by Lyra Evans
Frowning, Niko settled into his seat for the drive ahead. The jungle-forest sprayed a speckled trail of unusual growth along the highway, indicating the bulk of the trees were up ahead. They would be driving directly into it. Few locations served as better defense than the thick and often unpredictable nature of the jungle-forest.
“Seems you already know all the relevant information,” Niko shot, eyeing his speedometer. The skin of his hands and arms felt itchy.
“Forgive me, I was apparently under the delusion we were meant to share information on this case,” he said evenly, and Niko gritted his teeth. Shooting Cobalt a sidelong look, he found the Selkie gazing back at him with an expressionless mask.
Swearing inwardly, Niko bit back his instinct to tell Cobalt to fuck off. The last thing he needed was an earful from the Captain on inter-Court cooperation at this ‘crucial political juncture.’
“Sade was the leader of the sex trafficking ring I was put undercover to crack,” Niko said, his grip on the wheel ever tighter. His knuckles went white. “He’s a cruel and brutal fucker. Abused pretty much all of the victims he trafficked. Didn’t tolerate mistakes or disloyalty. He made a lot of money picking up freelance prostitutes and runaways and addicts and selling them. The healthiest and most attractive victims, Sade kept. He’d rent them out to clients, but he wouldn’t sell them outright until they became what he called ‘damaged.’ Permanent scars were one way to get sold. Trying to escape or talking to cops was another. Those that tried to trade away their ability to feel pain tended to get forced into a deal with him, then sold to the worst buyer Sade could find.”
Cobalt was silent for a while, considering all this. Niko reviewed the memories in his head with cold distance, like a government worker flipping through tax files. It had been a while since he’d allowed himself to feel anything in regards to the faces who came and went while he’d been undercover as Kiran. Kiki. He swallowed the instinctual gagging.
When Cobalt did speak again, it was to ask something Niko was unprepared for. “How do sex traffickers even exist in a Court where the sale of sex is legal?”
Niko blanked a moment, staring down the stretch of black asphalt ahead as though seeing it for the first time. He blinked away the confusion, then thought on the question itself. Niko wished he could go back to a time when he never thought of those things, of Fae bought and sold and used and abused by people with too much money and too few scruples. Or maybe it was empathy they lacked. Or both.
“Prostitution, if you’re part of the union, is legal in Maeve’s Court,” Niko said. “But purchasing another sentient living being is not. And while Maeve’s Court is far more open and welcoming to individual kinks than the other Courts, there are still limits to what is acceptable. For instance, minors are off-limits. The age of consent is sixteen for sex, but workers have to be twenty-one to be employed in a pleasure club. There are also strict rules for health concerns and the protection of workers in the more dangerous pleasure clubs, such as the ones focused around pain play, dominance and submission, humiliation, and erotic asphyxiation, to name a few. They’re regulated to ensure everyone is safe while practicing their kinks. There are also strict rules surrounding health checks for the workers, use of protection spells and potions, and trade-kink. That’s when someone’s kink is to force magical trades on a sexual partner. Without regulation, that can get dangerous very fast.” Niko had seen some gruesome forced trades in his time, and the perpetrators generally ended up in Sluagh. “Unfortunately, there’s still a market for non-consensual acts and torture. And snuff. It all still exists. So sex traffickers make money selling to those people.”
Shock silenced Cobalt for a long moment, and Niko tried not to think about what he’d just said. He had been in those rings, seen it all in person, and they hadn’t managed to arrest everyone. Sure, they’d arrested Sade and his gang and gotten the victims in Sade’s keeping out. But apparently they’d arrested some of the victims too, as evidenced by Starla’s experience. And a handful of buyers were caught up in the raid, but most of them had gotten away. Sade never turned them over, and he was the only one who had all the names. Niko had done what he could to help track them down, with the information he’d collected, but the buyers had not been his primary target. Sade was. So as they drove to question Sade in prison, there were monsters roaming free in the Three Courts, buying people and doing horrifying things to them.
