Chapter 261: Hypnosis
Chapter 261: Hypnosis
Elias had always treated Pain Conversion as close to invincible.
A broken bone, a cut, a dislocated joint, the clean agony of a blade, the ugly burn of a bruise, none of it could reach him the way it reached other people. Pain came in, got turned inside out, and returned as something else. In theory, he could probably stand in the center of a radiation zone smiling all the way to the afterlife.
Unfortunately, the skill had finally met something it could not convert.
Sedatives.
It was an irritating limitation. Pain Conversion could reinterpret injury, but it could not stop chemistry from doing what chemistry did. There was no sharp sensation for the system to seize and reshape. The sedative slid through his bloodstream without resistance, turned his muscles heavy, dulled the connection between thought and movement, and put him under.
No amount of determination helped. He could not even cling to consciousness long enough to curse the woman who had taken him.
The drug did not hurt. It simply took his body apart from the inside, peeled away his ability to focus, and dropped him into darkness before he could even form a useful thought.
When he woke, he was lying against something hard and freezing beneath his back.
His wrists were secured. His ankles too.
The chair supported his spine at an angle that immediately made every alarm in his mind start ringing.
Elias stared upward through the haze.
"A conditioning chair," he thought.
[System Theta: There is no such thing.]
"There is now."
[System Theta: Host, that is a medical restraint chair.]
"Every woman who has ever tied me to one of these has had bad intentions."
[System Theta: That is not a classification system.]
"It is in my experience."
He had been through enough worlds to know the pattern. Any time a powerful woman placed him in a secured chair, whatever came next was never paperwork. Sometimes it was interrogation. Sometimes it was a threat. Sometimes it was an even more humiliating kind of attention.
Back when he did not have Pain Conversion, some of those memories had been difficult to revisit.
Elias clicked his tongue inside his head.
He had been hoping the Maldives would be peaceful.
The lights above him switched on.
Soft white light flooded the room. It was supposed to be gentle, but the brightness was brutal after unconsciousness. His eyes reflexively narrowed. For a few seconds, his vision dissolved into white glare, and the body in the chair seemed to drift farther away from him.
Not him exactly.
The body had woken.
Elias, however, remained somewhere behind it.
He could still think. He could still speak to System Theta. But his limbs no longer belonged to him, and his eyes would not focus when he ordered them to. It felt like being trapped in a locked room behind his own face, forced to watch someone else use the windows.
He tested the limits immediately. He tried to move one finger. Nothing. He tried to tilt his head. Nothing. He tried to force a blink, then a breath deeper than the shallow rhythm his body had settled into. The commands went nowhere.
[System Theta: The drug has not fully metabolized.]
"So I noticed."
[System Theta: Your conscious awareness is active because of our link. Motor control remains compromised.]
"That is a very polite way to say I am haunted inside my own body."
[System Theta: I was attempting reassurance.]
"It needs work."
The sound of fabric shifting reached him.
Only then did he realize there were white privacy curtains around the chair. They enclosed the space in a tight circle, turning it into a little island of clinical brightness. A hand pulled one section open.
Yvonne stepped through.
She wore a white coat so immaculate it seemed to belong to the room more than she did. Latex gloves covered her hands. Her dark hair was pinned back, and her gold-rimmed glasses caught the overhead light.
For a second, Elias’s mind went blank.
Then it exploded.
"Yvonne?"
He had expected trouble from Serena. He had expected, perhaps, that Serena had followed him here to demand something absurd. He had not expected to be drugged, restrained, and placed beneath a doctor’s lights with Yvonne Quinn standing over him.
The scene carried an unpleasantly familiar feeling.
In another world, he had once played the role of a ruthless emperor. He had woken drugged in a chamber where women who had no business being there had somehow gathered around his bed, each of them insisting she had a reason.
Was this one of those disasters again?
"No," Elias told himself. "Absolutely not."
[System Theta: Host, focus.]
"I am focusing. I am focusing on the possibility that my life has become a group project."
A voice sounded beyond the curtain.
"He should be awake by now, right?"
Elias’s eyes widened internally.
Someone else was here.
For one terrifying moment, he imagined Seraphina. There was no logical reason for a movie star to appear in the Maldives and abduct a college student. That had never stopped his missions from becoming ridiculous before.
