Chapter 76
Seth
Iwatch Brooke the moment it happens.
I smile at the recognition. This is the look she gets when fear stops negotiating and clarity takes over.
I light a cigarette because my hands need something to do. The flame catches, the ember glows, and I take a slow pull. Then another. I step closer and pass it to her.
She inhales.
I can see it ground her, pull her fully into her body.
She steps forward and presses the lit end straight into Grant’s eye.
His body bucks against the restraints so hard the table rattles, a noise tearing out of him that is not language anymore.
I hand her a knife.
“What do you want to do first?” I ask.
“Hmm,” she turns the blade in her hand. “Why don’t you give me some ideas?”
I tilt my head and look at Grant. At the panic spreading across his face now that he understands we’re not fucking around.
“Well,” my eyes flick back to him. “Didn’t he say he was going to rape you if he found you that night?”
She nods. “Mm-hmm.”
“Then let’s take away his ability to rape anyone.”
She smiles.
Grant’s face finally breaks. The arrogance collapses into raw panic.
“No,” he gasps. “No, no, no.”
“Oh, yes,” she glances at the table. “Give me the shears.”
I move without hesitation. I retrieve the heavy shear cutters and place them in her hand.
Brooke smiles.
Grant sobs now. The sound fills the room and then cracks under its own weight.
She looks up at me. “Is there anything to cauterize it?”
My mouth curves before I can stop it. I reach for the torch and feel the heat still trapped in the metal.
“I still want him alive,” she murmurs. “Dickless. Ballless. Pathetic.”
Grant tries to curl in on himself even before she lifts the shears. His scream rips out fast, strained and frantic. He knows exactly what she is about to take from him.
I stay where I am and watch her.
She isn’t breaking him to prove a point. She is removing the last thing he ever used to hurt anyone. She is taking back every inch of power he stole.
Grant thrashes against the restraints, the straps biting into his wrists and ankles as his body jerks and twists.
He is stripped down to nothing but his underwear, leaving him exposed in a way that makes the fear hit harder.
His thighs tremble. His heels scrape against the table, dragging uselessly for leverage he can't find.
His panic fills the room in broken, uneven sounds that echo off the concrete walls.
Brooke steps in without hesitation. She grips the waistband and yanks his underwear down, forcing him fully exposed, leaving him with nothing left to hide behind.
The blade comes up next.She positions it at the base of his groin, right where the skin meets the root of his dick.
A sound tears out of him, raw and broken.
Then she cuts.
The shears part his flesh in a single, brutal motion.
It opens the skin around the entire organ, slicing through the shaft and the thin tissue that encases both testicles.
Blood pours immediately. Thick, hot, pulsing streams run down her wrist and coat the inside of her palm.
His nuts split open as she drags the blades downward.
Both testicles spill free, still attached by connective tissue for a moment before she severs everything with a decisive finish.
As a man, watching that hits me in a place instinct tries to guard. Everything below my belt pulls tight fast, like my body thinks I’m the one getting sliced open. It should make me sick.
It doesn’t.
Because it’s Grant. Because the bastard earned this.
Because seeing the one thing he shoved into every victim he ever took get hacked off him feels so goddamn right I almost smile.
He spent his whole life acting like that shit made him powerful.
Now it’s gone, useless, bleeding out like the rest of him.
And I’ll be honest. Watching him lose it makes me feel fucking good.
What was once his dick and balls drops from her hand onto the floor. The severed penis, the emptied pouch of the scrotum, and the testicles lie in a mangled heap, glistening under the overhead light.
Grant’s body jerks so violently the chains rattle. His voice cracks. His breath comes in wet, broken gasps. He doesn't pass out. He feels every inch of the raw, exposed wound where his genitals used to be.
Brooke takes one step back.
“There,” Brooke smiles. “Now no one will ever have to feel you inside them again.”
I get the blowtorch and ignite it.
The blue flame roars to life. I step toward the open wound between his legs, and the heat hits him before the flame does. His scream tears straight up through his chest. It climbs in pitch. It shreds into something thin and animal-like.
I pressed the flame to the bleeding tissue.
The wound sizzles. The edges curl and blacken.
The smell thickens. His body bucks so hard the table shifts an inch.
He is crying now, choking on his own breath, but I continue until every open vessel is sealed shut in a blistered, ruined mass of charred flesh.
I turned off the torch. The room goes quiet except for his rasping breaths. What remains between his legs is nothing but a blackened crater, cauterized and destroyed, the final proof of exactly what we took from him.
Brooke straightens, I step closer and reach out. Wipe a smear of blood from her cheek with my thumb. Her eyes flick to mine.
I’ve never wanted her more than I do right now. Not just because of what she’s done. But because of what it cost her. What she gave up to be this, here, now, with me.
And I’ll never let anyone touch her again.
She leans in, whispers something to Grant. He’s barely conscious, barely alive. But I watch his eyes twitch. He hears her. Whatever she says, it’s meant to be the last thing his mind clings to.
She turns away from him. Looks at me. “That’s enough for now.”
I nod, wrapping an arm around her waist. We walk upstairs, leaving the door open. Letting him hear our steps, our silence, our calm. Because he knows now, he is nothing to us.
I want to ask about Travis. I already know the answer, I can see it on Brooke’s face, but I need to hear her say it. I need the truth out loud, even if it kills me.
“He’s alive,” her voice cracks. “Still not stable. Naomi’s with him. Beau and the kids stayed. I told them to call me if anything changes.”
