SICK HEART

by Huss, JA

But I absolutely care if people mischaracterize my story to use it in their political agenda.

  Fuck. Politics.

  This is what I think the dubcon thing was about.

  I am not political. I don’t even watch the fucking news. And other than the snow storm that just dumped three feet of snow into my driveway overnight, I have absolutely no idea what is happening in the world right now because I live in the literal middle of nothing.

  Every day of my life I see more cows than people and I don’t own cows, guys. The rancher across the road does. I see more of his cows than I do people in this world on a daily basis.

  I unfollow anyone on my social media that posts about politics. It’s nothing personal, and I don’t unfriend them, I just don’t like the way people are divided right now and politics is the number one way people self-segregate themselves into groups.

  When I go on Instagram I like to look at pictures of crystals, and flowers, and books, and outer space. I like quotes about giving no fucks and Stoicism.

  When I’m on Facebook I hang out in my reader group, Shrike Bikes, where we have a strict no politics rule. I really don’t look at anything else.

  And I do almost nothing on Twitter but post up new release pics or posts about books on sale because Twitter is a cesspool of unavoidable hate. I do not understand how anyone gets joy out of Twitter.

  So if you think this story is part of MY political agenda, you’re wrong.

  That’s your political agenda speaking, not mine. Because I don’t have one.

  I write stories that make people question things because if I do have an agenda (and I don’t – I refuse to be invested in changing people’s minds about their world view), then my agenda would be question everything.

  That’s it. That’s what I stand for.

  Question. Everything.

  Don’t just accept what you are told. Go find the answers for yourself.

  And I know that this EOBS won’t change anyone’s mind, but I’ve said my piece about it and everyone gets a chance to hear my point of view.

  Not one damn thing about what I have written in this book can be misconstrued. It has all been spelled out for you.

  Either you are the type of reader who wants to lie about my motivations so they fit your world view, or you’re not. I already wrote that EOBS in Bossy Jesse. And trust me, the mean bitches came out of the floorboards like cockroaches to put that EOBS down after it was published. You can see these sad, unhappy people on display anywhere reviews are written. They don’t even realize how sad they are. They just keep throwing hate anywhere they can to make themselves feel special, and better, and “worthy”.

  But that’s got nothing to do with me.

  That’s all them.

  So who gives a fuck.

  Thank you for reading, thank you for reviewing, and I’ll see you in the next book!

  Julie

  JA Huss

  March 15, 2021

  I had written a whole other End of Book Shit about some other points in the story before I got this ridiculous dubcon ‘feedback’. So I’m gonna paste that below so you can read it. But I’m not gonna put that part in the audiobook version because even though I like what it says, I don’t want to say those words out loud anymore. This EOBS I wrote above is the “true” End of Book Shit and what happened to my story between writing that first one and this one is the only thing that matters.

  So here’s the first EOBS:

  Welcome to the End of Book Shit. If you’re new here, this is the part of the book where I get to say anything I want and just generally write about the story and process. I don’t really edit this, so ignore the typos. And normally I write these very last minute. Usually a day or two before publication, but I’m writing this on February 18, 2021 because the manuscript needs to be somewhere tomorrow and I actually have no idea when this book will release.

  Sick Heart.

  I came up with the title of this book over a year ago and it was on my schedule to be written like 6 times and it never got done. I had made the first cover long before I ever started writing it. I had made the second cover long before I started writing it. And this cover it released with is the third design. That’s how long this book sat on my “to be written” list.

  I finally started writing it in August of 2020, but I was also trying to finish up the final Bossy Brothers book and the final Harem Station book, so it got set aside for several months before I went back to it in January 2021.

  So this book took me a while. And when I started it I had plans to write a MMA fighter book. Probably enemies to lovers. The girl was the daughter of a man who did horrible things to the hero when he was a small child. And the hero was a major dick to this girl because she was his revenge plan. It was going to be very “on trope”. Very enemies to lovers/captive romance.

  Obviously, that’s not how it really turned out. Though most of that is still in this story and there are dark undertones floating around in the background, it’s not a dark book at all. I think it’s actually one of the most romantic books I’ve ever written.

  There is a lot of violence, for sure. But learning to fight and taking your hits as you do that is a very different type of violence. I definitely didn’t set out to write a “learn to fight” book. And that’s not what Sick Heart is.

  Sick Heart is just a love story about two people who each control only one thing in their lives.

  Speech.

  And they don’t need to learn to fight. They’ve been fighting for so long, it’s now second nature.

  Anya was already a warrior. She was just different kind of warrior.

  And Cort’s heart wasn’t really sick, he just turned it off to survive.

  This is the point, I think.

  Because people often say I write dark books. But you know what? That’s not really accurate. I mean, some of them are definitely dark. But I don’t actually write books about dark things or people.

  I write books about survivors of dark circumstances.

  Every single dark book I’ve ever written was about survivors.

