“You asked me if I loved you the other day and I wanted you to know, I don’t know what love is. No one’s ever loved me. I’m not even sure if I believe in it. But if there was anyone that could make me, it would be you. I love chocolate. I love dick. And whatever I feel for you trumps both without any question.” It wasn’t some deep proclamation. I couldn’t force myself to vomit flowery words out of my mouth, but it was something.
Whatever I felt for him was overwhelming. It consumed me. He was all I could think about no matter what I was doing. I wanted to say it was love, because what else would it be?
What I felt for Tilly, who was really a lying bitch named Tiffany, wasn’t even on the stratosphere of what I felt for him.
He didn’t say anything for what felt like hours, staring like I hadn’t just made myself vulnerable. My brain told me to backtrack. This was Romero, the man that took pride in turning the Badlands into his own personal hell. Did I really just confess to wanting to love him when I didn’t know the real definition of the word?
I wished I’d had a mother around to teach me how these things worked.
It was bad enough realizing how damn sheltered I’d always been from the real world.
It was hard going about life when I’d been left to figure it all out on my own.
“I don’t know how to do this. I’ve never...I’m sorry.”
“Don’t fucking apologize. You haven’t done anything wrong.” He pulled his hands free and his arms wrapped around my waist.
“I don’t believe in any of that love at first sight bullshit—I don’t know what the fuck love is, either—but ever since you looked at me with those big blue eyes, I’ve been fucking positive you’re my soul mate.
“You’re mine, I’m yours. It’s that fucking simple, baby. We can figure everything else out together.”
“Together.” I confirmed, trying to contain the ridiculous grin ready to explode across my face.
“Ugh, this is over the top cheesy. I feel like you should call me a slut, bend me over the desk and then fuck me so we’re normal again.”
He let out one of his rare laughs and it warmed my entire being. I could sit and stare at him for hours on end but when he laughed or truly smiled, I was completely captivated.
“You and I will never be normal, but if you want to be a slut, get down on your knees and wrap your lips around my dick.”
I smirked and did just that, sinking down to the carpet.
It took me a full minute to free him from his jeans with no assistance. I gripped his dick in my hand and stroked with my thumb. It was soft and smooth, encased in a patch of dark hair.
With the tip of my finger, I traced a circle around his barbell and then down a vein. He twitched against my palm.
“Cali, stop teasing me and suck my dick before I choke you with it.”
Biting my cheek so I didn’t laugh, I looked up at him and without further preamble, I swirled my tongue around his tip before swallowing him whole.
He made a sound in his throat and tangled a hand in my hair. I wrapped both my hands around his base and worked them up and down in succession with my mouth, toying with his piercing every time I glided up.
“Just like that. You look beautiful with my dick in your mouth.” I felt the muscles in his thighs tense. His grip on my locks grew tighter the faster I worked and harder I sucked.
He started fucking my mouth, forcing me to repeatedly deep throat, holding my head in place. I let go of his dick and gripped his thighs to keep myself up.
Doing my best not to gag and choke on the saliva rapidly building up and running down my chin, I slurped what I could, occasionally coughing around him, feeling the rest coat his balls. My eyes watered and spilled over. I sucked harder as he thrust down my throat.
He didn’t warn me before he came. The only sign I had was the hair along my scalp feeling like it was about to rip out and his dick jerking a second before his semen coated my taste buds.
I caught and swallowed every last creamy drop, flicking my tongue out just to be sure I’d milked him bone dry. His dick left my mouth with a wet pop.
I rolled my lips together, watching him tuck it back in his pants, and wiped my saliva drenched hands on my jeggings.
In the blink of an eye, he had me on my feet and his mouth on mine, no doubt tasting himself. Not seeming to care, he cupped my ass and pulled me into him, nipping my lower lip.
When he finally pulled away, his forehead rested against mine and he held my face in his hands.
I dared imagine a future with him, something I’d never had the guts to do because happily ever after wasn’t meant for girls like me.
Regardless, whatever happened, I knew walking away from him wasn’t an option.
I wasn’t ever letting him go, even when keeping him meant I’d soon be standing beside him in a war where I would be forced to partake in a bloodbath, fully embracing the dirty twisted bitch he always saw me as.
Part Two
So if the devil ever asks you to dance,
You better say never,
because a dance with the devil may last you forever.
-IMMORTAL TECHNIQUE-
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
It looked like something out of an apocalyptic film.
Me and Arlen had matching facial expressions as we eyed the monstrous machines in front of us.
“When did you do this?” I asked, glancing over to where Romero stood.
“I had it done the day you got here,” he responded absentmindedly, shoving the last duffel bag into the hatch.
It was still the same jeep he’d always had; it’d just undergone some drastic changes.
There was a flood bar on top. The already large tires had been swapped out for a set of larger ones that slightly extended away from the frame. An identical jeep was parked behind it, loaded and ready to go.
There were seven of us in total. Cobra and Grimm had been helping Romero. Arlen stood by my side, Dhal and the green eyed man I’d seen the night before who I now knew was named Bryce, stood off to the side.
