Page 23 of Psycho Obsession
He leans down, his face inches from mine. He looks hot—sweat-slicked, disheveled, his chest heaving with a dark, secondary thrill. He’s not doing this to cure me. He’s doing this to see how much of me he can burn away before he hits the soul.
“Let’s see what happens at sixty,” he whispers.
He touches the switch, and the lightning returns.
This time, it feels like my blood is boiling. My heart is a trapped bird slamming against my ribs, trying to escape the cage. The floor beneath me seems to vanish, leaving me suspended in a void of pure, screaming electricity. I can feel my bladder wanting to let go, my muscles tearing against the iron bolts.
Through the white-hot fog of the pain, I see him. Aris. He isn’t standing back. He’s leaning over me, his hand pressed firmly against my heaving stomach, feelingthe way my body vibrates under the load. He looks like he’s watching a sunrise.
“Yes,” he hisses over the hum of the machine. “Give it to me, Hallow. Give me the scream.”
“Higher,” Aris breathes, his voice a jagged edge of lust and science.
He doesn’t just turn the dial; he cranks it.
The world ceases to exist. There is no floor, no mahogany, no Hallow Maddix. There is only the current. It’s a white-hot spear driven through my prefrontal cortex, a rhythmic, violent thudding of raw power that turns my nervous system into a burning fuse. My body isn’t mine anymore—it’s a conductor. My heels slam against the floor in a rapid-fire staccato, a seizure of pure, unadulterated agony that smells like burning copper and wet hair.
“Ninety,” he rasps. I can hear the click of the dial over the roar in my ears.
My heart isn’t beating; it’s vibrating. It’s a flatline of muscle-spasm that makes the air turn to lead in my lungs. I can feel the capillaries in my eyes snapping, a wash of red blurring the white light. My jaw is clamped so hard I hear the distinct, sickening crack of a molar giving way.
And Aris? He’s right there in the storm with me.
He’s not behind the desk. He’s on the floor, straddling my pinned hips, his hands clenching the rug on either side of my head. He’s watching my face contort, his own expression a mirror of my wreckage—eyes blown wide, his mouth agape as he drinks in the sight of my undoing. He’s looking for the moment the “ghost” leaves, the moment I become nothing but meat and electricity.
“Tell me!” he screams over the whine of the machine. “Tell me you can feel me now! Fuck the legend! Fuck the dark! It’s just us, Hallow! Just the wire!”
The machine lets out a high-pitched, dying squeal. A spark jumps from the electrode on my left temple, scorching a black pit into the rug. My chest hitches once, a violent, final jolt that feels like a physical punch to my soul, and then…
The silence is deafening.
The power cuts. The hum dies. I collapse back into the floor, a wet, limp pile of scorched skin and frayed nerves. My heart is a stuttering engine, missing every third beat, fluttering like a dying moth. I can’t feel my hands. I can’t feel my legs. I can only feel the cold, heavy weight of Aris on top of me.
He stays there for a moment, his chest heaving against mine, his forehead pressed to the floor next to my ear. He’s shaking. The man who thinks he’s a god is trembling like a leaf.
He lifts his head, and I see it. He looks like a man who just touched the sun and survived. There’s a smudge of my blood on his cheek, and his black shirt is soaked through with sweat.
“Hallow?” he whispers. It’s not a command. It’s a plea.
He reaches for my throat, his fingers pressing into my carotid artery. He waits. The silence stretches, thick and suffocating, until a tiny, pathetic thump echoes under his skin.
He lets out a breath that sounds like a sob, his head dropping onto my shoulder. “Still there. You’re still there.”
He pulls back, his hands moving over my bodywith a frantic, possessive urgency, checking the bolts, checking the burns at my temples. He’s manic, his eyes darting across my face, looking for a sign of the girl who tried to strangle him.
“Speak to me,” he commands, his voice regaining its sharp, clinical edge, though it’s still frayed at the borders. “Hallow Maddix. Identify yourself.”
I pull my eyes to his. They’re clouded, the red smears from the burst vessels making him look like he’s standing in a sunset. I try to move my tongue, but it’s a heavy, leaden weight. I swallow the taste of copper and burnt enamel.
“Go… to… hell,” I croak. The words are barely a vibration, but they’re mine.
Aris stares at me for a heartbeat, and then he does something truly terrifying. He smiles. It’s a wide, genuine, and utterly psychotic expression of joy. He leans down and presses a hard, bruising kiss to the burn on my forehead, his lips lingering on the scorched skin.
“I’m already there, Hallow,” he whispers against my skin. “And I’m never letting you leave.”
I don’t answer him.
The spark that usually lights up my throat, the one that feeds the venom in my words, is gone. It didn’t just flicker out; it was burned to ash by ninety milliamps of his “care.” I lie there, pinned to the mahogany floorboards by iron bolts, staring at the ceiling with eyes that feel like they’ve been replaced by glass marbles.
