Page 23 of Broken Skulls (Rebel Skull MC #7)

Chapter Twenty-Two

Jacob

A s 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.

“Text Jackson and have him bring the doc in. I’m not going to listen to this all night,” Dirk finally says. He pushes himself off the bed and crouches down in front of me. His gaze bounces over my face as I breathe hard. “If you love this woman, it’s going to hurt like a motherfucker a lot of the time.”

He sits on the edge of the bed. “You think this sucks for you now? Someday you’re going to go through a long stretch where that woman is happy, content, and everything seems so fucking good, and then something as simple as a color … a smell … the fucking breeze on her skin, will set her off. It’s going to happen a lot, and you’re never going to know when.”

He looks over his shoulder at Dan before turning his attention back to me.

“In those times, she’s going to need you to be like that fucking room you have. Still, calm, sure. If you can’t handle that, then you better pull out now.”

The doc walks in, and I give him the side eye before turning back to Dirk. “I don’t need the doc.”

“You sure about that? Because if you wake me up, I’m going to go down there and kill that motherfucker myself.”

My lip curls, but I know he’s not lying. “I’m sure.”

He waves doc away while keeping his eyes on me. “Do you want me to untie you?”

“No,” I answer, turning away from him.

After he lies back down, Dan shuts the light off, leaving the TV on as a distraction for me.

Dirk tucks his hands behind his head. “Just so you know, I’d have reacted the same way.”

“Me too,” Dan adds.

I spend the rest of the night playing the videos we found over and over in my mind. The sound of her soft cries as he painted her skin, and then her portrait will haunt me forever.

My gaze goes to the dark forms of my friends, sound asleep in the room as the light from the TV dances over them. How many nights have they stayed awake worrying about their women?

I know what Dirk was talking about, though. I’ve seen both Jesse and Lily be triggered at the drop of a hat.

I remember one day in particular. A child began crying and throwing a fit in the store, and the mother covered the little girl’s mouth with her hand, attempting to muffle the child’s obnoxious screaming as she hurried out. For most people, including me, I saw a mom trying to quiet her little one as she politely left the building. Lily saw, or maybe it was what she heard, something completely different. She ran to the storeroom, covering her ears and sobbing. Nothing I said helped. I had to call Dan. He came right over, and the minute he stepped into the room, she calmed down.

I want to be that kind of peace for Elizabeth.

But I also have this blinding rage for the man we captured.

“It’s already happened. I’ve already survived it.”

I let my eyes fall closed, and sure as shit there it is. The painting. And even though it’s an image of the most beautiful woman in the world … it’s the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen.

“Please make it go away,” I whisper as exhaustion begins to blanket my bloodlust.

Instantly, the painting morphs into the watercolor painted dragonfly hanging on my refrigerator at home. While the image is more pleasant, it doesn’t hurt any less than the previous one. It only adds a layer to the pain.

I saw the look on Tank’s face as he took in Mr. Baxter’s “art” room. Don’t get me wrong, the teacher had plenty of science crap. Actually, what he had was more like a morgue. His scientific mind was the fuel for his creativity. At first, I thought he must be a serial killer, but Anthony did some digging on the man’s computer, and it looks like he gets his bodies on the black market.

In fact, there was a fresh one lying on the table. A young female.

Anthony and his crew are going to continue working on all of this. He said more than likely the corpses are coming from dirty funeral homes. How many people think their loved ones are being cremated only to be sold on the dark web?

I hope his team finds them and shuts them down, because even though the women might have died naturally, they deserve to be treated with respect. They deserve justice.

We all stood there, stunned, realizing that she didn’t tell anyone because no one would have believed her.

I just don’t know how to tell her what we found. But I guess she already knows.

Of course she knows. She lived through it.

She knew what we would find.

It’s like a knife to the gut.

“It’s already happened. I’ve already survived it.”

We left most of the evidence of his depravity behind to be destroyed. The only thing we took was one of the paintings.

I know now why she hid her daughter. He needs to be erased from this earth.

Because I can’t imagine finding out your biological father is a monster who loves the dead.