Page 19 of Vice

9

Dele

Like Viper, my sister has always had a very precarious relationship with all forms of authority. Teacher, bosses, mentors, kingpins, and mobsters. Her own older sister. You name it. If they’re in a position of power, she’s going to find a way to have a problem. Hence why it’s better for people like Viper and my sister to be in charge for all parties concerned. Because if they’re under you, they’re constantly going to be doing their own thing and only very stringent handling will keep them somewhat in line. Never completely.

But Viper, for all his lack of tact, is capable of being sneaky about his disrespect of authority. And if he can’t be sneaky, he’s very much mastered the art of malicious compliance. Doing precisely what’s expected of him and loosely following orders, all the while not in the exact way his superior would have specified if they’d know they needed to specify because it was so obvious.

My sister, on the other hand, is blatant in her disrespect. In all forms. From who she hung out with when we were younger to not doing her fucking homework at night to running off when she was sixteen and not letting me know if she was alive or dead to choosing to work with the women who was the catalyst for the single most traumatic experience in my life to going off the grid and disappearing without telling me in recent years.

So it’s not at all shocking to me when I come downstairs and find her standing in the middle of Bella’s garden at the fucking Uccello-Bianchi estate in fucking Long Island, New York City, far from the secret base she’s supposed to be working from.

Not shocking.

No less infuriating.

“Delilah. What in the fucking hell?”

“Good to see you too, Dele.” She gives me a once over and adds, “Or should I say Addy?”

“What are you doing here?” I ask bluntly, not in the mood for my sister’s flippancy. “And for fuck’s sake, it better be fucking good or I’ll shoot you.”

“Your own sister,” Delilah says though she certainly doesn’t seem all too torn up by the fact that I threatened to shoot her. “And to think people say blood means something.”

“Delilah,” I say in warning. And there’s no way she doesn’t know that I will absolutely shoot her. Because Viper taught me not to threaten to shoot someone unless you had every intention of doing it.

Delilah rolls her eyes and lights a cigarette. Sure that she’s wasting my time at this point, I start to reach under my shirt to take out my gun and actually shoot her when my sister finally talks.

“If I thought I could have sent this over an email or told you over our network, I would have. But this is too sensitive. No telling who might be listening,” she says.

That’s fair. While our network is secure from outsiders, people in our operations who help her maintain our dark web communications network have the tools to overhear something they shouldn’t. Hence why Viper and I use a totally other secret network to communicate.

That said, whatever it is Delilah has better be good.

“Get to the point then,” I say, shaking my head when Delilah offers me a cigarette. Her and Viper’s propensity for being dramatic. No wonder the two could never stand each other.

“You know that shipment of children you happened to come across with Wyan while investigating that weird assassination a couple of months ago?” Delilah asked.

“You found out where it was going?”

“No. But I found the guy who would know where it’s going.”

“Who?”

Delilah reaches into her pocket and pulls out a small clear case with a micro-SD card in it.

“Maximillian Harp.”

“Who the fuck named him that?”

“He did,” Delilah scoffs. “Powerful men and their fucking ego trips I tell ya. Name just fucking screams look the fuck at me. Anyway, he runs a prestigious gentleman’s club in Las Vegas. Not on the Strip, of course. That’s for everyone in the lower ninety-nine percent. And you don’t ask to go. They choose you to be their potential customer. I was tracking him for his connections to Pray’s sex trafficking schemes.”

I open my mouth to make sure she’s not doing anything more dangerous than I’ve approved, but Delilah predicts that and says as she rolls her eyes, “Relax. It’s only recon to map out his entire operation so we can wipe it out when it’s time.”

Who was going to be deciding when it was time still remained to be seen. Already, I’ve begun to amass a lot of money and power with my own criminal organization. But not nearly enough for me to feel comfortable going toe to toe with Pray any more than giving him competition in the drug business. That was going to have to wait until Viper had enough control of all the man’s operations with people he trusted so he could take over, or my burgeoning mafia grew powerful enough to withstand and win a war against the man. Whichever one came first.

Until then, Delilah is on strict orders to only map out the man’s sex trafficking operations. To figure out who was involved so that when it was time, we can take them all out in one fell swoop.

Delilah continues, “But as I was doing my mapping, I noticed something on the last drop that Mr. Harp was overseeing and signing off on. There were two shipments. One of adult women and men and the other of kids.”