Page 50 of Broken Skulls

I know she’s saying it for me to hear, but I only hear what she’s not saying.

“Okay, we’ll see you all soon.”

I glance around, just now noticing that most of the women have stepped from the room. Only Lily, Jesse, and Jesse’s daughter, Billie Rose, remain.

“I want to go back to Jacob’s,” I say, rising from my chair.

“I’ll take her,” Jesse tells the others, grabbing her keys from a hook by the front door.

Lily reaches out and touches her arm, but Jesse brushes it off. “I’ve got this.”

When we pull out onto the road, Jesse lights up a joint and hands it to me. “So, the guys found some really fucked up shit at your teacher’s house.”

I take a long draw, holding it in. When I try to hand it back to her, she shakes her head. “You’re going to need all of it.”

I take her advice and continue smoking. “Yeah,” I say on a sigh, turning my focus out the window. “Something went wrong. I can feel it. Jacob got hurt, didn’t he?”

“Not exactly.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

Jacob

As soon as these motherfuckers untie me, I’m going to kill all of them. I roll my head on my shoulders, my gaze going back to the portrait in front of me.

“You’ve got to calm down, man. You’re too old for this shit. You’re going to give yourself a heart attack,” Brody says, blocking my view of the painting with his body.

I know he’s joking about my age, because the fucker isn’t much younger than me, but I’m not in a joking mood right now.

Sweat runs down my forehead.

It doesn’t matter that I can’t see it. The image has been permanently branded into the tissue of my brain. I can feel it smoldering. I shake my head, roaring at them to let me go.

“Jesus, quiet down,” Jackson says. “You’re going to get us kicked out of this shit hole, and I need some sleep.”

“His face is turning purple,” Elijah says. “Just give him something already. He’s not going to snap out of it.”

Dirk walks over and punches me in the face. “Enough,” he barks, his spit flying over me.

My head falls back, and I stare at the ceiling.

He begins to give orders. “Everyone out. And take that fucking thing with you.”

My head falls, blood running from my mouth as I watch my brothers haul the painting of a younger version of my woman out of the hotel room.

Dan flops himself on one of the beds in the room as Dirk takes the other.

“You fuckers just going to leave me here?” I ask, trying to scoot the chair they’ve tied me to closer to the table.

“You asked for this, remember?”

The sweat dripping in my eyes stings, but I don’t dare shut them. “Argh!” I yell out. I need to break something. To kill something.

“She wants him alive,” Dirk reminds me, flipping his switchblade in the air. “He’ll pay soon enough. Patience.”

Dan flips on the news. The three of us watch as flames try to escape Mr. Baxter’s fancy fucking house of horrors. No one will ever know what kind of monster he was … is. That’s a shame.

I tug against my binds, yelling out again.

---