Page 73 of Broken Warrior
My eyes close briefly as I fill my lungs with poison, not giving a good goddamn about anything except the calm it brings. A calm I’ll have to maintain on my own because I can’t let that false sense of comfort draw me back into anything like this, not even cigarettes. It’s helping right now but it won’t forever, and once our meeting is over, I’ll manage just fine.
“What’s this all about?” I ask as I hand over the Marlboro, the two of us heading in the direction Zak just came from. “Assuming you have more info than what Marbles sent the group.”
He nods. “I do but… fuck.” Zak blows out a breath as he lifts his ball cap and scrubs a hand over his hair. “You just gotta see it for yourself.”
And there goes my anxiety again.
We walk around to the back yard, past the house itself and toward one of our VP’s multiple pole barns.
Do I knowwhyMarbles has six different pole barns—along with a three car garage and four sheds—on his property? Fuck no, no one knows why Marbles does anything, but ever since the last clubhouse went to shit we’ve been meeting in one of them, and since that’s not the one Zak is leading me to, I guess I have to assume there’s a method to his madness.
We walk up to the door and I flinch as Zak takes a deep breath, our top enforcer and one of the baddest badasses I know visibly shaken over whatever is waiting behind it. Which is the exact second I notice what might actually be a puddle of vomit next to the entrance.
“New patch brought us beer.” My brother sighs as he follows my stare. “Marbles thought it would be funny to let him walk in on this shitshow without any warning.”
I nod slowly. “Like you’re doing with me?”
“Nah. I just know you ain’t gonna lose your breakfast over this shit. It’s bad and it’s fucked up, but I think most of us have seen worse.”
Then we walk in.
The foul stench of death hits me first, followed by an eerie and unusual silence.
I glance around the room as Zak closes the door behind us, my gaze bouncing from brother to brother until it lands on Jackal, my cousin’s face relatively neutral save for the lack of color.
I frown.
All of that is completely out of character for him.
The pale tone to his complexion for sure, but the fact that he’s not grinning or flapping his gums is a huge red flag, and I thought for sure Jackal would already have a beer in hand regardless of how fucking early it is. He doesn’t though and he’s standing there almost as stoically as Pope, who’s…actually praying?
I glance around the room again and realize no one is acting like they usually do; Brick is pacing nervously, Pork Chop is leaning on the chair Crunchy is sitting in and both of them look like they just saw a fucking ghost, Marbles is dead fucking silent and Prez, well, he’s on the phone having some hushed conversation, which is actually pretty normal if shit went down.
But yeah, none of them are acting like themselves and that does not bode well for this meeting.
Oh, this is so fucked.
And when I finally step further into the pole barn to join my brothers, I know exactly why.
In the back of the room, on top of two saw horses is a slab of wood covered in a tarp. On top of that tarp, oddly placed and relatively uncovered, is a body. A mangled body, positioned in a way I have only ever read described online in the news before.
The torso is in the middle, arms and legs framing it like it’s a goddamn work of art, and sitting dead center of the chest is a severed head with the poor bastard’s dick and balls hanging out of its mouth.
He struck again.
I mindlessly walk toward the makeshift table, my eyes fixed on the mess in front of me. “Is this—”
“Just like those two Cobra assholes,” Berk says, stepping out of the shadows. Our personal medical examiner—and Sofie’s dad—pats his forehead with a handkerchief, a sorry attempt to wipe away the gratuitous amount of sweat it’s covered in. “Identical, right down to the missing left femur.”
“Jesus…” This is fucking grotesque. It’s disgusting and morbid, but the closer I get, the more details I see; the tiny punctures from where the man was methodically drained of all his blood, the clean and seamless incisions where he was dismembered, the precision used to extract only the femur and leave everything else relatively intact. Aside from what was most likely the fatal injury caused by some sort of serrated blade to the left temple, the overkill that followed in the form of multiple similar wounds to the face and neck, the body is almost like any that Doc would have worked on himself.
If he was a psychotic serial killer taking out the scum of the earth, that is.
Which makes me think… “Do we have an ID?”
Berk nods and clears his throat. “Another piece of garbage who got what he deserves.”
“Everything is the same? You’re sure?”
