Silas Nash Book 1: Hush Hush Honeysuckle: Chapter 35

At the Dale View secure mental health facility, Carter Finch had been in isolation for three months. And now he wasn’t. He’d behaved so much like a model citizen that they let him out with the other kids. This was his first day on the integrated wing. He wasn’t a threat to anybody, and all the terrible things he’d done were committed under coercion.

Nash said, ‘No.’ He wanted the little bastard kept in manacles and chained to a wall in a dungeon fifty feet underground. Carter Finch was the most dangerous human being he’d ever encountered. At least his accomplices had a reason for killing—he just enjoyed it.

Adam Vance was deemed criminally insane by three doctors. He wasn’t put in a youth offenders programme but in the psychiatric ward, on a colourful unit, for assessment. He underwent a barrage of tests and counselling sessions prior to the case of The Florists going to trial. The media went into a frenzy when the story had been released in full, so, for his own protection, Adam Vance was given the alias while he was in the facility.

Again, Nash said no.

Adam Vance liked his new name. He thought it sounded like a superhero alias. He’d told his psychologist—who was lovely—that he’d stopped having bad thoughts about killing his sister. He missed his parents, but they said his mum and dad weren’t allowed to visit. That made him sad, and in counselling, when he had to draw his mood onto the blank face, he’d scribbled a sad expression. He wanted to add blood dripping from the eyes, but he didn’t.

He said the room where they carried out his counselling was scary, and could he have it in his bedroom? They agreed and were lucky he didn’t have a weapon at that point. The inmates weren’t animals, he’d been told, so they weren’t locked up in cages. In Nash’s opinion, the staff were all spare-the-rod snowflakes. When they looked at Vance, they saw a sick child. Nash wanted to show them the photographs. He saw a monster. Since he’d been released from isolation, Vance had a proper bedroom with a single bed, a desk, and a camera on the ceiling.

And a roommate.

He rocked. He rocked all day and often at night, too. He enjoyed reading, and although he wanted to read Stephen King, he didn’t. He chose the Percy Jackson books, and while he was reading, he put his chair back onto two legs, and he rocked some more. But otherwise, he was okay, and they told him, ‘Very good, Adam. You’re doing very well, aren’t you, sweetheart?’ When the psychologist said, ‘A chair has four legs,’ he burst into tears, so she didn’t try to stop him again. It was a comfort thing, they said and should be ignored for now. After all, he was doing so well.

They put him in with a much bigger boy. Jackson was his role model, and they could see that Adam looked up to him.

It was all going very well.

‘What are you in for?’ Jackson asked.

‘I like killing people too much.’

Jackson laughed and called him a little freak, and Adam went back to his book about Percy and the Olympians.

One day, Adam did something different. It was risky, he knew that, but he had little choice. It was after lights out, and Jackson was already asleep. He dragged the blanket off his bed and pulled it over his head on the floor next to his chair. A guard saw his strange behaviour on camera and flung the door open.

‘What’s going on, Vance?’

Adam stuck his head out from under the blanket and pretended to be embarrassed. ‘Private stuff,’ he said, and the guard went red.

‘Bloody hell.’ He closed the door.

Jackson woke up and laughed, 'You dirty little pervert. You’ll go blind doing that.’ But this laugh made no difference. The last time Jackson laughed at Adam when he said he was a killer was enough. Adam didn’t like being laughed at.

Under the covers, he wasn’t doing what the guard and Jackson thought. He had reached his objective, and with all the rocking, he’d managed to get the leg off the chair. It was a wooden seat, and he’d spent days on two legs to weaken the joint. What he could have done in five minutes at home with a saw took five days here. He slipped into bed with the leg.

And waited.

For half an hour.

For light thirteen-year-old snoring.

He knew he didn’t have long, so he had to make it good.

Adam Vance roared like a bear and shot out of his bed. He crossed the room to the other boy and figured he had less than a minute if they were on their game and longer if they were playing cards. He knew they sometimes turned the sound off on the monitors.

The first three hits to Jackson’s face were hard. Bang.

And fast. Bang.

And bloody. Bang.

The kid was big, and he was probably as hard as nails. Adam didn’t give him time to react. There was blood. A lot of blood. More than any of the others, and that’s what turned him on.

‘Private stuff.’

He kept hitting Jackson’s face, using the chair leg with the screws sticking out of it until he heard them at the end of the corridor. They were running. They didn’t usually run. He kept hitting his roommate until they used the card reader to open his door. His arms were aching. He’d lost count at fifty-one. But. He. Kept. Hitting. Jackson.

Until they pulled him off the dead body. Nash wasn’t surprised. He’d seen the others. Vance was always going to escalate.

Nash would use his dying breath to fight any appeals and see that the kid was never released. God help the world if the day came when Adam Vance breathed the sweet air of freedom.

It was a dirty word.

And that's the end of my book. I hope you enjoyed it.  If you would like to read this, or the other books in the Silas Nash series by Katherine Black, you can find them here. They are all standalone and are available on KU.  My other unrelated books are listed, too. 

Thank you :) 

All of Katherine Black's Books: https://katherineblackbooks.com/

Hush Hush Honeysuckle. https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0BP2QXCL7/ 

Night Night Necropolis. https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0BW9VYVC4/

Lie Lie Lullaby. https://books2read.com/u/mqNagZ
 And coming September 26th: 

Cold-Blooded Carnival  Silas Nash book 4.