The sun beat down on us remorselessly as Romero gave some last minute instructions to Cobra, who would be riding in the second jeep with Dhal and Bryce.
“This is like the start of a bad fuckin joke. Five psychopaths, a redneck and a fugitive go on a road trip,” Arlen mumbled.
“Let’s go,” Romero called out before I could ask her who the fugitive was.
“Come on.” I lightly touched her elbow and made my way towards the jeep.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Romero demanded, slamming the door shut just as I pulled it open. “You sit in the front.” He took hold of my forearm and walked me around to the other side, and then all but placed me in the passenger seat himself.
Arlen climbed in behind his seat and Grimm sat behind me for more leg room. Within seconds, we were on the road heading to wherever our destination was.
“No entourage of followers?” I asked, getting myself comfortable.
“They’re called acolytes, and they’ll be around soon enough.”
I hummed, staring out the window as we headed down a long empty road that had no end in sight. I peeked in the side mirror and saw Cobra was behind the wheel of the other jeep.
“What’s the deal with the girl and Bryce?” Arlen asked, slightly leaning forward.
“Bryce is someone I know I can rely on to keep Cali safe, regardless of what’s going on around us. And think of Dhal as a midwife.”
“Midwife?” we said at the same time.
If Arlen was caught off guard by Romero knowing I was knocked up, she didn’t show it. Grimm didn’t react at all, which could only mean he’d already known, or that not even that bombshell could crack his stone demeanor.
“I wanted someone around who wasn’t a stranger and knew about babies and shit. She’s helped her mom deliver a few.”
Honestly I didn’t give two fucks who wanted to play doctor, as long as they knew what they were doing and Baby S made it from utero
to my arms. It was the principle I needed to shine a spotlight on.
“You didn’t think to tell me any of this? Like, hours ago?” I questioned.
“You didn’t ask, like, hours ago.” He retorted. “I plan my shit meticulously, you know that.”
“Glad you’ve got it all figured out then, dickhead.”
“I always do.”
“Asshole,” I muttered, leaning my elbow on the window frame.
He chuckled darkly. “Keep talking shit, Cali. I won’t be driving forever.”
Rolling my eyes to the sky, I turned the radio on and let the voice of Otep fill the silence.
After what felt like hours had gone by, a weathered sign that read: “Welcome to the city of Woeford” appeared up ahead.
I’d been half asleep up until that point. It wasn’t the sky towers covered in moss, or the vision of a place that had once thrived that caught my attention and woke me up.
It was the smell gently blowing on the wind. The smell of death was so potent it burned my nose hairs and coated my tongue. The closer we got, the worse it became.
Death was an everyday occurrence in the Badlands. Whatever was causing this odor wasn’t.
“The fuck is that?” Arlen coughed out. from the corner of my eye, I saw her lift her shirt over her nose.
“There’s chaos in the streets. You’re about to see a whole lot of bodies and blood,” Romero answered.
No sooner had those words fallen from his lush lips and the jeep coasted into the mouth of city did his words drive home.
I could handle the stench of death. It was a sweet aroma that brought an air of comfort with it. Death signified the end; it was final. When death snatched a life away, she never gave it back. To me, that was beautiful.
What I was not a fan of was corpses that had been baking in the heat at a temperature of eighty-seven degrees.
Blood coated the sides of buildings, old store-fronts, and shards of windows that hadn’t been able to handle the carnage and shattered. It spread through the cracks and crevices of the sidewalk and steamed on the asphalt.
Mangled bodies lay at odd angles, some so loaded with bullet holes you could see right through them.
“What…who…why did this happen?” Arlen asked.
“We’re at fucking war,” Grimm answered. “This isn’t the only place like this. Shit, this is happening all over the place.”
There were bodies of acolytes, delegates, and outliers. That didn’t make sense to me. Why would the outliers be involved in this?
The number of bodies lessened in some parts of the city than in others. One thing that was consistent was the silence.
“And David did all this because he wants Cali back?” Arlen implored, sliding across the back seat as Romero swerved around a woman with half her white mask smashed into her face.
“David started this because I made him believe in an alliance that was never going to happen, made him think he would get everything he wanted and then made a very public display that said he could go fuck himself,” Romero explained evenly. “I started this motherfucker and it’s going to be one helluva ride to end it.”
“Ave fucking Satanas,” Grimm said cheerfully.
“See, you just did a good job showin some emotion,” Arlen cooed.
“I’d do an even better job at showing you how good I can make you feel.”
“Yeah, I’m gonna take a good hard pass on that, reaper,” she spat back at him.
My laugh was cut short when Romero pulled a round black object with yellow trim—which I initially thought was a walkie-talkie— out of his pocket. The screen and the numbered keyboard gave away the fact that he had a phone.
“What is that?!”
“Are you really asking me a question you already know the answer to?”
“How long have you had a fucking phone?”
“Years. A lot of people have phones, Cali. How do you think we’ve been communicating? We don’t send up fucking bat symbols.”