When Cobalt gathered himself, he said, “And what was your role in this?” He turned to face Niko, his eyes burning into Niko’s cheek, but Niko stared determinately out at the stretch of empty road. “What part did you have to play?”
Chewing on his cheek a moment, Niko wrung at the steering wheel, remembering the day he’d been brought to Sade in painful detail.
“I had to get as close to Sade as possible, and that didn’t leave many options,” he said, skirting the question.
Cobalt shifted in his seat. “Were you one of his enforcers? One of his lieutenants?”
Niko almost laughed, but there was a churning in his gut that made it hard to do so. He wasn’t ashamed of what he’d had to do. He wasn’t ashamed of his work undercover. But telling Cobalt was different, somehow. Laying the words flat out for someone who didn’t already know was like painting an incomplete portrait and asking them to understand.
“I needed him to trust me,” Niko said. “Or at least, trust that I couldn’t betray him. He had a handful of lieutenants, and all of them had come up with him. And even then, even after years together, he didn’t fully trust a one of them. No, there was really only one way in.”
Cobalt thought on that for a while. Niko grew increasingly uncomfortable the longer it took him to vocalize it. He shifted in his seat, his muscles growing sore. It wasn’t lack of comprehension stopping Cobalt from saying the words out loud. It was an inability to believe them.
“You went in as a victim?” Cobalt asked. Niko heard the disbelief in his voice, the surprise. He knew the questions and thoughts running through Cobalt’s mind because the same ones had run through his own mind when he’d been asked to take the case.
“I knew what I was getting into,” Niko said, a mite defensively. “The only new people into Sade’s orbit were what he termed ‘merchandise.’ That and, very rarely, buyers. But he didn’t trust buyers with information. The only people to see the inner-workings of his operation were the victims because they were part of it. And I fit a particular type.”
The outfit they had dressed Niko in was meant to put him on display without making him look as though he was trying to seduce anyone. He had to look like an addict and a transient. So they put him in a cropped tank top, torn unevenly to display his stomach, and a pair of ripped, faded jeans that hung low and hugged his body tightly. His eyes had been black rimmed, his hair dishevelled and shaved on one side. And they’d given him the slightest stain on his lips to amplify their colour, making them look swollen and raw. He’d been given a set of miscellaneous tattoos to cover the very real runemarks branded into his skin to protect him from some basic dangers. He’d been made invulnerable to drugs, so he could take injections and do lines without ever worrying about the effect on his body, a standard rune to protect from transmittable diseases, and another rune to track deals. In case something had been done to him without his knowledge or consent. They promised to undo anything that might have happened to him when he came back. But they couldn’t undo everything.
“Sade’s type,” Cobalt said quietly, coming to understand. Niko nodded.
“Turns out he likes skinny Fae boys with attitude problems and too much confidence,” Niko said flatly. “And dark hair.” He shook out his midnight blue locks and took the awkward turn ahead smoothly. They were finally breaking into the jungle-forest, and the road was now both empty and significantly less straight.
“So they put you in there hoping he’d want to fuck you?” Cobalt asked, shaking his head. The atmosphere in the car had shifted somewhat while Niko re-examined his memories. It
was brittle, buzzing, as though a hornet’s nest lingered in the backseat. “How does that gain his trust?”
Niko’s expression went flat, as it often did when he thought back over what followed from the moment he was dumped into Sade’s dank dungeon of a property. He’d been part of a group of five or so new ‘recruits.’ That was what they had called them, anyway, despite the fact that they’d been rounded up with false promises of care and easy jobs for steady pay. Niko had been forced to linger on the streets in the darkest parts of Maeve’s Court for four days before Sade’s people tried to pick him up. And the moment Sade had walked up to him, Niko on his knees with his hands tied behind his back, he knew their gambit had paid off. Sade’s eyes had been—hungry. Ravenous. And he hadn’t bothered giving the other four victims a second glance once Niko was in front of him.
