Chapter 10: Trespass

The hospital at three in the morning was not quiet; it was simply muffled.

Fluorescent fixtures down the hall emitted a thin, high-frequency whine that Owen could hear only when he turned his head toward the door. Through the thin partition walls came the metronomic sigh of an alternating pressure mattress in 312, the dull rubber thwack of a custodial cart moving across linoleum, and the occasional squawk of a radio at the nurse’s station thirty feet away.

Owen lay on his back, propped at a thirty-degree angle because lying flat pulled at the deep contusions along his lower ribs. Every breath tasted faintly of the copper tang that had lingered in his mouth since Sabine had forced the rubber ball between his molars, despite the four separate paper cups of tap water Nurse Okafor had brought him before midnight. His jaw ached with a dull, throbbing persistence, the tendons in his neck stiff and swollen where his head had been wrenched back against the leather bench.

Under the rough cotton sheet, his body felt foreign. There was the sharp, localized sting of the needle taped into the back of his left hand, the bruising across his inner thighs where Sabine’s knees had pinned him, and the dull, burning ache across his lower back and buttocks where the crop had left its raised, overlapping welts. But worse than the physical pain was the lingering, humiliated heat that crawled beneath his skin whenever he closed his eyes—the sickening, involuntary memory of how his cock had hardened in Lenora’s hands, how Maeve’s breath had felt against his neck, how his body had betrayed him into response before Sabine had turned the room into a slaughterhouse of rules.

He stared at the ceiling tiles, counting the little grey punctures in a grid of six by eight.

He had told Delgado and Pruitt nothing they couldn’t already read off the intake sheet. He had confirmed his age, confirmed the address, confirmed that he had been in the detached studio with his family. When Delgado had asked if anything sexual had taken place, he had stared at the plastic water pitcher until the silence stretched long enough for Pruitt to write Unresponsive to specific inquiry in the margin. He didn’t know what his mother had said to them. He didn’t know what Tessa or Maeve had admitted. Most of all, he didn’t know what Sabine had told them, or what she had done after the squad car drove away from the driveway.

A shadow broke the light beneath the bottom edge of his door.

Owen went rigid. His breath caught in his throat, a sharp hitch that sent an electric spike of pain through his fifth rib.

The door did not swing open with the brisk, rubber-soled certainty of Nurse Okafor checking vitals. It unlatched with an almost imperceptible click, sliding inward inch by inch, avoiding the squeak in the upper hinge.

A figure stepped through the gap and eased the door closed behind her until the latch clicked back into place.

She wore a long, dark wool coat, the collar turned up against the night air, her hair drawn back into the same severe, immaculate knot she had worn in the studio. In the dim, greenish spill of the vitals monitor, her eyes caught the light like polished slate.

Sabine.

Owen’s heart hammered instantly against his ribs, so violent and sudden that the digital readout above his head began a faster, erratic beep: 88... 102... 118.

“Quiet,” Sabine murmured.

She didn’t whisper. She used the low, pitched, resonant tone she had used on the bench—the voice of an instructor addressing a student who had made an elementary mistake in posture. She stepped past the foot of the bed, her boots making no sound on the waxed floor.