“What you have is a fucking death wish,” she sneers, head shaking as she climbs off me, concealing the pen away somewhere as she does. “I almost killed him.”
“But you didn’t,” I say, keeping my voice light and my eyes on her as she starts pacing the tiny, white room.
She stops pacing and looks at her hands. After a few seconds, she snaps back from wherever she disappeared to inside her head and scowls at me. “Only because Dante stopped me.”
“You would have stopped.”
She walks over to the ground-up drugs on the table and starts scraping the powder onto a torn-off piece of the bag. Once it’s full, she twists the ends and pockets it. Her hands are stained blue by the time she’s finished. She dusts away the excess and heads to the sink that’s in her room to wash her hands.
When she’s finished, Viola heads to the door and opens it. There’s a lot of commotion in the halls as we step into it. Just like the main part of the facility, residents are allowed to come and go from their rooms to the common areas as they please until late in the evening, when we’re supposed to retreat back to our rooms. We’re not in prison, so we keep getting reminded.
“Where is everyone going?” she looks up and down the corridor.
“To eat. It’s dinner time.”
“Then we do the opposite,” she says. “Take me to Byron.”
My cousin isthe same as the last time I saw him. Even with probing the nurses and orderlies to no longer give him any sedatives, he’s still pretty much catatonic.
Viola walks right up to him, snapping her fingers in his face. He doesn’t even flinch.
“See, he’s gone.”
She looks over her shoulder at me. “You’re just going to give up?”
“Look at him. He’s a living, breathing corpse.”
“Just roll him over,” she says, giving me a death look.
“What? Why?”
“Because you’re going to shove some of your pills up his asshole,” she says sweetly, fluttering her eyelashes.”
I stare at her. “You’re fucking kidding me. Why?” I say again.
“Because benzodiazepines are the only thing that can wake your cousin up, and he needs it in large doses absorbed into the bloodstream quickly. I have nothing here to dissolve them in or inject him with. Hopefully, he has a tight, little anus for you to enjoy.”
The look I give her is dark, bordering on bloody murderous.
She holds up a handful of pills. “The faster you do this, the quicker we can go and eat.”
I close my eyes and count to five, and then open them. Nope, she’s still fucking there, causing my life to be a fucking misery. I have half a mind to take the pills and lock myself in my room, but I know she’ll hunt me down and hurt me in places I never knew existed if I did that.
“Fucking fine,” I snap. “Just give me the damn things and get out.”
She hands me the drugs but then crosses her arms in front of her chest. “I’m not going anywhere.” Her lips are twitching as she says it. She’s fucking loving this.
“You fucking bitch,” I say, half meaning it, half wanting to grab her and kiss that smirk right off her beautiful face.
Byron is light as a feather, so it’s easy for me to lean him against my shoulder, yank his scrubs down, and shove the pills into God knows fucking where. Then he’s back in his chair with his pants where they should be, and I’m scrubbing my hands in the sink.
When I turn my attention to Viola, she’s watching me with an amused look.
“You’re so getting it up the bum for that,”
She snorts. “That turn you on, did it?”
“I could be tempted.” I give her a Jude special—twisted grin, deviant fucking eyes. “Three-ways are still a gift of mine, babe.”