Page 41 of Nidev and Lyric

“Manageable.”

“You have a woman,” he remembered.

“I do,” Patches said. “Speaking of bites, how’s my favorite King doing? Last I heard, it was standing room only in your meetings.”

A twitch hit Nidev’s mouth. “I see we have a fucking mole.”

He let out a low laugh. “Maybe just a mole.”

“Probably those with holes to put their dicks in.”

“I didn’t ask,” Patches said with a shit eating tone. “What about you?”

“What about me? Is that why you called? To see if I had a wet hole to shove my psychotic obsessions in?”

“Ohhhh damn,” he chuckled. “That was pretty descriptive. You getting cold sweats and hot flashes?”

“You talk like it’s a medicalcondition. What I have is absolute and irreversible possession, a mind eating fungus turning me into a sexual psychopath.”

Patches’ low whistle crackled through the line. “You sounded kinda serious. Should I put you on suicide watch?”

Nidev shook his head. What the fuck he was wagging his tongue about it? “Only if I don’t get what I want.” Which he would.

Silence then a deep breath. “Hey, man,” he began quieter. “I’m not a priest, but if you tell me you’ve got a medical condition, I’m obligated to keep it to myself. Doctor-patient confidentiality.”

Nidev’s smirk was bitter. “There’s no medicine for my condition. Only a bullet. Maybe a silver one.”

“Well brother… you better make sure the bullet’s worth it. Talk to me,” he urged. “What’s your most immediate problem.”

“You mean the one blocking my sickness or feeding it?”

“I’ll trustyouto decide that,King.”

The Marsh brothers were surely different, but they understood the weight of leadership just like they did. “Skul is my immediate problem.”

“Skul,” he murmured, curious. “He the smartass?”

Nidev didn’t care about that. “He sat in her apartment.”

“Oh,” Patches said in sudden understanding. “There’s aher.”

“There is. And I wanted to slit his throat for it.”

“Oh damn,” he muttered, sounding familiar with the psychosis.

“I stood there while he was comfortable in her space and calculated how long it would take me to break every bone in his body. And then I walked away, because if I didn’t, she’d knowI’m a monster. The problem isn’t her ever finding that out, it’s her finding it out before I can ruin her for anybody else.”

“Oh hell,” Patches’s said, actually sounding worried. “That’s some Nitro-level bat-shit crazy. I had to restrain him and when that fucker broke out, he came for me. I would be dead if I hadn’t managed to hit him with a full syringe of propofol. You knowwhyhe came for me? I tried to keep him from her because I thought he was going to kill her.”

Everything went cold in Nidev at hearing that. “You really believed that?”

“Brother,” he said, his breaths taking a downturn. “He wasfuckingher like an animal, putting messy gashes on her body with histeethanddrinkingher blood. You tell me what you would’ve thought and done.”

“He hurt her?” Nidev forced out, a dark fear curling in his spine.

He let out a huge breath. “Ithoughthe was,” he swore.

“Butwashe!”

---