6. Trigger Words
6
TRIGGER WORDS
KRYPT
I watched him wake up from the nap I forced on him. After calling Ransom, Seven, Menace, and Riot to help me clean up the crime scene, I left Remiel there to wake up in her grave. He cried a lot. Looked under his nails, wiped at his mouth, threw up in the foliage and then tried to bury it. He looked confused when he couldn’t find any trace of her body, but he must have had some sense to survive because he left the forest and walked all the way to his shop. It still isn’t open. His friend Cain went in a few hours ago, but I haven’t seen either of them since.
Now we’re back at Vile House, and I’m about to get ripped apart ten ways to Sunday for what I did. We might be a ruthless society with a violent history, but we don’t kill at random. After I came down Remiel’s throat, I was so jarred by it that I knocked him out because I couldn’t stand for him to look at me while I felt so confused. Slumped over the girl’s body, he looked calm, almost comfortable in her grave. It pissed me off because I was so rattled by my reaction to him, and he had the fucking nerve to sleep so soundly after.
Director storms into the room, glaring at me. “The fuck were you thinking, Krypt?” he snarls. “Line up!”
We’re the farthest thing from an army, but we run on rank. Not because it matters, but because competition is the best way to get us to participate the way he wants us to. I stand in the middle of the lineup, between Menace and Riot, waiting for the shit-talking that will accomplish nothing but make me itch and waste my time.
“Someone wanna tell me why there’s a dead blond in my morgue?” he asks, staring at me. None of us say anything. “And does anyone else want to comment on the van full of religious fanatics that blew up on the highway? Huh? How’d that happen?”
“Sometimes shit goes our way,” Kyd mumbles, drawing a grin from the rest of us.
“They weren’t the fucking job!” Director shouts. “Neither was the girl! We have enough shit to handle with this billionaire asshole and initiation coming up next weekend, and now you fucks wanna throw this at me?”
“Sorry, Daddy,” Monster says.
“End of the line!” Director snaps at Monster.
“Hey! He back-talked first!” Monster rats Kyd out, but all it does is earn him a massive smile from Kyd, the youngest and most vividly deranged of us all. Monster moves to the end of the line, making the rest of us shuffle up a position. Rank earns us perks, and fuck Ransom for holding the top position for so long. He and Seven have been the top two for too long, and the rest of us are itching to knock them back down. Ghost, Menace, me, Riot, Facts, Glitch, and Kyd make up the middle, and now Monster sulks at the end.
“Why’d you kill the girl?” Director asks me.
I have nothing to lose and even less to prove, so I lift my chin and say, “Because I wanted to.”
“She looked like Gia,” Riot adds.
I stiffen and glare at my brother. “Fuck you.”
“Gia is dead, Krypt. You can’t kill her again,” Director says, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Give me a better answer than that.”
I’m not about to admit that I got triggered, so I repeat, “Because I wanted to.”
Director glares, and then he tilts his head towards Monster. Took me fucking forever to get back to the middle! For nothing. I barely breathe as I move to the end of the line, ignoring Monster’s sick smirk as I join him at the bottom.
“This bargain too much for you?”
“No.”
“Good. Stop fucking up then. Sit down.”
Everyone scrambles to the massive table in the centre of the room, fighting over pastries and baked goods like they’re precious. I’m not hungry. My appetite gets morphed by other cravings, making it hard for me to determine what I’m actually hungry for. I could be horny and think I’m starving; it’s always been hard to tell.
Today, it’s annoyance and frustration clouding my mind. Because I tasted him. Pressed my lips to the cut in Remiel’s neck and licked the blood away like a fucking crazed lunatic. I touch my lips, getting a dopamine hit from the memory. I’m so put off by what happened because having a sexual reaction to something isn’t me. I’m not comfortable being physically close to anyone. I’d rather fuck a silky pillow than a person, but something came over me in the cemetery’s forest last night, and when I give into my impulses like that, I can’t escape them until they’re seen through.
“We need to talk about initiation,” Director’s voice butts into my thoughts. “There are a lot of applicants this year, and since we’re short on understudies, we need to decide who we’re bringing in. We’re going to be hunting Benton Wentworth. Moros doesn’t want anyone buying the town, and we’re going to feed them this billionaire for breakfast. He’s up to something, and it’s time we find out who he’s working with. So, he’s the prey on initiation night.”
I’m shaking again. Unsure why. Agitated and jittery. My ears muffle and my vision blinks and darkens until I’m seeing nothing but the terrified look in Remiel’s eyes as I fucked his face like he was nothing.
“Krypt,” Ghost calls, nodding at the door. Director gives me a nod to leave, and I follow Menace and Ghost out the door.
