Page 98 of Worse Than Wicked
Like Blue, I have no one. Only a sibling, but mine is the one who will destroy me, like he destroyed her. He wouldn’t make me suffer. At least I’m sure of that. He’ll make it quick.
When Royal and King ask where I am, Baron will tell them I went my own way. They’ll believe him. They would never believe he’d hurt me. They haven’t seen how Mabel has changed us, how Alice has, how Blue has. They don’t know that when he left me, he tore me out of him, tore out his own heart. Now he studies it with the clinical detachment that he does everything else. He studies himself more than anyone—he is his first subject. He’d be fascinated to know how a man can live without a heart, to study his own reaction like a specimen under a microscope.
That must be where they went. To plan it out.
I thumb open my phone. Wonderland shimmers around me, inside me. It swallows me and pulls me down the rabbit hole, but the rabbit hole is inside me, a sucking vortex that always wants more.
I jerk off for a while, and then I want to move, so I dance until I’m hot, and then I take off my clothes and wander the house, prowling, seeking something new, some novice sensationto feed the beast. Seeley Boots watches me with suspicion from the top of the refrigerator.
“Fuck off, asshole,” I mutter to him, grabbing a beer from inside. “You think I’m going to light you on fire? I’m not that evil. Yet.”
I grin at him, and he shrinks down, like a fluffy orange turtle trying to retract its head into its shell. I toss the beer cap at him and go back to the living room. I grab my phone and thumb it on.
DukeOfBeavertown: u here?
Dynamo: wsp
DukeOfBeavertown: r u in Faulkner
Dynamo: no
DukeOfBeavertown: wya
Dynamo: at the great lakes w lo
DukeOfBeavertown: y
Dynamo: I told u I was leaving town w her when she got out
DukeOfBeavertown: u dnt come back for labor day?
Dynamo: no lol
Dynamo: not rlly a big holiday 4 2 ppl w/o jobs
DukeOfBeavertown: wb xmas
Dynamo: will prob come back 4 that
Dynamo: c u then k? gg
DukeOfBeavertown: I think ur sisters going to kill me
Dynamo: no shes not
DukeOfBeavertown: u don’t know her anymore
Dynamo: I know her well enough to know that.
DukeOfBeavertown: u dont
Dynamo: r u hi rn
DukeOfBeavertown: wut does that matter
Dynamo: get help
DukeOfBeavertown: I’m trying