“Sade didn’t fall into sex trafficking by accident,” Niko said, every word as emotionless as he could make it. “And he didn’t find his buyers on any online forum. People like that don’t advertise their interests where they can be caught. He knew these people because he was one of them. He had particular interests, and he found he liked to test the ‘merchandise’ to see who was capable of withstanding what. He went through a number of victims before me. They all broke eventually. I—” Niko hesitated, all emotional connection to the experience draining from him. With an empty voice, he said, “I did not.”
“Did he—” Cobalt began, weighing out his words. Niko pushed his back into the driver’s seat, as though trying to push through it. His throat was thick, but there was no water in the car to wash away what was stuck there. “Did he force you into a deal?”
Niko’s head moved narrowly side to side, every action like the scrape of a screwdriver stripping a screw. “Not Sade’s particular kink. He liked a more—physical—approach.”
His mind went back to Sade’s hand in his hair, gripping tightly and dragging Niko up by his scalp. Niko had never been treated so roughly in one motion, and his blood pumped hard through his body. But he hadn’t known, just yet, to what end. He couldn’t anticipate, then, that he would like it. Sade dragged him from the cement room, up stairwell after stairwell until he made it to what Niko later came to know as Sade’s playroom. He threw Niko down against the contraption inside the room. Like a table with strategic holes and cut-outs, it was steel and hard and extremely unforgiving. Niko’s heart beat so fast he was nearly out of breath as Sade bound him to the strange table. He’d let Sade bind him there. He’d allowed it. He could have fought back at any time, but he didn’t. Barely.
Niko took a hard right, jostling them in the car more than he needed to. His heart was beating a rhythm too fast for sitting in a car. He needed to regain control. To calm down. He would be fine. He was fine.
“How could the police department ask this of you? Of anyone? How could they send you in there to get ra—”
Niko cut Cobalt off sharply, his expression dangerous, edged in knives and flame. “I could have stopped it at any moment,” he said, and Cobalt’s clear eyes became momentarily clouded by something Niko couldn’t understand just then. “I was in control of the assignment. If I had stopped it, we wouldn’t have been able to dismantle his whole operation. Save the victims we did.”
Cobalt shook his head slowly, gently. In a quiet, even voice, he said, “I never meant to devalue your work, the good you did.” Niko turned back to the road, his temple throbbing. He took slow, calculated breaths to calm down. He was past this. He was. “Those scars on your chest and back… Is he responsible?”
Niko rolled his shoulder, never letting go of the steering wheel. There were marks on his body he’d never get rid of. Not now. He knew Cobalt would likely ask about them at some point. Anyone who saw him shirtless did. But Cobalt had more context than most people.
“Yes,” he said. He remembered every injury that resulted in a scar. He remembered the blades running over his skin with increasing depth and pressure. He remembered the hot steel burning into him, because how much could he really take? He remembered the rope burns that never healed fully. And he remembered, with intense pleasure, the bullet wound in his chest. Because that one, he was proud of. “Most of them,” Niko added, as an afterthought, knowing one of the scars was too old to blame Sade for. But he wasn’t about to get into that.
Cobalt nodded quietly, thinking who knew what as they rounded the dense set of trees to find the edge of Gaoltown in front of them. Finally. The outer walls of the small settlement were brick and stone and overgrown with moss and vines from the jungle-forest, making them blend effortlessly into the surrounding trees. The gate that stood blocking the only road in and out was made of iron and etched with runes so complex they covered every inch of the metalwork. No one got in or out of Sluagh without permission. No one.
Niko slowed near the gates, pulling his badge out of his pocket and setting it directly between himself and Cobalt on the dashboard. Once it was there, he advanced slowly, pushing through the warding magic until the badge glowed a faint pink. Chewing his inner cheek, he waited until finally the gates yawned open before them, and he drove into the small town.
“So that bullet scar,” Cobalt said, glancing behind them as they left the gates for the centre of town. “Was he the one who shot you?”
