Chapter 4
TRUE LOVE
T he skin on my back burned as needles embedded black ink into my flesh. The smoking eye sockets of a demonic skull engulfed in flames were the final touch on the piece that took up my entire back.
“You okay, baby?” Gemma asked over the buzz of the tattoo machine.
Her voice pulled me from thoughts of my brother.
After seven years, Dominick was finally getting out of prison.
We had conversed occasionally on the phone whenever the prison allowed him to call, but I’d only been to visit him a handful of times.
He had never wanted me to come see him. It wrecked me every time…
seeing him in a prison uniform, fresh bruises on his face.
After all, he was serving time and taking frequent beatings… or worse …for what I had done.
Being dirt broke, while charged and tried as an adult at the age of seventeen, only left him with a public defender.
Dominick copped a plea for manslaughter.
A first-time offense in the state of Arizona earned him the minimum sentence of seven years.
It hadn’t helped his situation any that one of the victims was the brother-in-law of a county judge, nor did it bode well that they each had been stabbed over forty-seven times…
fingers nearly severed from defensive wounds.
Didn’t seem to matter much that it all went down in our home.
They’d been invited in by our own mother, after all, who barely uttered a single word in our defense, much less an apology.
She was far more concerned with her own fate.
My mother lost custody of me, not that she’d put up a fight.
With no known next of kin, I did a stint in state custody before a local Catholic orphanage was willing to take me in and further my education.
Through their generous act of charity, I attended their elite boarding school until the age of eighteen.
“Chad and his fraternity idiots want some party favors for the winter break bash tonight.” Gemma’s words pulled me back from my wandering thoughts. I glanced over in time to see her tuck the cellphone into her purse. “He said he’d like to make it snow.”
Mom would be proud . She always favored her drug dealers over her own kids. Now , I was one .
Though small-time , dealing on my own provided enough to keep a cheap roof over mine and Gemma’s heads in a modest apartment, food in our stomachs, cash in her student account, and paid for the collection of tattoos covering a majority of my body.
I added to them whenever the urge to feel the burn hit.
After that bloody night, I stopped cutting myself .
Now, I had ugly tattoos, demonic tattoos, tattoos that reinforced the reputation I acquired as a kid .
Nobody could call me pretty anymore…
“You wanna stay for the party?” The lilt in Gemma’s voice indicated she did. “ Free booze?”
“Whatever. Hand me my smokes.” I cocked my chin at the leather jacket in her lap. She stood up and took a few steps toward me, reaching into the pocket to pull out a pack of cigarettes.
She smirked at me and placed a cigarette between my lips. “ Whatever … I have something for you, by the way.” She plucked a small object from her purse and tossed it to me. “ Had it engraved and everything.”
It was the brass Zippo Dom stole from our mother years ago. He’s given it to me before his sentencing, and I’d kept it ever since. To my irritation and dismay, it went missing a few days prior. I turned the lighter over and stared at the newly engraved words… True Love.
Is that what this was?
For a while, I’d wondered if dating me was just Gemma’s way of rebelling against her father. I was the bad boy biker . She was the headmaster’s daughter. To him, we were a match made in Hell, and she seemed to get off on it the more he hated it.
We’d been going steady together since reuniting after a midday mass, nearly two years prior. I had just delivered another good little Catholic girl some X and an orgasm in the pews. I remember shaking Gemma’s hand with the same one I had just used to get Mary Margaret off.
Mary Margaret… The girl had scurried away, flushed with sated embarrassment, baggy of pills in one hand, her bible in the other. She loved it when I told her she was a good girl…a sweet little lamb, and I enjoyed teasing her about her praise kink. Mary often scolded me for that of all things.
“Damien! We are in church!” Her cherubic cheeks would flush at the filth of my whispered words, pupils blown wide with a sinful lust for my touch.
Mary Margaret really lived up to all the naughty Catholic schoolgirl fantasies I’d dreamed up while surrounded by the little temptresses in my teenage years.
