Page 141 of Beneath Her Skin

Positioning the piece of metal on his middle finger, I watched the monitors as he continued his assault on Amara, making her beg him to stop.

Swinging the mallet again, but not as hard, I hit the metal, only severing it halfway.

“F-fuck! Stop! Fucking stop!” Aaron cried out with tears of pain running down his cheeks.

“Stop? STOP?!”

Dropping the mallet, I braced myself on his arm, leaning all my weight onto the metal and used a sawing motion, digging it through the rest of the bone and tissue. The squelching sound of his flesh being sawed into, combined with his screams of pain, made this entire process so worth the wait.

Blinded by my rage, I picked up the strip of metal with both hands and raised it above my head. With all my strength, I forced the edge of the metal down over and over, until his hand was a bloody stump. Each of his fingers was severed during my fit except for his thumb.

“Amara begged you to stop! BEGGED!”

His blood soaked my gloved hand and the metal, making it difficult to get a decent grip. Tossing it to the floor, I stoodin front of Aaron, watching his now pale face fight to stay conscious.

“Oh, don’t tell me you’re giving up already, like your weak ass brother.”

“F-fuck…y-you,” he stammered, as he looked up to glare at me, sweaty and panting.

“You know, I did all this for you,” I said, stepping over Dom’s lifeless body, positioning myself in between his legs, still bound to the wheelchair, and motioning at the monitors behind me. “Drove thirty two fucking hours round trip, just to bring you two useless sacks of shit here for a few hours of pain.” I pulled Aaron’s knife out of its sheath and spun it on my finger with the hole in the handle before slicing down his chest, cutting his shirt. A wet, crimson pool soaked into the shirt and he hissed, trying to hide the pain.

“Three weeks of planning…” Swiping the knife at him again, I sliced in the opposite direction, forming an “x” on his chest.

“Two years of pain because of you…” I swiped yet again, not even paying attention to how or where I was cutting him.

“You took her from me… The only person that ever loved me…” Pressing the knife into his skin on the side of his eye, I dragged it down, putting as much pressure as I could, cutting a deep gash in his face down to his chin.

“I should’ve killed you in Denver, not gone through all this fucking trouble. But I wanted you to fucking suffer. I know all about you, Aaron; I looked into your background the deepest,” I said, pressing the tip of the blade into the front of his shoulder.

He was a bloody mess, his face was covered in warm crimson, leaking and dripping to his soaked, sliced up shirt, to his lap. Bobbing his stupid fucking head, I walked behind him and pulled his head back, just like he did to Amara, positioning the tip of the blade on his neck under the curve of his jaw, blade facing out.

“I know Dom was your real brother, how your mother left you, Sebastian, and Dom on the streets after you tried to kill her for divorcing your father. I know how protective you are of Dom, and how you nurtured him, even though he was non-verbal. But his thoughts were darker than yours, weren’t they? He was the one that tried to kill your mother, not you. Yet you protected him anyway. I know your abuse of women was because the one woman that you truly loved fucked another man. Cheryl, wasn’t it?”

Aaron whimpered, shamelessly sobbing as I put pressure on the knife.

“Trust me when I say that I will kill every one of the remaining Davis “Brothers” and everyone you’ve ever loved. I hope you rot in hell for what you did to Amara; I’ll be seeing you real soon…”

Aaron closed his eyes, and I stabbed the knife through his neck, tearing it out the front like he did to Amara, tossing his head to the side. The force of the knife being ripped from his neck sprayed his blood across the monitors, dripping down the screens, as the image of him doing the same to Amara appeared.

He gurgled, struggling to breathe, and I circled around to his front to watch. I wanted to see that light leave his eyes as he died; I wanted to be the last thing he saw.

As he died, I tossed his knife onto his lap and closed my eyes, savoring the silence.

Turning to face Amara’s dust-covered desk, I sighed.

It was done… It was finally done. Two down, three to go…

9

ALEXIS

Taking a moment to gather myself, I peeled off my first layer of gloves, turning them inside out and dropping them in my duffel bag. Slinging the strap over my shoulder, I pulled out my phone from my pocket, unlocking the doors for my exit.

I stood in the doorway, taking one more glance at a very bloody, very dead Aaron, and scoffed. I quickly unsnapped his knife’s sheath from my belt and tossed it towards his body, landing in the large pool of blood underneath him.

During my short ride in the elevator to the ground floor, I caught my reflection in the polished steel of the elevator doors. It looks like I just stepped out of a horror movie; except, that movie was very, very real.

Tapping a button on my phone, the emergency room exit unlocked, and I stepped out into the crisp three in the morning air.

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