Page 44 of Wicked Nightmare

Cam's hand tightened on my shoulder, his fingers digging in painfully. "We'll make 'em suffer, Lakes."

"You think there's more of us?" I asked, gesturing to the envelope with my name on it. One I would open when I was done seeing the extent of the torture they'd inflicted on her.

I was getting some nifty little ideas of how to up my own creativity looking at these. Detached.

"Only one way to find out. You wanna keep going?"

I took a deep breath. "Oh, I'm gonna keep looking. Think his holy Father would get turned on if I cut off his finger and fucked his ass with it?"

I flipped to the next photo and froze. There, lurking in the background, he stood. His black drapery and his fucking crisp white necktie, splattered in blood. His eyes were cold, detached, watching Lydia being cut open the way someone watches a cooking show. Mild interest. Professional distance. Like this was just another day for him.

"That motherfucker," I hissed, my fingers clenching the photo so hard it crumpled. Memories of his "private confessions" flooded back, making my skin crawl.

I stared at his face in the photo. Memorized every line, every shadow, every angle. This was the face I was going to peel off his skull. This was the man who'd called me "little lamb" and smiled at me during evening prayers and stood in doorways watching girls sleep and fathered babies he then had cut out of teenagers on surgical tables in basements.

The next photo made even my iron stomach churn. Sister Anne, that sanctimonious bitch, was cradling Lydia's very clearly premature baby. Her face was twisted in a smile that'd make the devil himself piss his pants.

"What the actual fuck," Cam muttered, his usual cool slipping.

I couldn't tear my eyes away as I put the photo behind the next. The baby, lifeless, shoved back into Lydia's open abdomen. Some sick, reverse birth.

"They put it back," my voice was hollow. "They fucking put it back inside her."

I put the photos down. Placed them face-down on the desk and stood there with my hands flat on the surface, breathing. Just breathing. Trying to keep the contents of my stomach where they belonged instead of on the floor of this office.

Lydia had asked me to remember her. She'd hidden a note in her mattress because she knew she wasn't going to survive this place and she wanted proof that she'd existed. That she'd been real. That someone would know her name after they erased her.

And I'd spent all this time thinking I'd made her up because that was easier than letting my imagination run wild with what happened to her.

Even in my most depraved dreams, I’d never have thought this was what they did.

They hadn't just killed her. They'd tried to kill the memory of her too, and they'd almost succeeded.

Cam's arm snaked around my waist, steadying me. "We're gonna rain holy hell on these bastards. Make 'em wish they'd never been born."

I leaned into him, and drew strength from his solid presence. "Promise me something?"

"Anything."

"When we find Sister Anne, she's mine. I want to watch the light leave her eyes."

Cam's lips brushed my temple. "Wouldn't have it any other way, sweetheart."

The room started to spin, my vision blurring as tears burned hot tracks down my cheeks. I stumbled, and a wave of nausea hit me so hard I doubled over.

"Fuck," I choked out, unable to separate the pieces of me back into their compartments. They were all swirling, mixing into one giant brown puddle. My stomach heaved, and bile swirled at the back of my throat.

I'd seen some sick shit in my time, hell, I'd done some sick shit.

But this? This was a whole new level of fucked up. I hadn't cried since I was a kid, and yet I'd lost my head twice since being down here. The walls closed in around me, forcing me to breathe through a pin hole. I was trapped in an iron cage, spikes pressing into me, forcing me to collapse in on myself. The only piece of me still intact was the steel cage I kept my shadow tucked away in. It was the only thing still holding me together. The knowledge that I had the power to fight back. That I was a more than capable killing machine and that with the flick of a switch, I'd never feel a damn thing as I slid my knife underneath the skin and peeled it from their bones.

Cam's hand was on my back, rubbing small circles into my spine, steadying me. "Deep breaths, baby girl. We need you sharp. Don't lose that killer instinct now. Push it out of your mind and breathe. She needs you to be the avenging angel I know you are. You need you."

I nodded, forcing air into my lungs. The images of Lydia, of her baby, kept flashing through my mind, forcing themselves against the corners of my closed eyelids.

Taking another deep breath, my eyes now open, my hands shook as I gathered up the photos and notes. Each image made me want to tear my eyes out, but I forced myself to look at them one last time. To remember every detail of what those bastards had done.

"And from sin we exit, into salvation we go," I muttered, repeating the mantra they'd forced us to say, our knees bleeding from the spiked rugs they made us kneel on. I folded the gruesome evidence back into the envelope.