My Rescue Was Their Reunion, My Hell Was Their Project Chapter 01

My Rescue Was Their Reunion, My Hell Was Their Project Chapter 01

It was supposed to be spring break. Instead, I was dragged to Ravens Hollow, turned into a test subject for three years, and discharged with severe depression stamped on my file.

Then my fiancé told me why.

“I had you taken to Ravens Hollow,” Julian Vance said. No buildup. No hesitation. “The experiments — all of it was me.”

Arthur Sterling, the hospital director, stepped forward next. “The people who ran those drug trials on you? They were mine. I put every one of them there.”

Then Nolan Pierce — the boy whose tuition I’d paid for since grade school, now a tech millionaire. He said it like he was talking about the weather. “The machines they used on you — I supplied them.”

My knees buckled. I hit the floor, and deep in my skull, something woke — the system, silent for years, flickering back online.

“Get me out. I want to leave this world.”

***

A voice answered — flat, mechanical, like a signal breaking through years of dead air.

[Acknowledged, Host. Detachment countdown: 48 hours. The transfer channel will open when the physical body reaches termination.]

Okay.

Every night in Ravens Hollow, a different doctor pinned me to the exam table and didn’t stop until my vision went white.

Once depression was written into my chart, they moved on to the rest of my body — draining blood, pumping in experimental drugs, cutting me open and going organ by organ.

Three years of that left me riddled with needle marks, my skin ulcerated and my organs failing. Somewhere along the way, cancer took root.

I stayed alive because I wanted to see them again. I didn’t know they were the reason I was there.

It took everything in me to get the words out.

“Why…” My voice cracked. “Why would you do this to me?”

Julian looked down at me. There wasn’t a trace of guilt in his voice.

“Chloe came to me before the wedding. She wanted me. You slapped her for it, and she fell apart and sank into depression.” He said it like he was explaining a return policy. “Someone had to be the guinea pig for her treatment.”

“She’s almost better now. All she wants is the wedding — just the ceremony.”

“If you let her have this and stop targeting her, I’ll still marry you. We’ll make it up to you.”

I swallowed the blood pooling on my tongue.

“Don’t bother. There’s nothing left of us.”

Julian’s expression cracked. He reached out and brushed the tears from my cheek, his touch still gentle — the same hands, the same impossible softness, as if nothing had changed.

“You don’t mean that.”

“The wedding isn’t real. It’s just part of her treatment. Our engagement still stands. Once she’s better, I’ll marry you.”

Seven years. I’d waited seven years to marry him.

The night before the ceremony, three years ago, I walked in and found him in our bed with Chloe Sterling underneath him.

Everything went white. A high ringing filled my ears and wouldn’t stop.

I didn’t remember deciding to hit her. Only the crack of my palm across Chloe’s face.

I lost it. I was screaming, ugly and out of control. “You shameless bitch — you couldn’t stay away from my fiancé? Like mother, like daughter.”

She clutched her swelling cheek, tears already spilling down her face. Then she ripped herself out of Julian’s arms and ran.

That night, Chloe threw herself into the river.

They pulled her out alive. The subsequent psychiatric hold confirmed it; the diagnosis came back as severe depression.

I expected them to blame me. To lock me away and make me pay for it.

Instead, Arthur and Nolan held me. Julian knelt in front of me and slammed his fists into the floorboards. “This is on me,” he said, his knuckles bleeding. “I don’t know what the hell came over me.”

He offered to take me on a trip, a real vacation, to make it up to me.

I believed every word. I never saw the trap closing.

A violent cough racked my chest, and blood surged up my throat without warning, hot and sudden. It sprayed across all three of them.

For the first time, they actually looked scared.

“Elena! Oh God — Elena! What happened to you?”

I wiped the blood from my mouth. My voice came out flat. Empty.

“What happened?” I threw their question back at them. “Three years of drug trials for Chloe — that was what happened.”

“I have cancer. Three months left.”