I nod, because talking feels dangerous. The truth sits heavy in my chest, and I can feel it pushing up, trying to force its way out.
I don’t want to admit that I’m scared. I don’t want to say out loud that I keep seeing the amount of blood he lost, and my brain keeps doing the math that men like him don’t survive that kind of hit.
I have seen enough bodies to know it.
And it scares the hell out of me.
I’m not supposed to care this much. Travis isn’t some deadweight rookie. He’s family now, the real kind, the kind you bleed for without thinking. The idea of losing him feels devastating.
“Grant’s not gonna last much longer,” I tell her. “A few more hours, maybe. If we do anything else, he’ll bleed out. Even cauterized.”
Brooke doesn’t flinch.
She looks at me and says, “Then let’s not kill him like that…Let’s bury him alive.”
That pulls a grin out of me. I kiss her once. This version of her, the one who can calmly sentence a man to hell, is the one I always knew existed. The one who matches me bone for bone.
“I’ll get the shovel.”
We load him into the back. Duct tape around the wrists, just in case. I secure the restraints tighter. His fingers are already gone. His toes too. He won’t crawl far. But I’m not leaving anything to chance.
He’s barely awake. Slack-jawed, wheezing, eyes glassed over.
There was a heavy, reinforced wooden crate in the basement.
It’s been sitting down there. Built for exactly this.
The wood is scarred, the metal bands dulled with age and use.
The hinges creak when we drag it free. Beau built things like this for men who thought they were untouchable. Men like Grant.
We haul him through the tree line, boots sinking into damp earth.
The forest is cold and dark and quiet. Grant is quieter at first. Breathing wrong.
Short pulls of air through busted ribs. His jaw is swollen and crooked, blood dried dark against his chin and throat.
He watches the hole as we dig it, eyes tracking every movement, every shovel of dirt, every widening inch.
He studies it like he’s trying to memorize the shape of what’s about to erase him. Then he finds his voice again.
“You think you can kill me?” he spits, blood spraying with the words. “The things I’ve done, the people I’ve killed. I’ll be remembered forever.”
Brooke doesn’t look at him. She keeps digging. Her shoulders rise and fall with effort. Dirt streaks her arms. Her jaw is set. She doesn’t give him even a glance. That denial hits him harder than anything else we’ve done so far.
Grant laughs, harsh and wet, coughing halfway through it. “You’re a fucking bitch, Brooke,” his eyes locked on her. “Just like your whore of a mother. I’ll make sure someone finishes what we started. I’ll make sure they kill you right in front of him.”
That’s when I stop digging. The shovel drops into the dirt.
I cross the distance in two steps and drive my boot into his jaw hard. The impact lands clean. His mouth snaps sideways. Teeth clack together. The scream that tears out of him afterward is broken, garbled, barely recognizable as human.
He collapses back against the restraints, choking on blood and spit, jaw hanging wrong, eyes wild.
“I’m tired of hearing you fucking talk,” I snarl.
We lower the crate into the hole. The wood scrapes against dirt as it settles.
The fit is tight. Grant thrashes when he sees it, panic finally punching through whatever bravado he had left.
His breath turns fast and shallow. His chest heaves.
He tries to say something else, but it comes out as a slurred whine, jaw useless now, words dissolving into noise.
We don’t rush. We secure him inside, cinch the straps. Weight pressing in from every side.
I look down at him. “Any last words?”
Grant opens his mouth to say something.
I shovel dirt straight into his face. It cakes his eyes. His nose. His mouth.
I slam the lid down on him.
The first scream hits the wood hard enough to make it shake. The sound vibrates up through the ground, into my boots, into my bones. Something slams against the inside again and again.
I pause with the shovel in my hands.
I think about my mother. About my father turning men like Grant loose on the world. About Brooke dragged through hell because men like him needed to feel powerful. About Travis bleeding out on the ground while Grant watched and smiled.
Out of everything I’ve done, I know this is one of the worst ways to die. And Grant deserved all of that.
I shovel dirt onto the crate. The screams turn muffled and desperate. Then rhythmic and uneven. Then panicked breathing beating against wood, slower each time.
Brooke takes a turn. Her shovel lands with force. Dirt thuds down in heavy clumps.
By the time the hole is filled, the forest sounds normal again. Wind through branches, leaves shifting. Night insects starting up like nothing happened. Nothing left to mark what’s underneath.
Brooke wipes her hands on her jeans. I can see in her shoulders, the tension that hasn’t released yet. I step toward her, already reaching for her.
Her phone rings.
The sound slices through the quiet.
Brooke freezes. She looks down at the screen and I see the worry in her face before she even says anything. She doesn’t answer. Her fingers curl around the phone.
“Brooke.”
“I can’t,” she shakes her head once. “I can’t hear it if it’s—”
“Then don’t,” I take the phone from her hand and shove it into my pocket. “We’re going there.”
She looks up at me, eyes wide and glassy.
The truck doors slam and I’m behind the wheel before my brain catches up to my body. The engine roars to life. Gravel sprays as I throw it into gear and punch the gas hard enough to snap her back against the seat.
The road blurs. Trees streak past. The speedometer climbs into numbers I don’t register. My hands don’t shake. My vision doesn’t blur. Everything narrows to the road and the thought of Travis on a table somewhere, dying because of us.
Brooke presses her forehead to the window, breathing hard, whispering Travis’s name like a prayer.
Nothing about this feels like hope.
It feels like a race we’re already losing.