Niko’s face actually broke at the memory. His mouth pulled in a dark smile, his eyes staring out in front of them but seeing only the replay in his mind. Sade’s face wrought in fury, his bulky arms clapped in magic suppressing cuffs, his eyes boring into Niko. He’d reached for a gun they hadn’t expected, and when he shot, Niko didn’t even flinch. He took the bullet to the chest without changing his own expression, without letting the victorious, hate-filled smirk fall from his lips. As another officer reached for him, catching him and putting pressure on the wound, calling for an ambulance, Niko only remembered laughing. He’d shaken Sade so badly he’d resorted to what he deemed a coward’s weapon.
“Yes,” Niko said, his pleasure at the memory bleeding into his answer. Cobalt said nothing to that, perhaps wondering at Niko’s amusement, perhaps worrying for his grip on sanity.
Niko pulled into one of the parking spots that lined the outer-perimeter of Sluagh Penitentiary. The walls of the prison complex rose up before them, made of stone reinforced with iron and more runemarks. The walls were topped with jagged, sharp shapes that glinted even in the dying light of day. Only the warden of the prison knew what they were made of, though many people believed they were dragon’s teeth. All anyone knew was that any prisoner who ever came close enough to touch them had paid for it with their lives. They said the cuts those things caused could not be closed nor cauterised. They would simply bleed endlessly until there was no more blood left in you.
Getting out of the car, Niko swiped his badge from the dashboard and clipped it to his belt. The air in Gaoltown was more humid than the air near the beach, but it was also slightly cooler. It smelled of overgrowth and lush earth and just a little of iron. Cobalt closed his door as he emerged, studying the wall before them and then scanning the surrounding area. It was nearly dark now, but few residents were out and about. The nightlife wasn’t quite as thriving in this small town.
“This man abused you for his own pleasure, grew comfortable enough around you to let you see and hear the secrets of his operation, then tried to kill you when you showed your true colours,” Cobalt said, now looking at Niko. Niko met his gaze, feeling at once unburdened and more alone than ever. Cobalt’s expression wasn’t judgmental though. It wasn’t pitying, nor horrified. Niko wasn’t sure what it was, frankly. “What makes you think he’s going to talk to you?”
This was all Niko was certain of. “I almost single-handedly destroyed his business and got him convicted to spend the rest of eternity in prison,” Niko said. “He thought he was prepared for anything, constantly out-manoeuvering the law, and I outsmarted him. He’ll talk to me.”
Chapter 18
“What the fuck do you mean he won’t talk to us?” Nik
o snapped, glaring at the prison guard who’d come to deliver the news. It wasn’t the guard’s fault, he was sure, but he couldn’t quite believe Sade, the little shit, was being this fucking infuriating. Though, on second thought, Niko could believe it.
“I’m sorry, Detective,” the officer, a middle-aged Fae with greying green hair and a genuinely apologetic look on his face, told him. “We informed the inmate there were two police officers here to speak with him, but he refused.”
Niko stared dumbly at him. The closed-ventilation system of the prison made the air dry and sterile, giving it a strange quality on the skin and in his nostrils. He wrinkled his nose to fight the dryness, hands on his hips.
“Did you tell him my name?” Niko asked, trying not to sound condescending and falling just short.
The officer frowned slightly. “We did,” he said. “He did seem slightly more amenable after that, but he still declined.”
Niko’s eyes felt as though they might pop out of his skull. What the fuck? He turned to Cobalt, whose expression was carefully neutral, and Niko glared even more openly. Running a hand through his dark locks, he paced around the waiting room a moment. The linoleum floor was a vomit-coloured beige that matched the offensively taupe paint on the stone walls. Non-descript waiting-room chairs were arranged around the perimeter of the room, and a reception desk stood at the opposite end of the entry door. The desk was enclosed behind what looked like bullet-proof glass with a small microphone and speaker set up for communication. But the casing wasn’t glass. At least, not just glass. There were runes etched into the edges of it, and it was reinforced with the best warding systems money could buy, not to mention DNA-coded Fae security protocols Niko didn’t even know the details of. There was a weapons detector doorway behind a locked gate for admitting visitors, and Niko knew that was equipped to detect all sorts of things most people wouldn’t generally consider weapons.
