Sicko(79)
I study him over my shoulder, finally slowing my speed down. “Would it have mattered? You wouldn’t have taken a few days off—” I pause, knowing I shouldn’t go there but needing to, to drive my point home. I need Wicked at one-hundred percent when we war, and this one is going to be a cataclysm. “—her life.” I didn’t want to say her name. Fuck, if it was Jade, I’d strangle the vocal cords out of anyone who so much as breathes her name.
Wicked sighs, his defeat heavy in the air. “Yeah. Anyway, she came in. He ordered her to do shit to me and me her. He told me I had to fuck her like she was a lover. It was weird, but nothing new from the shit we had to go through.”
I snort. “Yeah, what like actually fucking a girl this time?” Throwing it out there in the open for the first time left uneasy tension in the space between us, but I didn’t give a fuck. I was done giving this cunt access to my shame. “Brother, what happened between all of us in there doesn’t mean shit.”
Wicked shuffles. “It’s not that. I mean, not the sex. I ain’t fucking gay—”
My hands go up. “—and neither am I! But you and I both know sex is sex.”
Wicked rolls his bottom lip between his teeth. I was fucking with him. None of us touched each other willingly after what he made us do in The Den. We all felt debased. The act in itself was difficult to digest because it’s not my sexual preference, but that’s not what made all of us feel violated. It was the fact that our choice had been taken away. We were no longer ourselves. We built L’artisaniant for two purposes. Well, if I’m being honest, three.
The first, and most important was to take money off rich motherfuckers and put it into the pocket of an underground anonymous misfit group who were about to shred open child trafficking in the US. It was something that Wicked was close to since his sister was taken. She wasn’t a child, but she was young like Jade. The government doesn’t seem to be doing shit, but this group of civilians have split open the seams of some of the most notorious cases around not just the US, but Europe too. Gaining access to files, video footage, photos, and exposing everything through their website while protecting the identity of the children. No one knows who they are. No one. Not even us, and we fund them.
The second, was to draw in Diamond and his sexual methods. Never fucking worked. He never set foot in there. The names of people who entered were always sent to Anonymous, who would check their records. Anyone who came through L’artisaniant that was on their files, we handed over to them. It was a net for sexual predators.
The third, was our own sexual needs. All four of us have a sexual hunger on the same level, only different tastes. We’re selfish bastards like that. Everything that happens in L’artisaniant is above age with consenting adults. Using an exclusive sex club to draw in sexual predators was how we humiliated them, and then furthermore, the money went back into the pockets of the group who was fighting them, who would then spread funds out to the people that they saved.
Wicked ignores me. “It lasted right up until I left. He made me train her, said that’s why I wasn’t to leave when you all did. Said if I tried to leave, he’d kill—” He pauses. “Poppy.” It was the first time I had heard her name since he first told me the story of his sister and how he ended up with Diamond.
Poppy was fourteen when she met Diamond.
She was fifteen when she died.
Wicked thought she died when she was fourteen, but that wasn’t the case at all. Poppy’s story and her last year alive was far more sinister than that. When Wicked found out she was still alive, she was fifteen years old. He tried to save her. With everything inside of him. He couldn’t.
“So I did what he wanted, and Jade seemed to go with it for the most part. I’m going to be honest with you always, Royce. I straight-up thought she was working with Diamond, and that’s why she was allowed in and out. Always looked nice. Well looked after. Wore the most expensive clothes and never took her mask off. Never spoke. We never spoke to each other, and I think we both preferred it that way.”
“What’d you do together…” I take the next turnoff, checking the brothers are still behind me.
“Everything.”
Squeeze.
“He let me go after he said I had completed her training and told me Poppy was already dead and that—” He pauses again and I know the next thing he’s going to say is going to hurt. Anger wraps itself around the next words that come out of his mouth. “Said she was our last meal.”
My blood turns cold, freezing my limbs. I pick up speed again and floor it forward, needing this to kick off. I need to smell blood in the air and the sound of flesh being pounded.
“Sorry, brother.”
“Today’s the fucking day,” he whispers, but I don’t look over at him, wanting to allow him his privacy.
“Today’s the day.”
“Royce,” Wicked says, just as we’re pulling down one of the back streets that leads into an apartment complex that’s situated on the corner of a crossroad intersection in the city.
I bring my eyes to his. This big motherfucker who had his heart taken from him the day his sister died and now walks around as the shell of the man he used to be. “Yeah?” I know I’d kill for him. Die for him. I know I can’t be mad at him for what happened between him and Jade, or that he fucked her at L’artisaniant. If anything, it brings a kind of peace. Could have been anyone fucking her in that Den with Diamond, would have rather it be Wicked. Even if it does make me want to kill the both of them. The two people I would die for make me want to kill them both.