Then Maart is there. Kissing Cort.
I get lost in that. The way their lips press together. The way their eyes close when they open their mouths. The way their tongues twist and then the way they both kiss me. Maart’s mouth on my neck, trailing down to my breast.
We don’t have clothes on and I don’t even know how that happened. It just did.
Cort’s mouth on my lips. His tongue twists with mine as Maart takes his kisses down my stomach. His fingertips parting the folds of skin between my legs. Pressing inside me. Making me gasp.
I see Rainer’s face then. Laughing. Smiling. Joyful. Saying something about starting the party without him. The bottle. He drinks, his eyes lighting up as he watches Maart lick between my legs. And I sigh when Rainer’s tongue passes over his lips, like he wants a taste of me.
And then he is tasting me. He and Maart are between my legs, holding them open as they kiss each other, then me.
My back bucks up from the pleasure and Cort’s mouth is there, hard and demanding as he pulls my hair while he kisses my lips, whispering things into my ear as he bites my neck.
I understand seventeen languages, but I can’t make sense of his words. They cannot make sense because I think he says, I will rescue you, and that’s not right.
No one ever rescues me.
“Shhh,” he’s telling me. “Stop thinking so loud. Just enjoy it.”
So I do.
Cort pulls me on top of him, positioning me over his hips, my long, wild, blonde hair dragging over his marked-up chest. And I get lost in those skulls—the big one on his right pec, the heart with the keyhole over his left pec, the little skeletons, and skull faces with gray eyes.
And the stars. I trace the stars as we fuck, his cock buried deep inside me. Maart behind me, pulling my hair as he wraps his palm around my neck. Not pressing hard. Not pressing at all, like he doesn’t want to scare me, just turn me on. And it does turn me on.
He enters me too, momentarily fighting with Cort for dominance. But Cort’s laugh echoes into the night and gets lost in the blanket of stars.
I turn my head and find Rainer sitting back on the blanket, jerking off as he watches us. He winks at me, says something in yet another language I don’t understand, then comes in his hand.
Cort’s thumb is swirling small circles against my clit and he and Maart fuck me and that’s it for me too. I gush all over them. And then they gush inside me.
We collapse into each other, a heap of bodies drunk on Lectra. And that’s when the buzzing of the tattoo machine starts.
Rainer is grinning wildly as he marks Cort up with yet another bit of ink. But it’s not a skull this time. He turns the keyhole over Cort’s heart into a lock.
Then he takes my hand and draws a key. A skeleton key, of course.
And he makes it fit the lock over Cort’s sick heart.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT - CORT
The world is mine.
This is what the Lectra tells me.
It’s all mine for the taking.
Finally.
We are a heap of sweaty fighters under the stars.
Warriors, all of us.
Champions in the dark.
My body is still humming from the sex, my mind is still blown from the ecstasy, and this is when the Lectra takes over. Pulls me into that other place. That other reality where I am small, and screaming, and running through a bathhouse.
I’ve been here before, I tell the Lectra. You’re gonna have to do better than this.
And the Lectra says, Challenge accepted.
Everything in the dream changes and I’m suddenly in a shipyard, one small boy among dozens of small boys running between containers. But we scream. Oh, do we scream.
And our feet are bare. And they are bloody.
This is how they find us. We leave a trail of crimson scarlet in our wake. And all they have to do is follow it.
But I don’t know this yet. How could I know that? I am only four.
I look up and the girl who is Anya or Ainsey, but is neither Anya nor Ainsey, is shaking me by the shoulders. She is older than me, years older. Maybe seven. She flashes her fingers at me quickly, efficiently, desperately.
Listen, her fingers say. Hide! Run and hide and don’t ever come out! No matter what happens, do not come out! She shakes me again. Do you hear me?
No. I don’t. Because she can’t talk. She has no tongue.
But I do, of course, understand her. And that’s all she really means.
So I nod. And I run again, weaving my way through the maze of shipping containers, never wanting to be inside one of those things again. Because I still smell like piss, and shit, and death from the trip across the ocean.