Page 11 of Vicarious

I want him to be that cruel.

“In the meantime, just trust me. I’m going to make sure everything is alright.”

I don’t believe him, and I want to hurt him for it. I want to punch him. I want to take a knife and cut more wounds into him. I want to pin him against the floor and strip him naked and fuck him painfully slow until he’s begging me to let him come and then deny him.

But that would also be too cruel for Phae, I suppose.

“Fine,” I decide to say.

And just like he can’t hurt Phae and be that cruel to her, neither can I.

That’s how this story plays out.

He always goes back to Phae.

I always let him.

It never fails.

5

Viper

We end up having to drive back to my estate in upstate New York. While Dele and I have multiple fake identities and passports to match, Phae has none. She’s a dead woman. And even if we could have procured that kind of identification for her, it would be too dangerous. A petite woman with curly brown hair probably doesn’t stand out much, but we can’t be too careful with Pray. We can’t be too careful of the people he has in all unsuspecting places.

Phae spends most of the ride asleep while Dele sits with her arms crossed and her head leaned against the window for most of it. Normally, I’d enjoy the chance to be able to drive with a long stretch of open road. I don’t get the chance to do it often. But today it doesn’t bring me the peace and quiet that it normally would. Not with the simmering tension present.

Needless to say, it’s with great relief that we arrive back to the estate and have room to spread out.

We’re all exhausted. So a servant shows Phae to a room while Dele finds her own and I find mind to rest.

There’s not enough rest in the world, though, to prepare me to deal with Phae’s first request upon waking up while we’re all in the kitchen for breakfast.

“When can I see the children?”

The first thing I do is glance at Dele.

While for all appearances, she doesn’t seem to react to the request, I see the way she just pauses right before taking a sip of her black coffee. I should have known this was the first request Phae would make, and while I’d be fine giving into her requests, there are a lot of… logistics involved in just smuggling Dele and the twins for a visit. Lots of planning over weeks and months, canceling many, many visits, and never anything impromptu. Not to mention, Lady and Leon think Phae is dead. So there’s having to reveal that she’s alive, find a way to reveal how she’s alive, and then after that, planning how to arrange their meeting.

Then there’s the fact that, technically, this is Dele’s call. She’s the one that spends the day to day with the twins. She’s the one who gets to decide what’s safe for them and what’s not. And I may fight her and grumble about it every now and then, but it’s the job I entrusted her to. She knows the logistics of the twins’ lives and how to disappear them and bring them back without notice more than I do.

I think I’m going to have to explain this to Phae when Dele doesn’t immediately reply. But then she finally says, “That’s complicated.”

“What’s complicated about it? I know they think I’m dead, and we’ll have to explain that but…”

“That’s before we knew Pray was aware they were alive.”

There’s something very cold and impersonal about the way Dele explains this to Phae. She sounds sympathetic and understanding, but it’s feigned. In the same way she pretends to sound sympathetic to me in an argument and wants me to notice she’s being condescending.

Then it dawns on me what Dele said.

“Pray knows they’re alive.”

“It’s the logical conclusion. He found her in that hospital. She wasn’t pregnant, and he lied about having them. We can assume that was just to scare you,” Dele says directly to Phae. “Or we can assume that he thought he’d catch up to me and get his hands on them but he never did. I like to err on the side of caution. So I’m going to assume that he at the very least thinks they’re alive but isn’t sure.”

“How can you be certain he’s not sure?” I ask.

“Because when you told him you found me five years ago, you didn’t mention children and you didn’t spend every resource trying to find me because I had them,” Dele points out.

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