What Keeps Our Hearts Beating

Chapter 10

The guards led Brasen down the staircase, shackled and their tazers armed and ready. There was a guard named Johnson with a handlebar mustache who had to use it in the past and Brasen was not about to tempt him to use it again. The hospital ward was vacant of students, as usual for this time of day as mandated by Weber, but Brasen caught himself trying to get a glimpse of golden-brown curls at the end of the hallway. His meeting with Lacey felt like a dream, if it wasn't for the welt on the side of his face where she had smacked him with the Bible. The Bible, of all books.

"Did you see a ghost?" one of the guards snidely asked, following Brasen's gaze down the empty hallway.

"Just the beautiful angel of death come to devour all of you lovely gentlemen today."

"Sounds like my kind of woman," the guard snickered, pushing Brasen roughly into the hospital waiting room where Nurse Ackman was waiting for him, head to toe in paperwork.

"Morning Handsome," she croaked in her manly unsympathetic tone. Her voice hoarse from the countless cigarettes she had consumed prior to them cutting a hole in her throat. Now she was more like frog lady than a nurse. Weber knew how to pick the worst with the non-bedside manner. Only the best for him.

"Good Morning Beautiful," he crooned in a sing-song voice, to annoy her more than anything else. It tended to work perfectly.

"Someone's in a sunny mood for entering the chamber this morning. Weber is still complaining about the bruise on his hand from your soccer maneuver last week."

Brasen cringed, recalling how Weber had tried sedating him after injecting his arm with yet another poisonous venom meant to kill him, burning his entire inside and then getting upset that Brasen was fighting and making a fuss. Luckily, whatever poison was already in his bloodstream did not succumb to the new poison, but it felt that more and more Weber was getting paranoid and extreme in his testing. Those past 3 weeks were hell, and Nurse Ackman named the Examination room properly as Chamber, short for Torture Chamber.

Yet because of that test, Lacey had heard him screaming. When he thought all hope was lost, she had heard him. He couldn't put too much faith in an Ainsbrough...whose father was the one funding this experiment and giving Weber the ammunition he needed to keep Brasen exactly where he wanted. He needed to find out more about her, to figure out the best way to manipulate her. As his father told him, he needed to find his victim's weakness and then pry into that. Everyone had a weakness, and he needed to expose that in Lacey. His father's life depended on him acquiescing to Weber's demands. But Brasen knew eventually one of the poisons would kill him. He was still human and if he died, so did hopes of freeing his father, and tracking down the man who had injected Brasen with the poison to begin with.

"I apologize for my behavior last week," Brasen said and Nurse Ackman lowered her glasses thinking she was hearing things. "I will let you gag me without biting you if you tell me some things I want to know before Weber shows up."

Nurse Ackman nodded to the guards to leave them after they had secured and strapped Brasen tightly into the bed. "Knock twice when you see Weber coming," she ushered to Johnson, slipping him a $20, as they closed the double doors behind them. She stroked Brasen's cheek, her breath stinking of cheese and said, "Go on, handsome."

She had to be at least fifty, but he knew she was attracted to him. She had made that clear when they had been alone together before. She put her hands over his bare chest and he had to fight himself from struggling against the straps, to pretend he liked her touching him though he hated anyone touching him, feeling so violated.