  I first started writing books about the global dark underworld in 2013. Tragic started out about an abused girl running away. Manic was a little glimpse into her ordeal. And Panic was her coming to terms with the fact that she willingly took part in something very dark and disturbing. And back in 2013 I was hesitant to put in the stuff about human trafficking.

  Not because it was dark and disturbing.

  I didn’t want to put it in there because I didn’t think people would believe it.

  Because I didn’t believe it. I really didn’t think this shit was happening.

  Modern-day slavery? A global network of slave traders? WTAF are you talking about?

  This was my worldview at the time. So I was pretty uncomfortable putting human trafficking into that series.

  But in it went. And… well. The story kept going. And since the human trafficking was already in there, I kinda had to see it through.

  I would just like to stop here and say I’m a little bit into the conspiracy stuff. BUT – and this is a HUGE BUT – my interest was always just about aliens.

  lol

  Like, for real, that’s as far as it went for me. I am so in to Ancient Aliens—because I’m actually a science nerd and I want explanations for all the weird shit on this planet we can’t explain. I am simply a seeker of truth. Most of you already know this about me. And a lot of you have probably read my Junco Sci-Fi series. So that was the totality of my interest in conspiracy theories. All that other shit about Kennedy, and 911, and what have you – that shit could all go fuck itself.

  I just didn’t care.

  But now I was stuck in this new world of human trafficking and there was no way to back out, so I just went with it. I made up child assassins and a global shadow government called the Company. And listen, of course I knew that there was a conspiracy theory already floating around out there about the global shadow government, right? It’s called the
New World Order and I didn’t invent it. I just didn’t believe in it.

  But that’s why it’s called fiction, so whatever.

  I kept going.

  And it was fun. Good god, who doesn’t love James Fenici? Right? I loved writing the Company books. Little Sasha Cherlin. Harper and Nick Tate. A little sprinkle of my man, Ford.

  Those were some good times.

  But then… then I wrote a book called Meet Me in the Dark and that’s where shit got a little too real for me. Because even though it’s really hard to find evidence for all these wacky conspiracy theories, there is some hard, damning evidence of a little US government program called MK-Ultra.

  They fucked with people’s heads.

  This was a real thing.

  And when I discovered that, I didn’t even know what to do with that information. I just finished the book and did my best to forget about it.

  But it was there. I’ve written this sentence in books at least three times – Once you know things, you can’t un-know them.

  So once I knew that this mind-fuck shit was real, well… my imagination took off and I’ve been running with it ever since.

  And that’s all fine. There is a market out there for romantic conspiracy stories. Obviously. I’ve done pretty well with these books.

  But the reason I bring this up is to highlight my journey of acceptance. Right?

  In the Rook & Ronin series I came to terms with the fact that human trafficking exists.

  In Meet Me in the Dark I accepted that mind-control programs—whether effective or not—were something the US government was in to.

  I didn’t really believe there was a Company out there, but I was exploring what it might feel like to be caught up in it using fiction.

  And in order to keep writing about these characters and this world, I had to keep going. I had to dig a little deeper each time I started a new spin off.

  The Misters was about the corrupt media.

  The Dirty Ones was about the corrupt elite.

  Three, Two, One was about a sex cult.

  In To Her was about underground crime syndicates.

  Bossy Brothers was about information warfare.

  Bully King and Ruling Class were about secret rituals.

  Creeping Beautiful is about living on the ‘inside’.

  And when it finally came time to write Sick Heart I remember sitting down and asking myself… OK. Where can these assholes hide where no one can see what they’re up to? Because if I’m gonna write a story about an underground MMA fighting ring where every fight is a death match, not even these smug, uber-elite assholes can do this in the open.

  And by this time (summer 2020) we’re neck-deep in our very own “dystopian future” filled with corporate data-mining, and facial recognition cameras on every corner in big cities, and social media trying to control the world via access to information.

  So where can ‘they’ hide where I haven’t (fictionally) found them yet?

  And the answer, of course, is the ocean.

  I have set books on many a private island. That’s no longer even interesting, I’ve done it so much. And the idea that the super-elite use private islands for nefarious things such as human trafficking isn’t even in question anymore. Epstein and Maxwell are real-life sick fucks who made the news and now we know, right? Now we know this shit is real.

  So, I wasn’t going to put the fights on an island.

  I have always been kind of fascinated with offshore oil rigs. They don’t look very big when you see a picture of them, but they are huge and often hold hundreds of people. And the life of an off-shore oil-rig worker is very non-traditional. I’m not going to get into it too much because it’s all beside the point. I didn’t put the fights on the rigs, I put them on the installation ships because these ships are floating cities and they live under different rules than the rest of us. This is the part of these conspiracy stories that I like to explore.

  The ship in the beginning of the book is modeled after a real oil-rig-installation ship called Pioneering Spirit and it is largest ship ever built (as I write this).

