Page 55 of Pretty Pink Poison
CHAPTER 18
BIANCA
“I sawyour birthday was a week ago, so I brought you this cupcake.” The lady with the clipboard was smiling wide, standing with her shoulders back in her pretty blue dress. They all wore dresses or regular outfits rather than scrubs.
I knew one or two of them were psychiatrists. They asked how I felt every single time they walked in the room.
Everyone was overly happy, overly caring, overly accommodating. Did everyone really think walking on eggshells was helpful? That I needed brightness and joy at every damn turn?
It was straight out of a horror movie, I swear.
I took the cupcake from her and set it on the metal table in the library room. Or at least that’s what they called it. Libraries had all sorts of books, but this one only had rom-coms. No dark romances. No demons in hell coming to screw the heroines in the fantasies. They wanted to give me rainbows and butterflies when I wanted demons and hell.
“Did you have any wishes for your birthday?” she asked, so full of life I wondered if she was really drained on the inside.
I decided to ignore her until she left. I didn’t have time for the pretend niceties.
I wanted out of this hellhole.
Everything was sterile with white bookshelves and metal tables but there were no other patients around. I’d sat in this facility for a whole week now and hadn’t seen anyone else dressed like me or being catered to like me. Instead, nurses milled about, checking my vitals, cooking meals, making sure I had everything I asked for.
Everything except leaving.
I didn’t consider this care or comfort. It was just another form of torture. The walls were supposed to look normal in my room but they were definitely padded, I was all alone, and there was no sound but my own thoughts all day long.
I didn’t thank her for the birthday treat but instead pushed it away with a dead stare.
“Oh, it’s not so bad here, right?”
Wrong. This place was creepy and everyone knew it. The way their smiles never dropped, their faces never changed, their perfect makeup and hair all done exactly the same—even if I wanted a tutorial on how to do it that way, it made me wonder if they were going to kill me in my sleep.
“If it is, how can we make it better?”
“Ha,” I grumbled more to myself than her. If this was Bane’s way of keeping me sane after my trying to escape the hellhole that was my life, he’d gotten it completely backwards. I was going to spiral even worse here.
I needed something real. Give me the punishment I deserved. I’d caused the mess of a lifetime, and Bane hadn’t even come to rip my head off.
And, let’s be honest, the primary reason I’d lost it on my birthday was because I’d been alone and he hadn’t come.
No one had come. I walked around the resort holding my phone like I might get a birthday call. I didn’t.
I at least fed the Koi and they crowded the pond right next to me, their bright colors moving under the water to get an extra orange or two.
Ugh. I was going to have to apologize for trying to leave them behind. Maybe there was a really good treat I could order them.
Neglecting them was the last thing I wanted to do.
Neglect had gotten me here. That terrible feeling could eat away at a heart worse than any other emotion. Love and heartbreak could break you too. It was a hard moment to realize I meant nothing. Loneliness infected my bones and bled darkness into every part of my light.
So I’d made a choice to succumb to it. But Bane was faster than the life bleeding out of me. He somehow got to me in time, and I woke with bandages on my wrists, my phone gone, and in new attire.
Looking back, it was clear I was depressed and suicidal. I didn’t get therapy or help for the abuse my father inflicted on me, nor did I ever talk about the night I was taken advantage of or about how I lost the baby from that night. I didn’t accept my life within the resort. And I didn’t talk to anyone or even write in the diary I’d had before for fear Bane would somehow find it.
Instead, I read books as an escape and then talked to Oracle. And I treated it like it was my confidant and psychiatrist all in one. That AI-generated app provided me with positive feedback for everything I wanted, and when I slit my wrists, I knew, according to AI, I’d done it right.
Now I’d lost that too. I didn’t have a phone or communication with the outside world. It was worse than the resort. Here I got locked into a pastel-bombed room and told I could read some books or record a journal entry into a machine.
I found they wouldn’t give me pens or anything sharp. I was denied access to the tub, and there was nothing jagged in my room to impale myself on.
