Page 21 of Desecrated Saints
“You first,” she pushes.
“You’re mean, firecracker. Fine, truth.”
“Kade said that none of you have been with anyone else.”
I choke on a mouthful of rum. “No messing around, huh?”
“Is that a question or a statement?” Hudson adds tightly.
Brooklyn ignores him, watching me. “A question.”
Rather than answer, I grab her wrist and drag her closer. Slamming my lips against hers, she soon gets over the shock and melts into the kiss. My teeth sink into her bottom lip, seeking the promise of fresh blood. By the time we separate, I’m hard and she’s gasping for air.
“Does that answer your question?”
Brooklyn makes a non-committal noise.
“For fuck’s sake,” Hudson grunts. “None of us fucked anyone else. Of course, we didn’t. Now take the bloody bottle and say truth, because I have questions too. I’m sick of waiting.”
Chastised by the grumpy dickhead, Brooklyn snuggles up to my side and retakes the bottle. Hudson’s stare is full of anticipation and barely restrained annoyance. Something serious is eating away at him. I have a feeling our playful game is about to be hijacked.
“Truth,” Brooklyn concedes.
“I want to know what the deal with Seven is. No lies.”
The crackling fire is the only sound in the silence his question brings. We’re trapped in an infinite moment as everything rests on her answer. Brooklyn takes a swig from the bottle, which should indicate that she’s passing. Instead, she pulls up her t-shirt to reveal her back.
I stare without blinking, sickness churning in my stomach. Hudson’s string of curses would make the most hardened criminals wince. On the expanse of her milky skin, there are rows of vivid, striped scars. All the way down her visible spine, every inch of flesh is viciously marked.
“Who did this to you?” Hudson spits out. “I’ll tear them apart and make a fucking hat out of their broken skull.”
“You’ve never seen a whip mark before?” Brooklyn attempts at humour. “Beat you to it. I wonder what Incendia did with Jefferson’s eyeballs. I sure hope they didn’t put them back in.”
Hudson traces a finger over a nasty scar, causing Brooklyn to shiver. She soon pushes him away, dropping the t-shirt back down before he loses his shit for real. I watch the shutters fall over Hudson’s face at her rejection.
“Augustus was recruiting a new technician,” she explains. “I later found out it was a trap, and this idiot was a mole sent looking for information. I refused to cut off his finger to mail back to his wife as leverage.”
I try to drag her into my arms, but Brooklyn shuffles even further away. Neither of us are allowed anywhere close. She clearly can’t stand to be touched while recanting this tale.
“Augustus didn’t like my disobedience. He ordered Jefferson to beat me until I agreed to do as told.”
“Fuck, firecracker.”
“By the time I broke, the job was already done. Seven cut the son of a bitch’s whole head off to send to the wife instead. He slept in his blood-stained clothes for a week. Augustus loved to dehumanise him even more.”
Hudson looks set to explode in a torrent of rage. I watch him stand and promptly punch a tree. If he could go back and murder Augustus’s psychopathic ass all over again, I have no doubt that he would. Brooklyn watches him with resignation.
“I was put back in my cell,” she continues. “What they didn’t know was that I’d slipped a knife into my sock, stolen from Jefferson’s belt. I got it back without being discovered. I could barely move after the beating; my back was shredded, and I hadn’t eaten in days. I couldn’t go on any longer.”
Flashbacks threaten to overwhelm me, still raw in my memory despite the time that’s elapsed since I found her half-dead. The thought of her alone, back in that awful place, threatens to finish me off. I feel like a fucking failure for giving up on her.
“Firecracker—”
“No,” Brooklyn interrupts. “Don’t give me all that pitying bullshit. Hudson asked a question. The answer is this: when I had no one, Seven was there in the pitch black—a complete stranger who owed me nothing. He spoke to me through the air vent, talked me down. I could’ve slit my wrists, but I didn’t.”
Hudson stares at his bleeding fists, listening but not really present. The tree has matching dents in the rough bark now. He’s slipped back into his angry, volatile haze, and can’t be reached. I watch as he takes off, stalking into the nearby woods without a word.
“Probably just needs to clear his head.” I wince.