My Hockey Alpha

Nina

I don’t know how long I was asleep. All I remembered was an immense amount of pain, Edward’s face looming over me, and then… darkness.

When I woke up, I was back in that same room that I was in before. My wrists and ankles were bound to the table, and the lights were blindingly bright. My brain felt as though it was in a heavy fog, like I had hit my head against a wall countless times. I wanted to sleep again, but the lights were too bright — as though he was trying to keep me awake.

Even though the lights were so bright it hurt through my closed eyelids, I still occasionally fell unconscious from time to time. I would fall into a half-asleep state, during which I would feel as though my body was floating through space, and then I would come back to consciousness again with a pounding headache from a combination of the electroshock therapy, the drugs that Edward gave me, and the bright fluorescent lights.

I started to cry, but as time went on, no more tears eventually came. I couldn’t even lift my hand to wipe them out of my eyes; I could only lay there and feel them slowly dry on my cheeks and in my ears, where they had pooled up from my laying down position. Was Edward going to keep me like this forever, all over a simple file taken from his basement?

Just as I was beginning to think that I was going to die in here, alone and afraid, I heard the mechanical door slide open. I weakly lifted my head to see Edward standing in the doorway.

“Good morning, Nina,” he said. His voice was as sweet as honey, as though I was just another patient sitting in his office of my own volition and not a prisoner being kept in some strange medical facility with no windows. “Did you sleep well?”

“Sleep?” I croaked. My throat felt dry and hoarse from the time I had spent screaming when he shocked my brain. “How can I sleep like this?”

Edward clicked his tongue disappointedly as he approached my bed. He stood at the end of the bed, so that I had to continue to hold my head up to see him.

“You’ll find it’s not so difficult to sleep here soon,” he said. “You’re safe here. You can trust me.”

“Where am I, then?” I replied. “Where is Enzo?”

we go again with the imaginary friends. Enzo this, Enzo that… You’ve been talking about this person

brow and laid my head back down on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. Enzo was real… He had to be. “You’re just trying to mess

replied. “You’ve been here for

Justin, then?” I asked. “He disappeared for weeks, and when he came back, he was like a completely

“Justin? As in your old

“Bunkmate?”

to the treatment, so he went home to his family. You must have been having another one of your hallucinations when you thought you saw him outside of here… He’s perfectly fine, and is likely having breakfast with his family

bed then and pulled up a rolling stool. He sat on it and took my hand in his. I tried to pull away, but I couldn’t with the wrist restraints. With a sigh, he took my chin in his hand and turned my

the talking skeletons… These are all fantasies of yours. Things you’ve made up in your mind to protect yourself from the horrors of your past trauma. None of it is real, and

he described felt so fuzzy and far away, like a bad dream… Maybe he was right; maybe these were all just fantasies

have I been here?” I asked. My voice shook

squeezed my hand comfortingly and reached up to brush a hair out of my eyes.

“So does that mean…”

nod. “Everything — everyone — that you think you’ve come to know in this fantasyland you’ve created in your

more tears came to my eyes

realize that his voice was so comforting because he had comforted me just like this so many times

me,” he continued. “My

is Nina

for at Mountainview

being cared for at