I light a joint as soon as we step onto the back patio. Weed does nothing for me except signal to my brain that it’s time to chill out. It’s an auto-response I’ve trained myself to accept, so as soon as the herbal tang hits my lungs, I’m able to inhale a full breath and stop jittering so much.
“What happened?” Ghost asks, sitting on a partial stone wall that faces the misty forest behind Vile House. Menace leans next to him, reaching out for the joint.
I pass it to him. “I raped him.”
Both their eyes widen. Ghost glares at me, but Menace laughs. “What? You suddenly sexual?”
“His mouth,” I add.
“And?” Ghost asks, unsure how to feel. “Did you come? Fuck, I don’t wanna know.”
I nod anyway and look into the forest.
“Never again, Krypt,” he warns, and I know it won’t be the first or last warning I get about Remiel from Ghost.
“The whole night went off the rails. I was supposed to meet him at his dad’s grave to go over the first name on his list, but then this fucking chick…”
“Did she really look like Gia?” Ghost asks, taking a drag and passing it back.
Gia is my mom, and she’s one of the things I hate. Or, she was. “No. But she… fuck !”
“Said your trigger word?” Menace fills in. I hate confirming it, but I nod. “So you killed her and Remi saw it?”
“He didn’t see it, but he saw her after. She was dying, and I watched him walk up just to see what he’d do.”
“What’d he do?”
“Nothing. Just watched her die like he was seeing it second-hand or through a movie instead of experiencing it in real life.” And fuck, did that speak to me. To be intrigued by the death of a body is exactly how I react to people dying. Not in some sense that I caused the death, but in the fascinating way a body goes from living to dead, how everything shuts down, how it just… ends. “Was weird.”
“You like weird.” Menace grins.
“He’s nobody. Just the guy I have a bargain with.”
“Krypt,” Ghost warns again. Fuck him.
“Just the guy you throat raped!” Menace shouts. “What the fuck, Krypt? We’ve been friends forever, and I’ve never even seen you willingly touch someone. And him, of all people?” Menace glances at Ghost, cringing a bit.
Yeah, I’ve always figured I’m asexual or just fucked-up, but last night, something surged through me and I couldn’t stop it. It was the fear emanating from him, acting like such an aphrodisiac that I became a slave to it. My god, it turned me on when he pissed himself. Reactions to fear differ from person to person, and I fucking loved how Remiel got scared.
“What’re you going to do about him?” Ghost asks. “When he finds out…”
“He doesn’t get a say. This is my bargain, so he can fuck off about it. And so can you.”
“Until you kill him.” Ghost scowls. He’s personally invested in my bargain but he doesn’t get a say.
I ignore that and finish the joint. “Should I feel bad about the rape?”
They aren’t the right people to ask. Menace is a torture and pain junkie, and Ghost is a narcissist who lives and breathes in the grey area of life. I mean, we all do, but his grey area is often sexual, whereas mine never has been before.
“Yes,” Ghost snaps at me.
“If you want to,” Menace says. “Or you can revel in it. You finally have a life in your hands, and he willingly made the bargain, so it’s yours to do what you want with.” His grin is sick, but it makes me feel better. When Ghost shoves him, I almost feel bad. Not quite.
“Krypt,” Director calls from inside. “Let’s go. Morgue.”
Time to clean up my mess, I guess.
CURRENT RANK
1. Ransom
2. Seven
3. Ghost
4. Menace
5. Facts
6. Riot
7. Glitch
8. Kyd
9. Monster
10. Krypt
I hate that her body has me hard. I don’t see her mottled flesh, greying under the fluorescent lights of the morgue’s cold room, or the crimson and blond hair that has turned a rusty brown.
No, I’m fixated on the bruises on her thighs. The ones that happened post-mortem from Remiel’s fingertips while I forced my way into his throat. I’m transfixed by the dried and browning drop of blood on her forehead, the one that dripped from my knife after pressing it to his throat.
I’m freaked out by my sexual reaction, unsure what it means.
“Anything I need to know about?” Director asks from behind me. “Your DNA all over this?”
“Not mine, no.” Her eyes are closed now, and someone, probably Menace or Monster, because they’re both filthy fuckers, snapped her neck back into place and glued her mouth shut.
“Whose?” he asks, stepping up next to me.
When I look at her, I see him. The physical response is what shocks me. I don’t try to cover my erection because it’s fascinating me more than anything. I’m not typically one to get aroused because of a dead body, but then again, it’s not really the body that’s doing it for me.
“Necrophilia isn’t you, Krypt. What’s going on?” Director asks. “You’ve been more compulsive lately. Talk to me.”