  This ship is part of the reason this book took so long because in order to write that first fight scene I had to look at videos of the inside, kinda learn how the cranes operate, and how the ballasts work. I needed to know what the inside of the command center looked like and I had to get a general idea of what it was like to be on this ship, so I scoured websites that hire people to get a feel for cabins and watched recruiting videos. I needed to know all kinds of shit about this stupid ship before I could get past that opening fight sequence.

  But get this… the things you find when you go looking are fucking weird. I had never heard of Pioneering Spirit when I started this book. I did a basic Google search for “Largest ship in the world” and this thing just popped up. And I didn’t give any fucks at all about who owned the ship or how it got its name, I just wanted to see some freaking pics and vid of this thing so I could model my fictional ship after it.

  But I wanted to give you guys a little information about the ship for the EOBS so I did a little post-book research just twenty minutes ago and it turns out that this Pioneering Spirit ship is owned by a company, which is owned by a man whose father was a Waffen-SS Nazi and was linked to another company that used slave laborers for the Nazi war effort. And the owner of the company that built the Pioneering Spirit originally named the ship after his father, the Nazi, but naming a ship that had the attention of the entire world after a Nazi caused a “controversy”, so it got changed to Pioneering Spirit.

  There’s that saying, right? You can’t make this up. I most definitely *could* make this up, but I don’t need to. This is real.

  I run into these coincidences when I write these stories all the time (See the End of Book Shit for Mr. Match for proof). I didn’t know any of this when I started the book. And I swear to God, the longer I write these crazy books set in the dark underground world of absolute shit-bag people, the more I realize that truth is stranger than fiction.

  My big revelation in 2013 was the idea that people are bought and sold like animals.

  Right now, somewhere on this planet, there are slave traders buying and selling human beings.

  This is a fact.

  And my new revelation when it came time to write Sick Heart was so much worse than just “humans” being trafficked.

  It was children.

  That’s the dark side of Sick Heart.

  But again, this book isn’t about trafficking. It’s not about the abuse Anya or Cort dealt with as children. It’s not about any of that.

  Of course, all that stuff matters.

  But then again, none of it matters when you’re living it. Because if you’re living with it, the only thing that matters is that you survive.

  My stories are about surviving.

  Sick Heart is about all the ways in which you fight.

  It’s about all the things you do to cope.

  It’s about coming to terms with who you are, and what you’ve done, and then taking a stand for yourself, and hopefully, others like you.

  And I know there are readers out there who will leave me a review and say this book is dark. And they’re just wrong.

  This book is about HOPE.

  And if their lives are so damn perfect that they can’t relate to the world my characters live in, then good for them.

  Not everyone is that lucky.

  So that’s my story.

  And I’m sticking to it.

  I hope you enjoyed Sick Heart. I fell in love with these people and I left the ending open for a book two, but we’ll see how that goes. Also—fun fact—this is the longest book I’ve ever written and comes in at just under 130,000 words. An average romance novel is about 70,000 words so… you got your money’s worth with this one, unicorns!

  Anyway, thank you for reading, thank you for reviewing, and I’ll see you in the next book.

  P. S. If you’d like to know how all my stories c
onnect, you can find that info on the next few pages.

  JA Huss

  February 18, 2021

  Sick Heart is a standalone book. None of the characters who appear in this story can be found in any other story I’ve written. (yet). :)

  But if you want to know the complete story of this world from start to finish, here are all the related books and characters (with ages).

  Rook and Ronin Series

  The entire Company beginnings start in this series. But each series is its own entry point. You can jump in and read them out of order as long as you follow the specific series reading order.

  Tragic

  Manic – Vaughn Family and Sick Boyz appear here.

  Panic – Vaughn Family and Sick Boyz appear here.

  Ford – Sasha Cherlin (age 12) and Merc first appear here

  Spencer – James Fenici first appears here – Five is born, Vaughn Family and Sick Boyz appear here.

  The Company - Rook & Ronin Spin-offs

  New entry point into the series. This is the true beginning of the shadow government called The Company.

  The Company – James and Vincent Fenici age 28, Sasha Cherlin age 13, Nick and Harper Tate age 18. This is the full story of the “Santa Barbara Incident” where Adam and Donovan’s fathers die (Creeping Beautiful).

  Meet Me In The Dark – Merc, Sasha Cherlin age 21, Sydney Channing (Company Girl like Indie and Sasha)

  Three, Two, One – STANDALONE BOOK – Jax Barlow first appears

  Wasted Lust – Sasha Cherlin, age 24, with Jax Barlow.

  Nick Tate, age 29, plays a major role and the rest of the Company characters also show back up. First appearance of Angelica Fenici and “other Adam”. Wasted Lust takes place DURING Creeping Beautiful. Specifically when Indie is 15 years old and the “Company falls” and when Nick meets Adam in Daphne, Alabama. Vaughn Family and Sick Boyz appear here.