Page 6 of Vicarious

“No,” Phae says firmly before I can follow that thought through. “I’m glad you left. If you hadn’t, Pray really would have had my babies. He has people everywhere. He had people in the hospital. If you hadn’t left as soon as you did, he would have gotten all of us. And you probably would be dead right now.”

Phae looks toward the door and then back to me, “Dele, what’s going on? How is Adrian not dead? Why are you and Wyan with him? What’s been happening outside this place?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Well, we have time.”

“We don’t. Not really.”

Viper and I need to get out this town and go back to living our lives so Pray won’t suspect anything amiss except maybe two people having what’s ostensibly a clandestine love affair. But I have to tell Phae something. She’s gone a long time without answers.

“Then give me a headline.”

“Right um… Essentially, Viper—”

“Viper?”

“Adrian,” I correct because I am the only one that calls him that. “He’s working from the inside to take down Pray while I’m helping gather resources on the outside.”

“So Adrian came around.”

“Well, when it looked like Pray was responsible for injecting you with a ticking time bomb poison that made it look like you died in childbirth, yes.”

“Good,” she says. “If someone can burn Pray and his Empire down to the ground it would be him and you. I want to help.”

“Phae…”

“I can’t go undercover and get people arrested like you all can. But I didn’t forget how to write. You still have all my research, right? I can help you expose him and his business. The hand he had in the drugs wars. That he orchestrated them to consolidate power in the west. It’s all there. And there’s no telling how much more you’ve uncovered.”

She’s right. There’s a lot more that Viper and I have uncovered in the last seven years. We know the logistics of his business. The key players. Where he gets his products. That he’s planning to produce his own coke and undercut the competition by eliminating the middle man and sell his product so cheap he’d pretty much take over the entire North American market. Where all his money possibly is. We know it all.

But unlike Phae, our goal isn’t to take it all down. Our goal is to take it. Because that’s the only way to make Pray hurt. For him to see his businesses stolen right under his nose.

Pray doesn’t need to know all that though. She doesn’t need to know Viper’s and my real plan. She doesn’t know that I have my own product that I funnel through the southeast and into the northeast right outside the perimeter of Pray’s turf and control.

All she needs to know is everything I’ve already told her until I talk to Viper and we figure out how to handle this. I don’t even have to lie to her. Just let her believe her own assumptions are true.

“We can worry about all that later. Right now, you need to recover.”

“I’m fine,” Phae says firmly, setting her face stubbornly in the exact way Leon does when he’s put his mind to something. “I’ll be even more fine when we take Stephen Pray down.”

“Pray will be there when you’ve had some time to recover,” I say. “Didn’t you always tell me that rest was just as important to the fight as being able to keep up with it when I injured and eager to get back up and chase Viper around on some dangerous mission?”

“Touché, I suppose,” she says with an arched brow.

“Viper’s going to want to talk to you,” I blurt out.

“I’m sure,” Phae says while looking toward the door. There’s no hostility in her voice though. Not like there was earlier when she saw him and stood up to him.

“We left each other on unideal terms,” I say carefully. “But Phae, he’s…” Certainly not changed from that night. Not necessarily. In more control of himself maybe, but that’s not going to help here. So I settle on. “He regrets what happened that night.”

“I know he does. He always does when he gives in to that side of himself.”

I frown. “What do you mean by that?”

Phae quickly amends, “He never did that regularly with me. That night… that was the first time he did something like that to me. But he would get carried away on mission sometimes. When the Soles sent him with me during my investigations. That’s what I mean.”

Considering the fact that Viper and I make a habit of trying to do everything but kill each other at least once or twice a year, and I have the hanging warning of killing him if it comes down to it, I can’t say I was concerned if there was any violence like that in their marriage. I don’t see how you could be married to a man like Viper and there not be some kind of violence considering he gets off on it.

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