Bratva Boss’s Secret Triplets by Bella King
Chapter 20
Dean
Pulling up to the clinic has my stomach feeling like it’s nothing but a ball of tangled cords. I’ve already fucked up with Dr. Ryan one time when I first tried the drug; I went fucking berserk and smashed a box of expensive fertility serums. I probably cost in the upper ten thousands to replace.
Fortunately, Dr. Ryan is fucking loaded. The box was replaced by the next day.
Not to say he wouldn’t kill me over a bag of chips, though. He’s unpredictable, so I don’t want to piss him off too bad.
The lab in the basement is at the end of a series of dark hallways in an unfinished part of the clinic that never got completed. There are plastic sheets hanging between different sections of the rooms throughout, and the only lights throughout the basement are from red EXIT signs and scattered windows. It gives me the fucking creeps.
I pass a group of young nurses, none of which have ever seen me before and immediately tense up when I pass them. I attempt to appear friendly and nonthreatening, but I’m pretty sure I just freak them out more.
My inability to close my eyes to a normal level probably doesn’t help either. All of the muscles in my face are so tense, I grind my teeth without even knowing. I’m sweating like mad, as well, which I’m sure shows in the clinical lights swinging overhead.
When I reach the lab, I storm through the door, attempting to project more confidence than I’m capable of.
Dr. Ryan jumps, dropping a beaker with a clear liquid in it to the floor. It shatters unceremoniously, the fluid pooling in the grooves of the tile. “Goddamn it!” he shouts, both at me and from frustration. “What do you want?! Where is the girl?” he bellows as he kicks a larger piece of glass across the floor.
My eyes widen in panic, unable to conceal the truth of my failure. Without even needing to say a word, Dr. Ryan already knows that I lost her.
“You don’t have her, do you?” he continues, folding his arms and leaning against a nearby sink. His expression has changed from vocally enraged to seething.
I’m not sure which scares me more.
“God, you really lost her? After you’ve spent how many years tracking her every move? Jesus, Dean,” he says as he reaches around behind himself for something that I can’t see.
“I’m sorry, she had backup,” I say, hoping that he won’t ask for a more detailed explanation. “Like, a guy with a gun,” I add, starting to feel jumpy from the drugs again. I’m sure my jittery demeanor isn’t helping my case.
“Hm. Backup,” he replies in a dry, flat tone.
Before I know it, he’s charging at me with an uncapped syringe.
The more desirable effects of the drug are wearing off, and my coordination is suffering for it. I’m hardly able to move before the syringe finds my bicep. Dr. Ryan pushes down the plunger and releases some totally new concoction into my bloodstream. Almost immediately, I’m so dizzy that I could fall over, ready to puke my guts up.
“How’s that for a consolation prize?” he says as my vision blurs. “It’s a new strain of the drug I’ve been working on. It’s almost exactly what the CIA used to use to train super-soldiers back in the 70’s before the goddamn liberals shut down their progress,” he continues, almost forgetting exactly how angry I had made him not five minutes prior.
My head spins and a terrible wave of nausea climbs up my spine and rests in my liver. My whole body has broken out into a cold sweat, and I almost feel like I’m vibrating from the inside. “What the fuck!? What did you do to me?” I plead as I start to slump to the floor, fighting the urge to lose control of my legs and smash my head into the counter as I fall.
Dr. Ryan scoffs at me. “I literally just told you what I did to you. You’re on track to becoming the first of an elite breed, Dean. Don’t complain. Change is never easy,” he replies casually, capping the syringe and tossing it into a plastic orange container.
“Now let’s try this again, where the fuck is April?” he growls through his teeth. His ability to switch from relaxed and unbothered to enraged is freaking me out, a lot. “I gave you one job, Dean. That job was to find and kidnap a skinny woman who has some form of vague trust in you. This could not have been an easier assignment.”
My throat feels tight and dry as my pulse races. Coming up with a lie will be too hard to maintain; I know he’ll ask more and more questions until I run out of lies. Then he’ll kill me. Telling him the truth about how someone else got to her first might land me dead too.
“She was taken by someone else, or she went with him. I don’t know,” I reply, trying as hard as I can to maintain some form of innocence in the failure of the mission. “I had her, I did. I tied her up and everything. Then some guy, her boyfriend I think, barged in and fucked me up,” I continue.
Dr. Ryan closes his eyes and inhales deeply. If he pulled out a gun and shot me between the eyes right now, I can’t say I’d be surprised or even blame him. “So you know she’s with someone else, then. Go fucking find them. Stop wasting my time here,” he replies, pulling a flask from his coat pocket and casually flicking the cap off. He takes a few pulls from it, which sets me on edge more than his other Jekyll and Hyde antics.
“Well… the thing is, I think she might be, um, she might be pregnant,” I say. I hadn’t given him this information yet, and I’m hoping that my investigative skills will help soften the blow of an otherwise brutal failure.
“Oh my fucking god, Dean. I’m April’s doctor, I knew she was pregnant before anyone else,” he says, rubbing his temples as a headache forms. He takes another pull off the flask. “Just go fucking find her. God, I guess I don’t know what I was expecting hiring on a bunch of drug-addled twenty-somethings to do a man’s job,” he mutters as he goes back to the work I had interrupted upon my arrival.
I shoot him a disingenuous grin. He’s getting on my fucking nerves himself, choosing to dictate how I work when he won’t even do the mission himself. He’d be perfect for middle-management in a call center.
Fuck him. I can find April, but when I do, I’m not bringing her back here. Once I have her, she’s mine.
I keep experiencing jolts of pain down my spine, which I assume is from the mystery chemicals that the fucking asshole doctor shot me up with. I’ve never really been into drugs before all this went down, but the idea of being without something in my system awakens a quiet panic that hums in the background of my mind.
No matter how sick I get, no matter how close I am to losing my sanity, I can’t imagine being totally sober ever again. Reality has twisted around me like a nightmare, and drugs are the only thing holding my paper-thin sanity together.