“He’s right,” Arlen interjected. “People inside the Kingdom are attached to the fuckers.”
I glanced back at her and she shrugged. That was the second time she’d alluded to her past with no hesitation, and neither Grimm nor Romero reacted. I was beginning to feel like I was the only one who didn’t know what it was.
“I don’t know what a bat symbol is. And I didn’t grow up like that.”
Grimm muttered under his breath and Arlen frowned at me. I tried to think back on all the times David would shut himself inside his ‘sanctuary’ and then start speaking when he was supposedly alone. That was obviously why.
Romero hit a button a few times and then slid the rugged cell back into his pocket.
“So what did you do?”
He nodded his head, indicating I should look straight instead of answering me with words.
Peering through the windshield, I watched as an armored luxury SUV pulled out ahead of us from a side street. The Sigil of the Baphomet stared back at me from the rear window. Checking my side mirror, I saw another coming up behind Cobra’s jeep.
I had so many fucking questions. Not about who was in the SUV’S; that was obvious. I wanted to know how he had access to all this shit. I wasn’t sure he would answer me, though. If he kept something as simple as a goddamn cellular from me, what else was he comfortably leaving me in the dark about? Every time I thought we were making some leeway, he knocked me right back down again.
He made his next turn behind the SUV and started down a street that was littered with bodies.
“It looks like a fuckin genocide,” Arlen breathed, rolling up her window.
“I don’t have the patience for this shit,” Romero stated, accelerating to go faster.
“Ew, Rome. What the fuck?” I yelled, as a barrage of audible crunches filled the air and the jeep began to dip up and down. You could hear skulls being completely flattened and bones getting crushed as he drove right over them. The other three vehicles were doing the same.
He laughed under his breath as we bumped along.
“We’re almost at the center. We’ll be through after that,” he explained.
I nodded, barely dodging a spray of blood that flew up the side of my door. I reached up and grabbed the safety handle to ground my ass on the seat.
The smell was terrible. I did my best not to breathe in and out without gagging. Expecting the center to be even worse, I was surprised to see it was almost barren, which I soon saw was done on purpose to give full attention to the three bodies strung up around a grime covered fountain.
Romero stopped and nodded his head as if confirming something.
I looked over the two men and one woman in partial confusion. There were three people from each group.
“Remember that display I was talking about?” Romero asked without waiting for me to answer.
“I hung an outlier, an acolyte, and killed one of David’s delegates. This is their response.
“When I said they were either with me or against me, some began turning on their own people to align with me. I was too lenient and wound up with some fucking roaches at my dinner table. Now, for every person I find that’s been compromised, I replace them with someone that’s proven themselves.
“Do you know how valuable it is to have people ready to tell you anything about another group? I have eyes and ears everywhere.”
Glancing over at him, I met his gaze. He was keeping shit from me and letting me in. Nothing with this man came easy or uncomplicated.
“What incentive do you give these people? And how do you know they aren’t being planted?” I asked.
Grimm took over and explained. “He doesn’t have to give them a damn incentive. They do it on their own. None of them know about the benefits until they’re already in. Like he said, we don’t just let anyone decide they can be a Savage.
“We have…well, they don’t have a title. Let’s just say we have group leaders to keep track of everyone and make sure they fit the bill. Don�
�t ask what that entails. These are people who have been around a long time.”
“So they do this just because?” Arlen jumped in and asked, earning a sigh from Romero.
“When you live in an eternal hell, your ass better make nice with the devil and his advocates,” Grimm stated. “All those people at Cali’s initiation would follow him anywhere. It’s better to believe in something than nothing at all, and when you are a sick fuck like us, it’s nice to know you’re not alone.”
Ugh, the initiation. I hadn’t even known that’s what was happening. When you have goat blood raining down on you and a group of masked men standing over you saying a satanic chant, your mind is too busy wondering what the fuck is happening to pause and take a headcount.
But that was at least a hundred people, and those people would have friends and families, and then their friends would have the same. The chain was never ending.
“This is what they’ve been doing to our people…using them to send a message back.” I looked over at the three corpses, studying each one.
The delegate had been de-robed, a practice David came up with when he wanted someone shamed and killed or someone announced leaving The Order. He was naked, an inverted cross carved straight down his torso so deeply his guts were spilling out.
From my vantage point, I could see larvae wriggling all over them as flies picked at the rest and flew in and out of where his ears used to be.
The woman beside him was missing half her bottom jaw and tongue.
The acolyte had two empty eye sockets beneath a cracked mask. Crows perched on his shoulders and plucked at what was left behind, their beaks covered in blood and bits of flesh from feasting on all three of them.
“Hear no evil, they slice off their ears. See no evil, they remove their eyes. Speak no evil, they cut out their tongues. They usually leave a few words about sin and Satan. Guess they ran out of room,” Grimm deadpanned. “Some people just don’t know how to lose.”
I didn’t know what he meant until a little after Romero hit the gas and took off again. The same flag I’d seen on the stoplight was hung on the side of a building.
Deviants Page 12
