AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Hold on,” he huffed as he tossed me a glance over his shoulder. “It’s stuck. Give me a second.” While he worked on undoing the first side of the tarp, I looked around, trying to find something I could use, something to kill this asshole with, but there was nothing. No old pieces of wood, laying around, haphazardly sharp in their design. Nothing at all I could use.
Well, my luck had to run out sooner or later.
“Ah, there we go,” Brett spoke in triumph as he finally managed to undo the left side of the tarp. It fell down, revealing half of the body, and what I saw didn’t really register in my head. No, it wasn’t until the second half was down and the tarp had fallen to the ground that it finally hit me, what I was seeing.
My breath caught.
“Surprise,” Brett said, turning around and facing me with a smile. He stood near the body, both arms strung up by the rope and stretched out as much as possible without tearing the corpse in two.
I couldn’t say anything. All I could do was stare with my mouth hanging open. The smell of the body was still strong—stronger now that the tarp wasn’t hanging around it—but the shock of what I was seeing made me numb to it.
“I have to admit,” he went on, “I thought you’d suspect, but seeing the look on your face… you had no idea, did you?”
The person strung up like an animal was a woman, or what was left of her. She was naked, only one tit hanging out, the other was just… gone. Half her face had been skinned, including her scalp. Her right arm was the same, all red and veiny and gooey looking. Her right leg was the same, skinned down to the toes, like Erin had been.
But that wasn’t what got my attention the most. No, the part of her that drew my attention immediately was the torso, the midsection on her right side. It was like Brett had taken a knife down her, right in the middle, starting at the head, digging down to the skull, and brought that knife all the way down her body. He’d skinned parts of her, but the right side of her midsection showed the bone.
Half her ribcage was exposed, though the ribs weren’t white. They were bright red, some fleshy bits still hanging off them. Everything underneath them had been taken out: the lung, the heart… from where I stood, I could see parts of her spine.
Farther down, past the ribcage, was her stomach, or what was left of it. Her left side was near untouched, but her right was gone. All that remained was part of her intestines, some of them falling out of the bowl that was left of her hips and midsection.
Brett was right. This was his best work. It wasn’t perfect by any means. You could tell he’d had to take out all of her organs, because what remained of her stomach and the left side of her chest was sunken in a bit, but it was as close to my work as something could possibly be.
I tried to speak, but words failed me. I couldn’t take my eyes off the desiccated corpse, the smell no longer bothering me. All of my brainpower was focusing on taking in the sight, every single detail, down to the way the exposed half of her ribcage still had some bloody meat attached.
Who was this woman, who’d given her life to become Brett’s finest work? Someone I knew all too well, someone who shouldn’t even be here because she was supposed to have left the country. The bane of my existence, the woman who’d always acted like she hated me with every fiber of her being. The woman who was never what she should’ve been to me.
My mom.
“Do you have any idea how hard it was to lure her out of the airport without causing a scene?” Brett asked, admiring his work as he returned to my side. “When I said I had you, and that I’d hurt you if she didn’t come with me, she really didn’t want to come. Let me guess: she was not a motherly sort, huh?”
“No,” I whispered, “she wasn’t.”
So Alistair had driven her to the airport, and sometime after he’d dropped her off, she’d left that same airport with Brett, after some convincing. I didn’t think it was too strange to have not heard from her in days, because I assumed she was over in Italy living her best life. I didn’t think… I didn’t even imagine she wasdead.
Did Alistair know she never got on the plane? Had he hidden this from me this whole time?
The really sick thing was, as I stood there, taking in the state of her body, I didn’t feel upset. I wasn’t furious or sad. The only emotion flowing in me right then was acceptance. Well, acceptance and awe.
Brett was busy staring at me with a puzzled expression while I studied my mom’s corpse. “You two had a weird relationship, didn’t you?” When I gave him a short nod, he muttered, “Figures. I should’ve gone for Gareth first. Leave it to me to pick the one you don’t give a shit about—”
Yeah, if he wanted to hurt me the most, he would’ve gone after Gareth. Then again, if Brett had known me at all, he would’ve gone after anyone but my mom. We might have some shared blood, but that was it. There was never love between us, not even when I was a child.
As I stared at my mom’s desiccated body, I muttered, “My mom always wanted me to be like her. To give up my art. To stop drawing and painting, or, if I had to keep doing it, to paint cuter things. She wanted me to market myself, to become an influencer, to make my brand. It’s easier when you’re younger, she always said, easier when you’re prettier. Makeup and filters can only do so much.”
I was pretty sure I heard Brett’s fingers tapping on his side, almost like he was growing impatient. “Sounds like a winner of a mother.”
“She was. I think she’d throw me to the wolves with a smile on her face if she thought she’d get something out of it. It’s pretty much what she did by marrying Alistair Montgomery.” I closed my eyes and let out a soft breath. “I never cared about money. Not like she did. She was always on the hunt for it, so when she started dating Alistair… it was everything she’d ever wanted.”
Opening my eyes, I turned to look at Brett, who stood less than two feet away, watching me with a narrowed expression. “Even if it was all a lie. Do you know Alistair told me, after the wedding, that he’d married my mom to get me here? I was supposed to be a present for Gareth, a new toy. Gareth’s toys don’t last that long, but I bet you already know that.”
“If this is the same schtick you told Neo before you killed him, let me warn you that I’m a harder nut to crack. I don’t care why you’re here, Brianna. It doesn’t matter. All I care about is the fact that you murdered my cousin.” He wasn’t smiling then, no amusement at all on his face, even if all of his smiles up until then had been fake. No, now he looked like he wanted to kill.
And I was the only one here with him. I was the object of his fury, the reason Neo was dead. Still, I couldn’t help but say, “I wouldn’t have killed him if he wouldn’t have kidnapped me to kill me, first. I did what I had to to get out of there alive. You understand that, don’t you?”
Brett didn’t say anything, but his glare hardened in my direction.
“He killed Erin and her family, and even if you helped him, it sounds like it was his idea. He had a vendetta against Gareth and Alistair, and he was willing to kill me to hurt Gareth. People might end up dead every so often around Gareth, but as far as I’m concerned, what Neo and you did? You’re no better than him.”
