Page 9 of Vicarious

“Look, Phae.”

“Shh,” she says putting a finger on my lips. “What happened that night, what you did leading up to all that, it wasn’t you.”

“But—”

“I know what Pray does. Trust me. I know better than anyone. He gets into your head. Makes you think you’re things you’re not. Makes you think you want things and want to do things that you don’t,” Phae whispered. “There’s a reason my family excommunicated him.”

I’ve never been particularly curious about Phae’s apparent blood relationship to Pray. I’ve never been particularly interested about her ties to some Italian mafia family beyond knowing that she had ties and ran from them determined to take them down in disgust for what they did. But now? Now what she knows sounds like something that could be useful.

“Excommunicated? How? Why?”

Phae shakes her head. “None of that matters. What matters is that you’re not what Pray made you. What matters is that you’re using your proximity to him to bring him down. And I want to help you. And Dele.”

I frown.

“Help us?”

“You didn’t think I wouldn’t want to. After everything he’s done. Pray needs to go down. Spend the rest of his life in jail while his criminal empire is totally dismantled.”

I take a moment to carefully think what my next words are going to be. Because that’s not my plan. It’s a far more sanitized and idealistic version of what my plans are.

“Did Dele tell you that’s what we plan to do?”

“Why? Was she not supposed to tell me you were working to take down Pray?”

“No. No. Just…”

“I know what you’re going to say,” Phae says with a smile. That same kind smile that I fell for when we met. “You don’t have to worry. I’m not stupid enough to go getting myself into trouble in places I’m not to be. I get it. I’ll have to do things from the shadows for now.”

That’s far from what I’m concerned about. I’m concerned that she fell for one of Dele’s non-lies. The ones where she gives people enough to let people make assumptions and then doesn’t correct them.

“I suppose you will,” I finally respond.

4

Dele

Wyan and I don’t say anything while Viper is talking to Phae. His wife. His children’s mother. There’s nothing to say. Not right now. Not to Wyan, anyway.

Finally, Viper comes out the room with Phae standing beside him, an arm helping guide her out by the waist. I resist the urge to openly scowl at the sight.

“Phae,” Viper says. “Do you have anything here that you want to take with you?”

“No,” Phae says immediately. She hesitates. “Well, there are some things. In my room—my cell. It’s in my cell.”

“Wyan, why don’t you take her to go get them while Dele and I finalize our transport?”

“Lead the way, Phae,” Wyan says again, just like he did before.

Phae does.

When they’re gone, I finally say, “Fuck.”

Viper lets out a long sigh. “My sentiments exactly.”

There’s a lot we need to talk about, but fuck knows if I know where to start. So I settle on saying, “Not going to ask me if I knew all this time she was alive? If I left her in that hospital to fall into Pray’s grasp on purpose and hid it from you?”

Viper huffs. “Iknowyou didn’t do that.”

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