Page 165 of Healed

Shaking my head, I left my brothers behind and approached the body, noting everything I had missed from a distance.

Her legs were curled underneath her, almost like she was kneeling. Her chest had been completely carved out, the wounds so deep her rib cage was showing. Her stomach had been sliced, not deep enough to spill any organs, but deep enough that bugs had crawled inside her, covering themselves in her guts.

“Is that—”

“Yep,” I said tightly, not needing Dante to finish his sentence.

She was wearing my cut. The same one I had given to Gabriella when she’d snuck over to the clubhouse a few weeks back. The item that had kick-started this entire shit show.

“You know there’s a punishment for giving your cut away,” Dante told me.

“I think Michelle paid a high enough price, don’t you?” I replied, my lip curling in disgust at the state of her.

Dante reached forward, opening the folds of the cut and revealing the rest of Michelle’s upper body to us.

Her arms had clearly snapped somewhere along the way, her shoulders hanging out of the sockets at an unnatural angle, and there were long, thick slices down the length of them.

Which was the same with her legs. They were covered in knife wounds, deep enough that I could see the muscles in her thighs.

Dante used his foot to nudge her knees open. Not that he particularly wanted to, but because we knew based on the other bodies that there would be a message somewhere.

And, lo and behold, as he parted her knees, we saw it.

A knife buried deep inside her genitals with chunks of flesh dried to the handle.

“That’s fucked up,” Doc gagged, turning his head to be sick.

Dante half scoffed, half laughed under his breath and then looked at me with his eyebrows raised.

“Don’t,” I said with a small shake of my head and then gesturing in the direction of the rest of the lads. They knew what had happened with Gabriella and Nico the other day, but not all the details. We kept the worst of it between ourselves to protect her dignity.

They didn’t need to know that Nico had threatened to fuck her with a knife, and now we were looking at her mother in the same position. It was bad enough with her mother alone.

“Boss,” Hacksaw said, his voice coming from behind Michelle.

“What’s up?”

His lips twisted as he stood up. “Look under the cut.”

“For fuck’s sake,” I muttered under my breath. Dante walked around and crouched next to Michelle’s body, raising the leather.

“Forever mine, princess,” he read. “Carved in there pretty deep as well.”

“Yep. Sounds about right,” I sighed.

I’d reached the point where this was becoming white noise. It should have been horrific. I should have been disgusted.

But I was becoming numb to it all.

“Just… just cut her down,” I said. “Let’s at least try to give her some dignity.”

Dante pulled out his knife, ready to cut through the ropes securing her wrists to the metal bars, just at the same time as my phone started ringing.

“Withheld,” I said, holding the screen up. “Wanna take a bet on who this is?”

I brought the phone to my ear.

“Let me guess—you’re watching all of this?”