One Deception

Chapter Sixteen

“Held on for quite awhile.”

“Shame, isn’t it? Such a beautiful face wasted on a rotten mind.”

They figured that I couldn’t hear them, I knew, but I hadn’t completely checked out yet. Though I mostly lay in bed motionless, nothing but my lips moving as I murmured replies to a person that they all claimed that can’t see, I was listening. I was always listening.

I supposed that this was an instinct hammered into me from the days of constant vigilance in the basement. 

Typically thoughts of the place made me shudder- and I’d been thinking of it quite a bit in the last few minutes- but I was bound so tightly that I could barely wiggle a toe. The staff had retrained me a whole ago when I woke up from a nap screaming, thrashing around in the bed. They had all asked what I dreamt about but I’d been crying too hard to speak. 

In my dream I had been back in the days before, practicing with my team- only, my team wasn’t the same. All but one were a bunch of bodies with blurred faces. The one without a blurred face was the goalkeeper, who wore Miranda’s face. I remember that if I didn’t score against her that...well, I wasn’t sure exactly what, but something bad would happen.

“Hey, Rosalie, some people were here to see you.” A young nurse popped into the room, her cheeks flushed. “You won’t believe it. You’re going to be so excited.”

Without thinking, I rasped out, “Miranda?”

I knew that it was ridiculous the moment I said it but it was too late to take it back. The young nurse, Pauline, frowned at me. Everyone knew of my obsession with the girl. I assumed that they had been instructed to disprove of it because every time I mentioned her I was frowned at, or shh’d silent. In the counseling sessions, though, I was invited to freely speak about her. It was then that I kept quiet.

“Who’s here?” I asked when she didn’t reply.

“You’ll see,” she sang.

She undid my restraints and then brought a comb from her pocket and began to run it through my perpetually dirty hair. She tied it up, saying something about how pretty it was, but my mind was focused on other things. Who was here that she thought it special enough to fix me up? Usually they just let the visitors in. 

My heart began beating double time, “the police. Is it the police?”

She shook her head as she wiped my face with a wet napkin. “Better than that.”

What could possibly be better than that? I could hardly imagine. I allowed her to continue

cleaning me up until she was done, and then she put everything back in her deep pockets and took a step back to study me. Apparently satisfied with what she saw, she grinned and clapped her hands together.

“You’re ready,” she announced. 

“For what?” I asked again.

“You’ll see in a minute- now, behave yourself, okay? Everyone think’s that this going to be a good thing for you.”

“Oh,” I said lamely.

With a final, shiny smile tossed in my direction, she hurried out of the room. I sat up straighter and instinctively brought my knees up, protectively hugging them to my chest as I wondered who would be walking through the door. If it would be a good thing for me than it must be someone that believed me, too. That thought excited me.

But when I saw who really walked through the door my blood ran cold. My mind blanked and I scrambled back against the wall, suddenly unable to find my breath.