Page 32 of Vice

14

Viper

I don’t say anything as I stare at Dele. As I comprehend what she just said. But that doesn’t make any sense. If Travis had been there, he should be dead. Because I killed everyone in that building that night. I know. I doubled checked. No one escaped my furious killing spree.

So if Travis was there, how the fuck is he alive?

Then I ask her something I’ve never asked before. Something I didn’t want to know. But I need to know it now. Because it’s the only way to figure out how Travis was there and how he got away from me if what Dele says—and I don’t doubt her—is true.

“What happened that night?”

“Viper—”

“What.Happened.”

She swallows, still doesn’t look at me as she begins.

“I don’t… I don’t remember much. I try not to. I just remember they took me out my apartment, and I woke up with my wrists chained up and he was there. He had a vendetta with me because apparently I ruined some business venture of his that wasn’t strictly legal. With some mobsters. I’m not sure who. But he said I cost him millions of dollars and I deserved to be punished for it but that he hated getting his hands messy so he hired that gang to do it for him.”

Dele takes a deep breath and continues blandly despite the tears continuing to build in her eyes.

“He told them that he’d leave the punishment up to them. However they saw fit. But everyone knew what he wanted. And they wanted it too. And that’s when they cut of all my clothes and they…”

She trails off. But I don’t need her to say what happened. I rescued her that night. It wouldn’t have taken a genius to look at her and figure out what happened afterward.

Still, even though she doesn’t need to say it, she manages to say it anyway.

“They raped me. And it would have been one thing if they made it hurt, but that wasn’t enough for Travis. He wanted me to like it. He wanted to show me that I didn’t have any control. That he could make me like being raped,” she mutters. “He didn’t do anything. But he watched. And he laughed while sipping on a fucking beer every time they forced me to come, and I didn’t want to. Just like he did tonight.”

Just like tonight. Where he insisted she be punished in front of everyone. Humiliated. And left me no choice but to acquiesce to his request. And then when it wasn’t enough, I tortured her with that stupid fucking vibrator and made her come and like it thinking that I was making sure she wasn’t getting hurt when it was actually the way to hurt her the most.

All for the entertainment of a man that should be dead, but must have left some time before I rescued Dele.

If this situation weren’t fucked up and enraging enough, Dele continues.

“You know, for years afterward I couldn’t bring myself to be with anyone again. To even want to be with anyone again. You were the first since.”

I frown, recalling her closeness with the woman in Canada.

“But I thought—”

“Maxine?” Dele asks looking up at me for the first time. “No. She wanted to. I could never bring myself to.”

That’s both comforting and enraging. To hear Dele admit that I’m the only person she’s allowed to touch her in all these years after the trauma she experienced at Jason Travis’s hands even though she hid it so well. To know that I have to work with the man. To know that now my hands are guilty of the same trauma at his insistence.

“He’s should be dead,” Dele mutters again.

“He should be.”

“But you can’t kill him.”

“I can’t.”

Doesn’t mean I’m not going to. Fuck how useful the man would be after my takeover. He dies. Not tonight. But he will. Jason Travis is a walking dead man.

But that’s for later.

For right now, Dele is afraid of my touch because she now associates it with humiliation at the hands of a tormentor. Dele is all but completely broken. By my touch. I was the first person she let have her again after her ordeal, and now she’s afraid of me.

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