One week later
Help!
Someone help!
Please help me!
“No one will help you, monster.”
I crack my eyes open and wince. The back of my head feels as heavy as metal.
Constant beeping. Smell of bleach and coffee. Classical music.
The moment blinding white light penetrates my eyelids, I screw them shut again.
I’m obviously at the wrong place in the wrong time.
Isn’t there a song about that?
“Reina?”
Someone’s fingers force my lids open and shove another blinding light into my line of sight. My pupils burn with the intrusiveness of it.
“Miss Ellis, can you hear me?”
“Reina, honey, open your eyes.”
Reina? Who the hell is Reina?
There’s something wrong about that name. Completely freaking wrong.
Wrong place. Wrong time. Wrong name.
The voices continue drifting in and out around me. Someone calls me Miss Ellis. An older voice keeps calling me Reina. And then there’s another presence, someone I can’t quite pinpoint.
His masculine voice is like a dark forest in the middle of a starless night. It’s deep and rough around the edges as if all the ruthlessness in the world has been injected into it. It’s scary how much a voice can relay.
It’s almost crippling how much a voice can become a subject of nightmares.
All the other voices keep asking if I’m fine and telling me to open my eyes, but not him.
No.
The nightmare voice is calm, unlike them. He’s composed and speaks with chill-inducing purpose. “Wake up, monster. You don’t get to die just yet.”
His words register slowly. It’s my brain. The useless thing understands with delay.
My heart thumps loud and hard at the threat in those words, at what he called me.
Monster.
This can’t be true.
It’s a dream—no, a nightmare. Soon, it’ll all end and I’ll go back to normal.
Only…what’s normal?
I’m not Reina or Miss Ellis or whatever the hell they keep calling me. I’m someone else.