Why? No one ever listens.
I like Director. He’s good to all of us, brought the ten of us together, and put up with a lot of bullshit from us ever since we reached this level of authority within Vile House. Ever since we became the ten.
When we reach a certain level, we’re tested based on our training after initiation. I was loaded down with so many secrets and bits of information from the leaders, literally bursting at the seams with all of it, and for two weeks, I never once cracked. I learned the power of silence. I strengthened my mental walls so firmly that nothing got in and nothing leaked out. I learned the strength that came with endurance. Because, holy fuck, did I endure some of the worst shit of my life during those two weeks. Torture, in its worst forms, couldn’t get me to crack.
It’s why they named me Krypt. I held onto the K because of some attachment I’d formed to my birth name, but mostly because the letter C angered me. Couldn’t stand to look at it. I was a vault of information, and when testing was done and I was allowed to vent and release that information, I couldn’t do it. I’d grown protective of it. And since no one in my life had ever been protective of me, aside from my brother, it felt like my duty to hold on to something dear. Of course, the information came out in phases, given to the group by our superiors. Since then, I’ve had nothing worth protecting.
But now Remiel…
“She called me sick. Just like Gia used to,” I tell Director. “Am I?” Because everyone has labelled me as such. My mother, Gia. My father. The homes I spent time in before joining Vile House. Teachers, doctors, and coaches. Friends who weren’t really friends.
“What even is sick?” he asks. “Your mind works differently from most. Doesn’t make you better or worse than any of them.”
“I’m the only one here without a solid diagnosis,” I remind him. “My sickness can’t be labelled.”
“Half of their diagnoses aren’t accurate either, and it’s not a sickness. It’s a mentality, and it doesn’t need a label. Do you want a label?”
Sort of. Because if I know what’s wrong with me, maybe I can understand why everyone thinks I’m sick.
I lack a normal attention span, yet I fixate and obsess. ADHD got slapped on my file.
I don’t really understand the concept of love, feel next to no regret or remorse over my actions, and have very little ability to suppress my impulses. Psychopathy showed up in my file.
I can’t differentiate or name all the emotions I feel, often confusing one for another. Alexithymia entered my file.
I like causing pain, not because it turns me on, but because it’s fascinating to witness how others react to it. Sadist.
I used to cut myself and watch my blood leave my veins, self-harming because it made me feel alive. Masochist.
I anger quickly, have very little tolerance for others, have zero patience, and tend to place blame on everyone else for that. I control people without fully intending to. Sociopath.
I’m smart in a selection of subjects, yet incompetent in others. Autistic, maybe neurodivergent, or somewhere on the Spectrum.
I range from mute to vocalist, happy to sad, angry to elated within the blink of an eye. Borderline personality disorder. Bipolar disorder.
I mention feeling like something else lives in my head. Schizophrenia. Dissociative identity disorder.
Asexual. Demisexual. Non-identifying. Numb. All of it describes me, yet doesn’t.
They’re all there and more, stamped in red and signed by doctors and specialists. Some conditions counteract others, and some cancel others out altogether. None of them are right. No one knows who I am or what is going on in my brain, least of all me. I’m not one thing, and I don’t fit the bill for anything particular, so labels get placed on my file as a way to appease the doctors. Not me. No one actually cares what I think, how I feel, or how their labels affect me.
It’s weird living in a brain that I don’t understand, and it causes me to feel disconnected from myself. Like I’m a passenger inside my own body, only letting the demons inside me rattle their confines enough to peer through my eyes as tiny windows to interpret the world we see.
“You crave understanding,” Director says when I don’t answer. “From yourself? Or from someone else?”
I don’t know. I like chaos, but I don’t like it inside me. I like mysteries, but wish I could solve myself. “Not sure.”
“We can do more testing if you want,” he says. He steps close to me but doesn’t touch me because he respects my comfort level. “But trust me, Krypt. When I look at you, I see someone unique and perfectly tainted. You wouldn’t be in Vile House if you weren’t. At some point, you need to let go of specific labels and learn to embrace everything different that makes you you. The guys love you.”
Half of them don’t feel love, but I get what he’s saying. I look at the body of Ophelia Hargrove, a psychology student from the city next over. I’m not sorry she had to die, and I’m not sorry about the way she died, but I am sorry Remiel had to witness it. Not because it hurt him, but because it links him to me more than I’m comfortable with after the sexual assault last night.
“She needs to burn,” I tell Director. “Remiel Sauder’s DNA is all over this, and I’m in charge of his life now.”
Director smiles. “Incinerate her then.”