Page 18 of Psycho Obsession
“Miller,” Aris barks over his shoulder without looking back. “Clean up the mess. And put Thorne in the Box. I’ll deal with her when I’m finished reminding Hallow why she belongs to me.”
As the world finally goes black, the last thing I feel is the heat of his skin through his shirt and the terrifying realisation that he isn’t angry I’m hurt.
He’s excited by it.
Chapter
Four
HALLOW
The world returns in fragments of silver and sharp, clinical stings.
I wake up to the sound of metal clicking against metal. It’s a rhythmic, surgical percussion that echoes in the hollow of my skull. I’m not on the mattress anymore. I’m on a cold, stainless steel table in the private exam room—the one with the specialised lights that don’t hum, they hiss.
My arms are pinned. My legs are splayed and locked into heavy metal stirrups, leaving me open, exposed, and utterly helpless. The air is freezing, turning the sweat on my skin to ice, but the real cold is coming from the man hovering over me.
Aris has his sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He’s wearing a fresh surgical apron over his ruined suit, the plastic splattered with the crimson wash he’s currently cleaning from my shoulder. He isn’t looking at my eyes. He’slooking at the jagged, three-inch tear Thorne left in my flesh.
“Stay still, Hallow,” he murmurs. His voice is flat, stripped of the lust from the night before, replaced by a terrifying, hyper-focused precision. “I haven’t administered the local anaesthetic yet. I want you to feel the baseline of the damage.”
I try to pull away, but the metal restraints don’t budge. “You… sadistic… fuck,” I rasp. My mouth tastes like a penny that’s been sitting in the sun.
“Precision is not sadism,” he counters. He picks up a curved surgical needle, the silk thread trailing behind it like a funeral shroud. “Sadism is what Thorne did to you. What I am doing is restoration.”
He leans in. I can see the sweat beaded on his upper lip, the only sign that he’s anything other than a machine. He doesn’t use a needle to numb the area. He simply presses his thumb into the edge of the wound, testing the depth, making me hiss as a fresh spike of white-hot agony shoots down my arm.
“Now,” he whispers.
He drives the needle into the raw, red meat of my shoulder.
I scream. It’s not a loud sound—I don’t have the breath for it—but it’s a jagged, ugly noise that scrapes against the tiled walls. I can feel the silk thread being dragged through my muscle, a slow, tugging sensation that feels like he’s trying to sew my soul back into my skin.
“Look at me, Hallow,” he commands, his eyes finally snapping to mine as he pulls the first stitch tight. “Look at the price of your little rebellion.”
He continues the work, his hands moving with a fluid, terrifying grace. He isn’t just closing a wound; he’s crafting a seam. Every time the needle pierces my skin, my body jerks against the steel table, the clatter of the restraints providing a frantic backbeat to my torture. He doesn’t flinch. He just wipes away a bead of blood with a gauze pad and continues.
“You think you’re a warrior because you bit a hole in a woman’s neck,” Aris says, his voice dropping into that dark, intimate register. He’s leaning so close now I can see the golden flecks in his eyes. “But you’re just a broken thing that I have to fix. You’re a puzzle, and I’m the only one with the pieces.”
He moves down to my lip. He picks up a smaller needle, his fingers brushing against my chin with a gentleness that makes me want to vomit. He’s so careful, so methodical, as he begins to stitch the split in my mouth.
“This one will hurt the most,” he warns, his eyes locking onto mine with a shimmering, psychotic intensity. “Don’t blink.”
He pushes the needle through the sensitive, swollen tissue of my lip. The pain is a localised explosion, a sharp, blinding heat that makes my eyes well with involuntary tears. I can’t move. I can’t speak. I can only lie there and watch him work, watch the way he admires the way the thread crosses my skin.
He finishes the last knot and snips the thread with a pair of silver scissors. Snip. The sound is so final it feels like a door closing.
He stands back, his chest heaving slightly, his eyes surveying his work. I’m covered in iodine and blood, mybody a map of his “restoration,” but the wound is closed. The mess is gone. I am once again a pristine specimen in his private collection.
“There,” he whispers, reaching out to stroke the hair away from my forehead with a blood-stained glove. “You’re perfect again. Don’t let anyone else touch you, Hallow. They don’t know how to put you back together like I do.”
He turns to the sink, the sound of the water running a harsh, industrial roar in the silence. He begins to scrub the blood from his arms, his back to me, leaving me pinned to the steel, a stitched-up ghost in a room full of knives.
Aris stands by the sink, the rhythmic scritch-scritch of the surgical brush against his skin the only sound in the room. He’s meticulous, scrubbing the traces of me from his forearms as if he can wash away the fact that he just spent twenty minutes revelling in the way my nerves screamed under his needle.
The iodine on my lip tastes like rust and antiseptic. I can feel the tug of the silk thread with every shallow breath. I’m pinned to that cold steel, my legs still locked in those goddamn stirrups, a dissected girl in a room full of glass.
“You’re done?” I rasp. The word is heavy, distorted by the stitches in my lip.
