Page 125 of Xerxes Ascendant
But what he was doing now wasn’t a lie. It was aperformance.
Unidentified male #1:How old are you, kid?
Unidentified male #2:Eighteen.
#1:Eighteen. Right. And your name is...
[Silence]
#1:You know those tattoos on your wrist could get you locked up for a few years?
[Silence]
#1:And so could what you were doing to that nice gentleman in the men's toilets.
#2:I note you didn't arresthim.
#1:Of course not. Paying for it isn't illegal.
[Silence]
#1:You don't talk much, do you?
[Silence]
#1:Well, it's your lucky day, kid. I've got a full holding cell downstairs and nowhere to put you. So how about you and I do ourselves a deal?
[Pause]
#2:Acceptable.
-Transcript of interview from Level F police station, 30 March 2060. Note: it is unclear if the bribe took monetary or physical form.
CHAPTER 38
Akira
Akira was a paranoid man. He’d had to be, to keep his family hidden and safe for so many years, and if he’d had no qualms about stalking, manipulating, and killing to protect those he loved, he certainly didn’t hold them when it came to installing cameras in his own home.
Robby and Sarah knew about them, of course, and he’d compromised when it came to intimate privacy, but his family’s living room was fair game. Before Akira and Kyle had stepped foot in the building they’d known exactly where Theta – and his two victims – were. Had carefully observed how the vindictive snake had sequestered himself away in a dark room with no windows and only one door, hiding behind a teenager with all the cowardly terror of a man who knew Akira was fucking coming for him.
The living room was hardly a resourced battleground, but with Kyle’s help Akira had quickly identified a possible advantage in the large viewscreen dominating one wall, which was designed to project vids when a runepad was plugged into the port beside it. Neither of them would have time to activate it without being seen and stopped…but Akira and Kyle weren’t alone.
Indira was currently crouched in some maintenance shaft somewhere, her runing wand poised above a switchboard and her runepad dialled into Kyle’s – whose device currently lay face down on the carpet to hide the active call connection. The technicalities of Indira’s work eluded Akira, but the bossy blonde had ushered them away with one clear order: make sure Theta ended up facing the living room’s viewscreen. It had taken some serious improvisation by him and Kyle, especially when Theta had unwittingly insisted on circling the room the wrong way upon their arrival, but some brilliantly devastating acting on Kyle’s part and enduring a painful kick to the elbow on his, and they were finally in position.
Careful to ensure the movement wasn’t visible – and that he didn’t accidentally cut his boyfriend’s throat with the sharp blade he regrettably held to it – Akira retrieved his gun from its hiding place at Kyle’s lower back beneath his shirt.
Theta didn’t so much as blink. He’d been so insistent on Akira proving himself unarmed that he hadn’t even thought to check Kyle, just as Akira had anticipated. Theta was a snob. He looked down on people like Kyle: the good, the sweet, the innocent, and equivalated those qualities to stupidity.
He’d never even contemplate that Akira would willingly put Robby’s life in the hands of another person.
And it was true, he wouldn’t.
But Kyle wasn’t just another person. He wasKyle.
Akira held implicit trust in the man who was his Dominant, his lover, and hissoulmate, and he hadn’t hesitated to suggest Kyle be the one to smuggle the gun into the room. Kyle couldn’t shoot for shit, but all they had to do was get Akira the weapon and pray to the stars they’d done enough to earn their victory.
Beating his boyfriend into physical submission past his impressively convincing begging hadn’t been part of the original plan, but Akira would readily let him repay each painful twistof his hair and wrists the next time they played. Kyle had performedwonderfully, handing Akira everything he needed and more.
