“Don’t smile at me, Princess. Twenty minutes ago, you were describing the best way to skin a child, not to put it bluntly. You went into graphic detail. A more cynical man might say you were enjoying it.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“I know. You wake up and tell me you don’t remember. We’re getting your mental health assessed. Them’s the rules and all that. But after what you did, I’d gladly let hungry dogs feast on you.”

“You can’t speak to me like that!”

Casey rushed at the door. The officer slammed the slot shut.

She pounded her fist against it, but nobody came. All she was doing was hurting her hand against the cold metal. Which meant she wasn’t insane, like he was trying to say; if she was, she’d keep hitting until the door broke or her hand did. He probably had a bet with some of his dickhead guard mates. Can we make her paranoid about her mental health?

It wouldn’t work. She sat on the bed, feeling like her skin was itching, like there were little bugs crawling over her body. She’d felt like this once before, when she was a teenager, the night she went into her parents’ bedroom and hacked them to pieces with the claw end of a hammer.

But no; that was another of her fantasies, her flights into the impossible. It was how she’d survived.

Her father had done it. All of it was true. Nobody could tell her otherwise. Nobody could take her pain away from her. She’d earned it, through years of living in terror; she’d taken the blows and she deserved the bruises. She had her truth. She knew what had happened, who she’d been forced to become.

Which was why they were so annoying, the tears, as they flowed down her cheeks. Fantasies had sustained her, but she couldn’t stop this feeling, this buzzing all over her skin.

She rushed at the door and hammered it with her fist. But again nobody came. They weren’t taking this seriously. She was going to be sick. She was going to die.

That was the one true thing in her life: the night she murdered her parents with the claw end of a hammer, the nights her father invaded her bedroom, and Casey would dream. She needed to stop thinking about that stupid teenage fantasy. It was like it was trying to infect her mind: like the bugs were crawling into her brain.

That was it. Her mind was tricking her, trying to make her believe she’d slaughtered her parents and then served eight years in prison. It was trying to make her think she’d killed them because she was curious to see how it would feel, or if she would feel. But those were the delusions she’d entertained as a girl.

Her father had abused her. That was that. It didn’t even make sense; she was too young to have served eight years in prison and then been married to Markus for five more. Except if she’d lied about her age. She’d remember that, wouldn’t she? She’d know if she’d lied.