But the person who entered was not Seraphina.
An older white woman stepped through the curtain, her hair silver at the temples and her posture straight despite the years in her face.
Karen.
Elias relaxed by half an inch.
At least it was not a fourth woman joining an already impossible coincidence. He might have survived it physically, but System Theta’s processors would have melted.
Karen looked at Yvonne. "He is awake?"
"Yes," Yvonne said.
Karen’s eyes brightened.
"Yvonne, do not feel burdened by this. Whatever the reason for hypnosis, the purpose is to help someone leave suffering behind." Her voice grew more insistent as she spoke. "People do not choose to forget happiness. They choose to forget grief, fear, guilt, and the things that keep them from living."
Yvonne did not answer.
Karen continued anyway. "And even if the client’s intentions are not pure, true hypnosis has limits. You know that. You have standards. You know where to stop."
Her expression was fervent now, like someone delivering a sermon she had repeated until she believed every word.
"Let him forget what hurts him," Karen said. "Give him another beginning."
Yvonne’s face remained still.
"You are making enough noise to bring him fully around," she said.
Karen blinked.
Then she gave a faint, sheepish laugh and stepped aside, offering Yvonne the space.
Elias watched Yvonne approach.
The fog in his mind shifted.
He understood at last.
Serena had hired Karen. Karen had called Yvonne because the target needed to be handled in his own language. Serena had not followed him to the Maldives for a vacation, or even to confront him. She wanted his memories changed.
The entire strange chain of events suddenly made sense.
That did not matter nearly as much as the next part.
Yvonne was going to hypnotize him.
Elias felt a spark of anticipation.
It was not the hypnosis itself. His memories were useful, and he had no intention of letting anyone tamper with them. But Yvonne had chosen to do this in a sealed white room, wearing gloves and a lab coat, with Serena possibly waiting beyond the curtains.
The setup had possibilities.
"Get a grip," he told himself.
[System Theta: Please do.]
Elias pictured Yvonne leaning over him, calm and clinical, and immediately had to suppress several thoughts that would make System Theta’s error log worse.
He should have asked her to use this kind of role-play back when they were together.
That would have been more interesting than anything the Trash Trope Intervention Division had prepared for him lately.
[System Theta: Host, my memory storage is becoming an unsafe workplace.]
The clinical setup should have unsettled him. It did, in a distant way. The white curtains, the restraints, the lights positioned to erase depth and shadow, all of it was designed to reduce a person to a subject. Yet Yvonne’s arrival changed the shape of the danger. Elias had spent enough time around her to recognize the difference between her professional composure and the interest she hid beneath it.
That difference was rarely good news.
It was, however, extremely interesting news.
Yvonne studied him through her glasses.
From her perspective, Elias was staring at the lights with his pupils washed almost white. The sedative, the glare, and the restraint had left him eerily quiet. His body lay motionless on the chair, his expression vacant enough that he looked less like a person than an abandoned shell.
Her breathing faltered once.
Then it steadied.
Yvonne lifted one gloved hand and touched his cheek.
She gently raised one eyelid, checking the pupils beneath the harsh light. Her fingers traced his jaw, then his temple, then the line of his throat with the deliberate care of someone performing an examination.
Elias’s thoughts became louder.
This was not hypnosis.
He did not know much about clinical suggestion, but he knew enough to suspect that repeatedly touching a patient’s face had nothing to do with it.
Yvonne was touching him because she wanted to.
In front of Karen.
Possibly with Serena waiting outside.
Elias did his best not to let excitement disturb the body’s blank expression.
He had to remain professional about this. Or at least pretend to be.
Yvonne’s hand moved across his face one last time. Her glove brushed the swollen edge of his mouth before withdrawing.
At last, she spoke.
Her voice was low, level, and stripped of warmth.
"You are exhausted."
"You are so tired that opening your eyes feels impossible."
"You are sinking into the ocean."
The words reached him with an odd weight.
"You cannot breathe. You cannot open your eyes. Water surrounds you on every side. It presses against your chest, fills every space, and pulls you downward."
Elias’s body reacted before he could stop it.
His brows drew together.
His mouth tightened.
The emptiness in his gaze twisted into visible distress.