Chapter 6

I climbed onto the windowsill and was about to jump when a strong hand shot out of the darkness and clamped around my ankle.

"Elio, where do you think you're going?"

At some point, Adeline had appeared in the garden below. She had not bothered with an umbrella, and the rain had soaked straight through her expensive pantsuit.

She tilted her head back and looked up at me through the curtain of rain, her eyes so fixated that they sent a chill down my spine. "It's windy up there. It's dangerous. Be good and go back inside, okay?"

I clung to the window frame. "Adeline, let go of me! I don't want to stay here anymore! You're all insane!"

Adeline did not let go. She yanked down even harder. My foot slipped, and I fell from the second floor with no way to stop myself. "Ah!"

I did not hit the cold concrete. I landed against something solid and cold instead. Adeline had broken my fall, and she held on to me so tightly that she nearly cracked my ribs.

"See, Elio? You can't get away. Even if you fall from the sky, the only place you'll land is in my arms."

She stroked my rain‑soaked hair, her voice both tender and cruel. "After the surgery tomorrow, you'll be completely weak. You won't even have the strength to stand. I'll make you the most beautiful cage, and I'll lock your wrists and ankles in gold chains.

"Every day, I'll be the only one you see and the only one you can depend on. Doesn't that make you happy, Elio?"

I looked at her face, deathly pale in the flash of lightning, and at last I felt a deep and real fear.

The next morning, the rain had stopped. Evelyn and Adeline marched me between them through the VIP entrance of a private hospital. I barely had the strength to walk.

After getting caught in the rain the night before, I had come down with a high fever, but Evelyn did not care.

"A little fever never killed anyone." She tossed the thermometer into the trash and turned coldly to the nurse.

"Take him straight in for the marrow draw. Hudson can't wait any longer."

I was pinned down on a cold operating table beneath the glaring surgical lights. A doctor walked in holding a frighteningly thick biopsy needle. He looked at my pale face and turned to Evelyn, hesitant.

"Ms. Sheridan, this gentleman's vitals are extremely poor. If we take that much marrow from him now, it could cause irreversible organ failure."

Evelyn frowned. "His body isn't like ours. He won't die. Do it. If anything happens, I'll take responsibility."

The doctor had no choice. He turned and rolled me onto my side. "Prepare the local anesthetic."

"No anesthetic." Evelyn's cold voice rang through the operating room.

The doctor whipped around. "Ms. Sheridan, that's against protocol. A bone marrow biopsy is excruciating. Without anesthesia, the patient could go into shock from the pain."

Evelyn walked to the side of the operating table and looked down at me. "He doesn't need it. Isn't he throwing a tantrum and trying to leave? Then let him feel every second of it. Pain is the only thing that'll make him remember who he belongs to."

I closed my eyes in despair. In that moment, I gave up even trying to struggle.

The long, thick needle pierced the skin over my lower spine and bored straight into the bone.

"Ahh!" I let out a piercing scream, and my body jerked violently like a fish out of water.

The pain was beyond anything words could describe. It felt as though the needle were grinding my very soul to pieces. My fingernails dug into the edge of the operating table so hard that two of them snapped off.