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Flies buzzed around the body as I examined it closer. His other arm wasn’t mangled like the first, but he was missing his pinkie finger, the skin charred from where they’d burned the wound closed. It lay beside him, as if his torturer wanted to taunt him with it, along with all of his fingernails that had been pulled out at the roots. The guy was shirtless, and my eyes caught on the ink of his chest.
I felt the bile begin to rise in the back of my throat, but I swallowed it down.
No way.
It wasn’t possible.
He died.
The explosion took him from us just as it had Warden.
Yet…
I knew that ink. Had been with him when he let Spider brand it into his skin. The angel wings with the cross in the middle in memory of his parents.
Blinking to clear my vision, I looked at the man’s face. A beard I’d rarely seen on my cousin mixed with blood and fuck knew what else. His face was pale, his lips cracked, blood dried on an open gash. Part of his left ear was missing, as if someone had been hacking away at it and got bored. One eye was swollen closed, pus oozing out of it.
None of that explained the scent of rotting flesh, though.
Donati lifted the body, shifting it to show me and the others the blistered and blackened skin of his back where maggots feasted on the decayed flesh.
The bile threatened again until I felt someone behind me. Donati carefully replaced the body back on the table at the same time I heard a pained wail coming from my cousin’s lips as Matt pushed past me.
“Tanner!” He screamed his brother’s name, shaking his arm. “Tanner? How are you here? Oh fuck, what did they do to you?”
I should have pulled him back, made him go upstairs, and not allowed him to look at his brother’s
dead body like this. But I was unable to make my legs work. All I could picture was that flaming truck, where Tanner and Warden had burned to death after the blast of the bomb nearly leveled the compound. People saw him in there. Raider saw him before the blast knocked him on his ass.
So how the fuck was he here, in Fontana’s safe house basement?
A weak cough filled my ears, and everyone in the room stopped breathing.
He was alive?
How was that even possible?
“Ah, fuck.” Tanner’s voice was barely above a whisper, sounding pained, maybe even drugged. It was hard to tell what was in the IV that was feeding fluids into his arm. Fuck, they must have been keeping him alive to get information out of him. His dry lips moved and the gash cracked, blood beading on his lips. “Matt, man. Did they get you too? Are you dead?” A tear spilled down Tanner’s cheek. “Did we end up in hell together, little brother?”
Chapter 2
Tanner
I was pretty sure I was hallucinating.
Again.
Why else would I be seeing my baby brother standing over me crying?
Matt didn’t cry. Not even when I hit a baseball straight into the back of his head when he was five and he needed seven staples to close the wound. Not even when Mom and Dad died. Neither of us did. The tears were there, but they never fell.
It wasn’t the first time I’d imagined people I loved beside me. Matt. Bash. Raven.
Her.
Fuck, I wished it were her.
I was glad to see my little bro, even if I was sure he wasn’t real. But I wanted her image back. Her smile filling my eyes as the Angel of Death finally took me away from this shitshow.
