Page 65 of Sin Like the Devil

“You alright?”

“I heard my room’s next,” he says in a panic. “I’ve got shit they can’t find.”

“Fuck, Raine!”

“I know. Help me, man.”

Shaking my head, I snag his long shirt sleeve and frogmarch him towards his room. Raine hands me his keycard so I can unlock the door quickly. We step inside, hoping no one has spotted us.

“Where is it?” I sigh tiredly.

“Bottom drawer in the nightstand has a false bottom.” He anxiously chews his lip. “And there’s a loose floorboard behind the desk.”

“Go stand near the door. If you hear them coming, shout.”

Quickly nodding, he taps a path back towards the door then presses his ear against it. I set to work investigating the nightstand and quickly find a notch in the smooth, dark wood that I prise open.

He’s been better since the night we begrudgingly enlisted Ripley’s help. Regardless of my feelings about that soulless bitch, I know we couldn’t let him stay like that. It was far too risky to let him detox there and then.

But the idea of her supplying him on the regular is making me want to demolish this whole damn room to ensure he has none of her pills to snort. I don’t know how he convinced her to sell to him, but there’s nowhere else he’s getting this stuff from.

“Got it?” Raine asks.

I scoop up two baggies of pills in a variety of colours. “What is this shit, Raine?”

“Just get the rest. They’re coming.”

Slotting the false bottom back into place, I duck beneath the nearby desk next. It takes several seconds to locate the loose floorboard underneath. I have to dig my nails into the edges to wriggle it free.

More pills.

These ones are that weird, off-white shade and clearly the same as the ones in the baggie Ripley previously supplied. I gather his stash in a pile then shove it into the waistband of my sweatpants, tightening the drawstring to hold it all in place.

“We good?” Raine’s voice is strained.

I slot the floorboard back. “All clear.”

His shoulders sag with relief just as the lock on the door buzzes. It’s flung open, narrowly missing him. The two assholes who were tearing apart my room order us outside before they begin obliterating Raine’s neatly organised space.

“Fucking hell.” He winces at the sounds of destruction. “There goes my system.”

“We’ll put it all back,” I try to reassure him.

“The bastards aren’t even pretending to be gentle.” The sound of crashing punctuates his words. “Do they really think this tactic works?”

As I peer up and down the corridor full of terrified patients, seeing what Raine cannot, I hate to admit that it does work. Everyone knows where to get their illegal shit from in here, but few know the sinister secret behind the program’s existence.

Most assume that Ripley has some pretty impressive connections to get her hands on anything that’s requested. If the entire institute knew the clinicians are feeding this toxic machine of mental illness in the name of experimentation, they’d kill themselves or try to escape.

Few are doomed to know the truth.

Including us.

Those who remain clueless are petrified of raids like this. They scuttle around, obeying the rules and hoping their sentence will pass without incident. Forever ignorant to the fact that management wants the exact opposite.

Clasping Raine’s elbow, I slowly guide him down the staircase and out into the windswept quad. Winter is rolling on, dousing the Victorian institute in frost and ice.

I have a maths class to get to before some anger management crap later on with my assigned therapist, but the surprise search threw everyone off. Even Harrowdean’s precise routine seems to be breaking down.

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