So much for the cool fa?ade. "Stop using your mouth for one goddamn second and maybe your brain will finally catch up." Then he cracked his neck from side to side, quietly tucking away his hair-trigger temper like it was never there. "I'd hoped you'd come to the conclusion on your own, but seeing as a decade has done nothing but thicken that skull of yours, I'll explain it in terms even you can understand."

It didn't matter how many years you spent under Adrian's thumb, how many more you saw in your future, the guy always had this way of reminding you that you were lower than the shit under his polished shoes. And that he had no problem scraping you off as soon as he was done with you.

I took solace in the fact that one day someone was gonna bend him over and shove that same shoe up his ass. The left side of my mouth tugging into a smirk at the thought while he continued to enjoy the sound of his own voice.

"A dilation and curettage procedurehas more than one use, Dr. Michaels. Something you should be more than aware of if you attended even one day of your gynecological rotation." He shot me a glare from across his desk. "To force a surgical evacuation and?—"

"Assist in the shedding of the uterine wall after a spontaneous abortion…"

"Among other therapeutic and diagnostic uses, yes." He nodded, white noise filtering through the air, but I wasn't listening anymore.

My feet were already taking me towards the door, muscle memory guiding me down the hall, my brain in search of the closest vice to quiet all the static in my head. Didn't care if it was liquor or pills as long as it did the trick.

A few minutes later, I found myself at the bottom of an empty vodka bottle. Never liked the taste of that shit but Casper always had a stash somewhere in his bunk and I wasn't above raiding it. I tossed it against the wall, watching the glass shatter before reaching an arm under his bed and grabbing another. Rinse and repeat until the rest of me was as numb as my hand.