Allowing me to fondle her curvy body in her uniform, fingerfuck her up that pleated skirt during mass…
Thank the Devil she was only one year younger than me when our little games began.
We’d met during her first semester at the Catholic college Gemma also attended, and thankfully, she was already eighteen.
“Is it not demanded of us that we praise the Lord , little lamb? I’d venture to say He has one as well.” I recall teasing Mary Margaret that particular day.
“One what?”
“ A praise kink . You shouldn’t be ashamed in the slightest. I imagine He’d be pleased. You, following in the Lord’s image , and all.”
To which she’d insisted, I was going to Hell.
Been there. Done that.
For a while, even after getting together with Gemma, I’d often found my thoughts drifting back to those heady encounters with my cherubic little sinner in the pews…
her thick thighs spread wide beneath that pleated skirt…
muffling her whimpers behind the pages of her bible.
I knew she was attracted to me, but she was also afraid.
Afraid of me, my affiliations, of what her parents would think of us.
At least Gemma wasn’t ashamed to be seen with me, or so that had been my impression.
Although the boarding school cast me out at the age of eighteen, I stuck around for the affluent clientele at the college Gemma attended.
The gang from which I acquired my merchandise took a liking to me, or rather, my ability to walk the line between these snobby pricks and the criminal element lingering outside their gated communities.
The rich kids liked to party, but they were skittish.
The cartel-connected gang running the area scared them, so I became their interdealer broker.
Drugs and sex. Recession-proof industries as well as the easiest avenues to lose one’s soul.
I had plans for my brother and I…plans which included forming our own criminal organization and breaking into the business of professional companionship.
Because of that, I never initiated into the ranks of any gang.
The business relationship remained strictly transactional, which left me on my own as far as protection.
No one knew my allegiances with any certainty, however, so no one dared risk retaliation.
I had solidified a reputation between my associations and my esoteric practices.
I was sufficiently intimidating to keep the spoiled trust fund fucks in line, at least for a while.
As far as actually attending one of these elite universities, I’d never even applied. Though I’d had the grades to enroll wherever I wanted…it didn’t seem right, not when Dominick threw his life away for me …giving up a possible football scholarship for a prison cell and a GED.
“Let me wrap up this tat, then you can go give yourself cancer outside ,” Zaps said, cutting into my thoughts as he set the tattoo machine down on the tray behind me.
“Is it finished?” I asked, running the pad of my thumb over the letters engraved on the Zippo.
Zaps wiped down my back. “Sure is. Have a look.”
I got up from the vinyl table and stepped in front of the double mirrors to inspect his work.
Full-color Hellfire engulfed the large, grayscale, horned skull, which spanned the width of my shoulders, down to my lower back.
I glanced over the smoke drifting from the pitch-black eye sockets and other demonic entities crawling through the gaping mouth and dancing within the flames.
Held between two clawed fingers of one demon at the small of my back was the Death card featuring a black armored Knight upon a black stallion.
The card-bearer matched the horned skulls on the back of my hands…
hands with which I had gripped a knife and sent two monsters to Hell.
“Looks sick as fuck.” I nodded in approval. Zaps was one of the best tattoo artists in Arizona, and he charged accordingly.
“Well, you are , so it should.”
“What do I owe you?”
“Three grand.”
Gemma handed me my jacket, and I removed some cash, tossing it onto his tray.
After flipping the Zippo open and flicking the striker, I brought the flame to the end of my cigarette and lit up anyway. Chad and his fraternity imbeciles would end up paying for my tattoo.
“I said outside , Damien,” Zaps bitched.
I blew my smoke at him. “Keep the change.”
T o say that I despised attending frat parties would be an understatement. Great for business, but nothing more than an annoyance beyond that.
A bunch of inebriated alcoholics in the making, bumping and grinding to shitty music that pumped so loudly, one could barely hear their own thoughts.
If it hadn’t been for Gemma’s familiarity with these pricks since grade school, I would have made them come to me for their party drugs, none of this errand boy bullshit.
These assholes, though leery of me by this point, had always looked down on me.