Page 198 of Malice and Surrender
“Nope, the one behind it. We traveled in the wrong direction, and I bet you won’t see your truck if you look out the front.”
“This is getting stranger by the second,” I said. Doing as Wilder suggested, I looked out the front window. Sure enough, we were facing the wrong way. This was not what I expected.
The place was dated with peeling, floral wallpaper, and floors that were a mix of shag carpet and subflooring. No pictures anywhere, but a new roll of toilet paper was by the shitter, water was running through the taps, and the thermostat on the wall glowed with the temp.
“Hey, Snake, come see this.” I left the back room I was looking through and found Wilder sitting at a computer with Roach standing behind him.
“Where did you find the laptop?” He pointed to an air exchange vent, and I shook my head. I would never have thought to look there. Wilder pulled something out of his pocket that looked like a memory stick. The screen glowed and then showed a lock screen. Before I could ask how he planned on getting past that lock, he shoved the stick in the side, and the computer dinged and opened.
“Government encryption decoder,” Wilder offered, and Roach and I looked at one another and shrugged. I could kill people with no problem and even make it creative, but this was why I brought Wilder. “These are all files on people, women mostly.” He pointed to the long list that went on forever. He opened a file, and even my eyebrow rose with the violent images. A woman’s face was contorted in agony as spikes were shoved through her body while someone fucked her. This was a new level of fucked even for me. You couldn’t see the attacker’s face for the large hooded robe that covered his body, but each image Wilder clicked on was more disturbing than the next.
He went to another folder and another, and it was all the same. Some women had been mangled or burnt but were still alive when these images were taken. One image had candles and strange symbols I didn’t recognize drawn on the wall in the background. This Father Frank was more disturbed than I thought. He was using the cover of the cult that focused on spirituality and twisted it into whatever the fuck this was.
“They have dates and names. I’m surprised someone would do that unless they really didn’t think they’d get caught,” Roach said, pointing to the long list of folders.
“It’s their trophies,” Wilder answered. “They probably keep something personal as well, but this will be where he comes to relive the kills. Someplace no one would be watching or catch him jerking off or re-enacting it with others.”
“That’s fucked up,” Roach said.
My pulse began to pound hard as a thought occurred to me. “Is there a folder for Raine Eastman?” Wilder and Roach looked at me, and even though they didn’t say it, I knew what they were thinking. “I need to know,” I said before they could argue.
The little folders went on and on as he made it down to the Rs, and the little cursor hovered over a file highlighted in blue. My fist clenched on the knife, shaking in my grasp.
“Open it,” I growled.
“Buddy, you sure you want to see this?”
My eyes snapped to Roach. “What if this was Lane?”
“I know, but….”
“Open the fucking file or get out of my way and I’ll do it,” I ordered.
Wilder clicked on the file, and the world narrowed in on the photographs on the screen. There weren’t as many as the other files, and the photo quality wasn’t as clear, but that didn’t matter.
There she was, my precious little Tink at fifteen, tied up and naked just like she said. Roach turned around and crossed his arms over his chest, his face as angry as I felt.
Blood and other bodily fluids coated her body. A dark hood was tied with black tape around her neck, but that didn’t stop her eyes from gripping me behind the dark material. I could taste her terror on my tongue and acid in the back of my throat as my body revolted against what I saw.
Wilder clicked through all the photos, most were just of her, but some had Jim and Dave. Frank must have been the one taking the pictures.
A sharp pain pierced my chest like I was being stabbed through the heart. She thought this was me. For eleven long years, she thought I did this to her. Fire and ice sizzled in my veins as rage collided with the realization of the horror she’d felt.
“This is a pattern. It’s not random. Some of the others have it too, just in different spots,” Wilder said, pointing to the six knife wounds on her naked blood-covered stomach. “If she wasn’t his first, she was close to it. That’s the only reason she’s alive. They’re not as clean and precise. The cuts were tentative, and he used a different blade than the others. The wounds are smaller in size, and by some miracle, he missed all her major veins, or she would’ve bled out in minutes.”
My body wouldn’t stop shaking, and my heart pounded hard in my chest. I gripped my knees as the room swam and took deep breaths to get myself under control. Roach’s hands were on my shoulders, but he didn’t say anything.
The fear in Raine’s eyes that night, when she found me in her house, came storming to the surface of my mind, and I wanted to throw up. That look on her face would haunt my dreams. She was my it, my all, my everything, and these three had destroyed us both.
“Take the computer. I don’t care if he knows it’s missing. The families of these people deserve closure.” I stood and nodded to Roach that I was okay.
“This guy is fucking dead, and when we find him, he’s all mine.” Wilder and Roach stayed quiet but locked eyes with me. “Father Frank may have signed a deal with the Devil, but I’m the Reaper, and I intend to fucking collect.”
Jace
Kai insisted on coming to the airfield with us. I found him extreme and unpredictable most of the time, but he was downright strange this last week. Kai didn’t challenge me or threaten to kill me when I purposely tried to get under his skin. He hardly spoke when we saw him and was more protective and edgy over Raine than I ever wanted to see from an enforcer. I didn’t know what was happening, but I would bet money that something set him off.
Raine was splitting her time between us, so we saw Kai every other night, and although he sometimes hung out and ate dinner, it never felt like he was wholly here. He was fine with Raine but would spend most of the time standing at one of the large windows staring outside. I didn’t know if this was a residual effect of the night we tag-teamed Raine, but it felt like something else. I hated being in the dark about shit. If he didn’t snap out of it by tomorrow night, we were going to have another private conversation.
