I can hear the wariness in his voice. The way his head moves from front-on to sideways, watching the road and me. The road and me.
“Carry the fuck on, brother.” I need to pull myself together if I have any chance of surviving this story when I know what is coming. I know Diamond and how he fucking operates. I may not know who the man is behind the mask, but I know his traits. His taste. Thinking that Jade is tangled up with him makes me fucking murderous. One word keeps flashing through my mind in neon fucking light.
Regret.
Wicked doesn’t hold back. “She came in dressed in suit pants and a fucking bra. Her hair was all tidy, her makeup on point. She—”
I cut in, “—to be clear, not saying that you knew because you obviously didn’t, but she was fucking fifteen.” I glare at him over my arm. “Fifteen, Lenny!”
Wicked has a poker face that could conquer Las Vegas, but throwing his real name at him has his cheek twitching.
“I didn’t know.” He shakes his head, running his big hand through his hair. “Fuck!” He punches my leather dash a few times. “Fuck!” I’ve never seen Wicked lose his cool. Not ever. He’s famous for keeping himself calm and collected. Unlike the rest of us unhinged bastards.
“It’s not your fault,” I exhale, needing him to continue but not wanting him to blame himself. Wicked had a baby sister once, he knows how it is. He’d never willingly fuck an underage girl. The baby sister story plays a big part in why he doesn’t like people calling him Lenny.
He clears his throat, and I know the rest of the story is going to come out pained. “She came in. Dressed up with a little bunny mask on and a shit load of makeup. She didn’t look fucking fifteen.”
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.