14. Chapter Fourteen Lakey
Chapter Fourteen: Lakey
My fingers shook as I reached into that fucking security box. Heart hammering, I grabbed two envelopes, my eyes zeroing in on the one with "Lydia Hamilton" scrawled across it.
"Shit," I muttered, glancing at Cam. His face was stone, jaw tight enough to crack walnuts. He gave me a curt nod.
I tore into Lydia's envelope, memories of her flooding my brain.
Her laugh, her stupid jokes, the way she'd given me her last piece of bread when they'd had us on a 'starvation cleanse for our sins'.
The way she counted in the dark to fall asleep.
The way she never cried, not once, not even when she should have.
Those thoughts evaporated the second I saw that first photo.
Lydia. My friend. The one who held me as I screamed in the night.
Sprawled out, skin pale as milk. A jagged, angry scar ripped across her belly in an upside-down T, held together by crude stitches.
I traced it with my finger, bile rising in my throat.
Red, angry welts criss-crossed over her breasts.
Her wrists held deep purple bruises from restraints.
But her face was finally at peace.
"Jesus fucking Christ," I choked out, my vision blurring. "They butchered her, Cam. Like a goddamn pig."
Cam's hand landed heavy on my shoulder as he leaned forward. "Keep going, Lakes. We need to know everything. I... I can look if you don't want to."
I shook my head. I needed to know. Everything they'd done to us would be done seven-fold. Just like they'd promised me if I didn't let them...
No. I can't think of that right now. I'll fall apart.
My mind raced, piecing together the horror show in front of me. What the hell had they done to her? And why? The questions burned, but the answers would be worse.
"I should've been here," I whispered, more to myself than Cam. "I could've stopped this. I could've saved her. They… they told me she left. They just took her here."
"You couldn't have, baby. You were very much a victim yourself," he said. "But we can make these fuckers pay. I feel like I fucked up, setting this whole thing in motion. Maybe we'd have been better off carrying on the way we were. It's not too late for me to call Dani."
"I killed Dani, dip shit."
He chuckled. "Whatever, there's always one to replace the old. Anyway, it's not too late for us to just walk away, light a match and forget about all of it."
"Nah. Call it my demonic rage, but I need to know what they did. Besides, I'm having some hella hot visions of you fucking me while I stand inside Father Christopher's corpse."
It's true. It would be super hot.
"Damn baby, that's nasty. Okay, what's next?"
I looked up at him, seeing the cold anger overtake the brief flicker of lust in his eyes. It matched the inferno raging in my chest, threatening to consume everything. I managed a lop-sided smile.
"Got any ideas for the Father? I'm thinking we start with his fingers."
Cam's lips curled into a cruel smirk. "Sounds like a good warm-up to me, darl'."
I turned back to the photos, straightening my spine and pushing my shoulders back. Lydia deserved justice, and I'd paint these halls red to get it for her. There were so many photos here.
Why? Why did they document it like this? Did they get off on it? Was it some kind of record-keeping? Some clinical need to catalogue their work the way a surgeon keeps notes?
I suppose I'm not much different. Getting off on killing. At least I recognize that I'm sick and twisted. They did everything they did under the guise of 'love and salvation.'
There's no mistaking what I am. What I was turned into.
I've never pretended to be anything I'm not.
I've always been exactly who I am, even if that version of me differs from the one from a moment ago.
Suppose that's what made me self-aware though.
Most people walk through life under the misconception that they will be loved if they act a certain way.
Dressed a certain way. Talked a certain way.
It's all a lie. Everyone will hurt you in the end, it doesn't matter how pretty you wrap your meat sack, you will never be the person you pretended you were, especially when they peel the mask back to reflect the ugly that lived inside you. Lying about it just buys you time.
At least I was honest about the ugly. At least I wore it on the outside where people could see it coming.
I shook my head, clearing my thoughts as I flipped to the next photo and felt my world tilt.
Lydia was splayed out on a surgical table, her belly swollen with pregnancy.
Her eyes were wide open, vacant, like she was already gone.
Tubes snaked out of her arms, and a mask covered her face.
But it was the scalpel poised above her stomach that made my skin crawl.
She'd been pregnant. Lydia had been pregnant and she hadn't told me.
Or maybe she had, during one of those whispered conversations in the dark, and I'd forgotten.
