“Take them back,” a voice says.
I focus on putting one foot after the other. I’m back in the long hallway again, trying not to slip. My wet hair sticks to my face, and my mouth hangs open. I try to close it, but I can’t. My body isn’t under my control anymore.
“Twenty-Five,” someone says. My eyes flit to the other boy with a black eye by my side. I wonder what happened to him. “Are you okay?”
I say nothing and keep walking until I’m pushed into a room.
“I’ll bring food soon,” a woman barks before slamming the door behind her.
We’re alone again. The boy puts his hands on my shoulders and stares into my eyes, like he’s searching for something.
“What’s your name?” he asks.
“Twenty-Five,” I mumble.
“No,” he says, shaking his head in disappointment. “What’s yourrealname?”
My voice trails off. “I…”
“I’m Aiden,” he says.
“I’m…” I will myself to remember through the aftershocks. “Eli.”
As soon as I say it, I’m brought back to reality, even though it feels like a terrible nightmare.
“I’ll look after you, Eli,” Aiden says with a big smile. “Together, we’ll get out of here. You’ll see.”
TWO YEARS EARLIER…
LEX
Aiden gruntswhile face fucking the girl on her knees before him. He holds her head and thrusts hard into her throat. She gags before he blows his load. When he pulls out, she gasps for air, his cum dripping down her chin like milk.
Aiden’s lip curls in disapproval before saying, “I had to put all the fucking work in there.” He shakes his head at her. “Your turn, Lex.”
My cock is already out and waiting as she crawls to me. All of the female patients willingly bow down for us. We rule Sunnycrest. Aiden, Eli, and me. Zero, Twenty-Five, and Forty. The three of us are the only patients to survive every experiment thrown at us, which has made us infamous.
We’re not taking advantage of the girls. They practically line up to suck us off daily. We don’t go for the ones who are completely batshit or high on whatever drugs Acacia feeds them, though. We still have some standards.
The girl, whose name I can’t remember, creates a seal around my cock with her lips. Aside from the remnants of Aiden’s cum, her tongue is as dry as sandpaper. Still, I groan while she gets to work. It’s not a great blowjob, but it beats using my hand. Nextto me, Eli lounges across the bottom bunk, legs outstretched and humming to himself.
“What’s the plan for tonight?” I ask Aiden.
Aiden returns to his top bunk to stroke the giant rat that he keeps as a pet. The rodent gives me the creeps, but I’ll never tell him that. When they die, he keeps the skulls, wearing them around his neck on a chain. In the real world, that’d seem crazy, but here? It’s normal.
I owe Aiden and Eli my life for taking me under their wing. I’ve been in Sunnycrest for three years. They taught me how things work and how to survive. I was sane before I got here, but now… I’ve never been fucking crazier, despite what Acacia says.
I didn’t talk when I first arrived. I had ‘selective mutism due to trauma’, according to my clinical notes. Watching your parents burn alive in a fire is enough to screw anyone up. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t speak. I even stayed silent through hours of Acacia’s experiments. That’s why he liked me so much. I was his challenge. Countless other subjects endured less and didn’t survive. It took him almost a year to coax a scream from me, and when it happened, my scream was the sweetest sound I’ve ever heard.
As we aged, Acacia moved us to a different wing in Sunnycrest. Usually, he likes to keep the experimental subjects separate. There’s no point mixing them among the general population. The general population, or gen pop as we call them, are other patients who are here for therapy because of a criminal order—not kids like me, Eli, and Aiden, who were handpicked to take part in Acacia’s torturous games. However, over the years, we developed a mutual understanding with the doctor holding us prisoners. They experiment on us, and we experiment in our own way with the other patients. Perhaps that’s one of his experiments in itself.
“Acacia’s yearly freak show will be the same as it always is,” Aiden mutters darkly.
I exhale deeply as I come. A brief relief. The girl backs away, breathless, looking up at me for some kind of compliment. Her desperation is sickening, and I kick her in the stomach. She yelps, making me harden again. I’d rather she scream over my cock than suck it.
Not put off yet, the cum bucket turns to Eli. “Do you want me to do you next?”
He shakes his head. He doesn’t fuck them every day. Only when he feels like it, and today, his head is elsewhere. Tonight is on his mind, too.