Or maybe she'd tried and I hadn't understood because I was a teen and traumatized teens don't know what pregnancy looks like on another teenager in a group home run by people who were supposed to be celibate.
Father Christopher. The father. In every sense of the word.
Turning it over and placing it face down, the next picture showed her skin peeled back, a gaping hole where the upside-down T was cut. Her fucking spine was showing, her organs taken out and laid beside her on the table.
"Fuck," I hissed, my hands shaking so bad I nearly dropped the photo. "She was pregnant, Cam. They... they tried to cut the baby out of her."
Cam leaned in. "Sick bastards.”
I fumbled with the attached note, my eyes scanning the clinical words: "Unsuccessful removal of fetus, both deceased." My stomach lurched, and I tasted copper in my mouth.
"They killed her," I whispered, my voice breaking. "They killed her and her baby."
The words on the page were typed. Clinical.
No emotion, no acknowledgment that this was a person, a girl who counted in the dark and shared her bread and dreamed about becoming a mother someday.
Just "unsuccessful removal." Like she was a failed experiment.
Like the baby was a tumor they were cutting out instead of a life they were ending.
Memories flooded back. Her dreams of becoming a mother someday.
Many whispered nights of what we would do once we escaped.
She'd come from a broken home, said her dad beat her and her mom fled, leaving her at his mercy.
But she never let it dim her smile. She never let it change her the way I let it change me.
She was sweet. Kind. Look at what fucking good that did her.
All of it stolen, ripped away by these monsters.
Something snapped inside me, a dam breaking loose.
"I'm gonna gut every last one of them," I snarled, my vision going red. "Starting with that fucking nun."
Cam's hand tightened on my shoulder, his fingers digging in painfully. "We'll make 'em suffer, Lakes."
"You think there's more of us?" I asked, gesturing to the envelope with my name on it. One I would open when I was done seeing the extent of the torture they'd inflicted on her.
I was getting some nifty little ideas of how to up my own creativity looking at these. Detached.
"Only one way to find out. You wanna keep going?"
I took a deep breath. "Oh, I'm gonna keep looking. Think his holy Father would get turned on if I cut off his finger and fucked his ass with it?"
I flipped to the next photo and froze. There, lurking in the background, he stood.
His black drapery and his fucking crisp white necktie, splattered in blood.
His eyes were cold, detached, watching Lydia being cut open the way someone watches a cooking show.
Mild interest. Professional distance. Like this was just another day for him.
"That motherfucker," I hissed, my fingers clenching the photo so hard it crumpled. Memories of his "private confessions" flooded back, making my skin crawl.
I stared at his face in the photo. Memorized every line, every shadow, every angle.
This was the face I was going to peel off his skull.
This was the man who'd called me "little lamb" and smiled at me during evening prayers and stood in doorways watching girls sleep and fathered babies he then had cut out of teenagers on surgical tables in basements.
The next photo made even my iron stomach churn. Sister Anne, that sanctimonious bitch, was cradling Lydia's very clearly premature baby. Her face was twisted in a smile that'd make the devil himself piss his pants.
"What the actual fuck," Cam muttered, his usual cool slipping.
I couldn't tear my eyes away as I put the photo behind the next. The baby, lifeless, shoved back into Lydia's open abdomen. Some sick, reverse birth.
"They put it back," my voice was hollow. "They fucking put it back inside her."
I put the photos down. Placed them face-down on the desk and stood there with my hands flat on the surface, breathing. Just breathing. Trying to keep the contents of my stomach where they belonged instead of on the floor of this office.
Lydia had asked me to remember her. She'd hidden a note in her mattress because she knew she wasn't going to survive this place and she wanted proof that she'd existed. That she'd been real. That someone would know her name after they erased her.
And I'd spent all this time thinking I'd made her up because that was easier than letting my imagination run wild with what happened to her.
Even in my most depraved dreams, I’d never have thought this was what they did.
They hadn't just killed her. They'd tried to kill the memory of her too, and they'd almost succeeded.
Cam's arm snaked around my waist, steadying me. "We're gonna rain holy hell on these bastards. Make 'em wish they'd never been born."
I leaned into him, and drew strength from his solid presence. "Promise me something?"
"Anything."
"When we find Sister Anne, she's mine. I want to watch the light leave her eyes."
Cam's lips brushed my temple. "Wouldn't have it any other way, sweetheart."
The room started to spin, my vision blurring as tears burned hot tracks down my cheeks. I stumbled, and a wave of nausea hit me so hard I doubled over.
"Fuck," I choked out, unable to separate the pieces of me back into their compartments. They were all swirling, mixing into one giant brown puddle. My stomach heaved, and bile swirled at the back of my throat.
I'd seen some sick shit in my time, hell, I'd done some sick shit.
But this? This was a whole new level of fucked up.
I hadn't cried since I was a kid, and yet I'd lost my head twice since being down here.
The walls closed in around me, forcing me to breathe through a pin hole.
I was trapped in an iron cage, spikes pressing into me, forcing me to collapse in on myself.
The only piece of me still intact was the steel cage I kept my shadow tucked away in.
It was the only thing still holding me together.
The knowledge that I had the power to fight back.
That I was a more than capable killing machine and that with the flick of a switch, I'd never feel a damn thing as I slid my knife underneath the skin and peeled it from their bones.
Cam's hand was on my back, rubbing small circles into my spine, steadying me. "Deep breaths, baby girl. We need you sharp. Don't lose that killer instinct now. Push it out of your mind and breathe. She needs you to be the avenging angel I know you are. You need you."
I nodded, forcing air into my lungs. The images of Lydia, of her baby, kept flashing through my mind, forcing themselves against the corners of my closed eyelids.
Taking another deep breath, my eyes now open, my hands shook as I gathered up the photos and notes. Each image made me want to tear my eyes out, but I forced myself to look at them one last time. To remember every detail of what those bastards had done.
"And from sin we exit, into salvation we go," I muttered, repeating the mantra they'd forced us to say, our knees bleeding from the spiked rugs they made us kneel on. I folded the gruesome evidence back into the envelope.
Cam's eyes were fixed on me, watching every move. "You sure you wanna see what they did to you?" he asked, his voice gruff but laced with a concern only I ever got to hear.
I shot him a look that could've melted silver. "You know me better than that, Axley. I've bathed in the blood of the innocent. Well, innocent-ISH. I wanna know everything."
A slow, dangerous smile spread across Cam's face. "Atta girl.”
I handed him Lydia’s envelope, his hand coming to rest on mine for a brief moment. A silent understanding passed between us, years of shared darkness and twisted loyalty condensed into a single look.
My throat worked as I tried to swallow around the lump that seemed to have grown there. I glanced around the dimly lit room, my gaze finally resting on the second envelope. My name glared back at me in small black letters.
"Fuck," I muttered, running a hand through my hair.
Cam took a step back and leaned against the wall, arms crossed. "Let's see what they carved out of you. Whatever it is, we can figure out something fun for them, repay the kindness, like his holy Saint would do and all that."
I snorted. "Yeah, by leaving a trail of body parts, a cute little limb trail to where we will be waiting."
He smirked, licking his teeth in a savage display. "Is there any other way?"
I reached for my envelope, my fingers trembling slightly. It felt like a fucking anvil in my hands. Whatever was inside, it was gonna mess me up, but I had to know. Had to face whatever sick, twisted things they'd done.
This envelope had my name on it. Not Lakey, Bed 1. My full name. Someone had written it carefully, in neat handwriting, like they were labeling a file they expected to revisit. Like I was someone special.
The thought made my blood run cold and hot at the same time. Cold because of what it meant. Hot because of what I was going to do about it.
"Here goes nothing," I said, turning the envelope over to expose the seal. "Let's see what kind of fucked up surprises these psychos left for me."
Cam couldn't stand still as I stared, unable to make the first move to open it, coming to sit on the office chair just to the left of the desk. He watched me, eyes narrowed as I turned the envelope around in my hands.
Once. Twice. Three times.
I grunted. "Fuck, this is harder than I thought it'd be."
It shouldn't be. I'd killed twenty-eight people. I'd slit throats and watched light leave eyes and dumped bodies off cliffs and slept soundly afterward. But opening an envelope with my name on it in a basement where they'd carved a baby out of my friend was somehow the hardest thing I'd ever done.
Because the bodies I left behind were strangers.
This one was mine.
"C'mere, baby girl, let me help you."