A Fucking Queen #2
But the details were unmistakable. The jaw. The shape of the brow. The way the cheekbones cut.
The Fox.
Kiko was in the bed with him.
Naked.
Climbing onto him.
Her body was smaller than I'd ever seen it. Her skin was unmarked. Her hips were narrow.
The IV line dragged across the sheet as the Fox's weak hand found her thigh.
His other hand fumbled at the side of the bed for the rail and missed.
She helped him, then pulled out his hard cock, and lowered herself onto him.
“Aww. Kiko.” His head pressed back into the pillow. His throat worked out a thin, satisfied moan. “My son will take the throne soon. I must gather my strength. I want you in place to watch him.”
“I’ll do anything you want.”
“You will. Watch Hiro too and remember, little whore. The more you fuck my sons, the more I will reward you."
Sweat beaded along Kiko’s forehead as she rode the old skeleton in the bed.
The vision ended.
I was back in the room with Kiko.
She had been fucking the Fox from the very beginning, long before Kenji ever became the Dragon.
I exhaled and just started to know so much. "You were having sex with the Fox, even before his wife was killed. Kenji’s mother."
Kiko's whole body jerked. Her eyes flew to my face. “W-what did you say?”
I switched to Japanese. "The Fox put you in his sons’ bed to get pregnant, and every time you could prove that they came inside you, he gave you extra money.”
“Lies! W-who told you that?”
“You actually stood in the bathroom and took pictures of the sperm dripping out of you.” I pulled at other thoughts in my head. “You put the condoms on Kenji, on Hiro, but. . .you knew you’d made holes in them.”
“I don’t know who told you that but—”
“It doesn’t matter anymore.” I shook my head and finally the twins’ crying stopped.
She pointed at me and sneered. “You can’t talk to me any way you want to. I may not be the mother of the Dragon’s twins, but he loves his brother, Hiro and that still gives me power.”
“Does it?”
She frowned. “You gave Hiro food. I am giving him two little boys to live for. He’ll forget about your stupid little cocktail party as soon as he sees their faces.”
The babies cried again.
She looked at the door.
“Do you want them?” I gestured to it. “Ready to feed your sons. Hold them. Be their loving mother.”
“The nurses have them.”
“Hmmm.”
“I’m still protected. But you are not. If you killed my cousins, I will kill you. Do you understand? Even if Kenji wins, one day I will kill you.” She pointed at me. “So you better hurry and tell your guards not to hurt my cousins.”
“They’re probably dead by now. It would be a waste of a phone call.”
Her bottom lip quivered. "You're not a boss."
I walked toward the bed.
"That's what Kenji has needed this whole time." Her voice steadied. "If he had a true boss as his woman, there would have never been a war on this island."
I stopped right at her side of the bed and looked down at her.
This cold sensation grew large in my chest. Rage was hot and rage was loud. This emotion was the quiet country on the other side of rage, where a woman went after she had buried something she would never get back, and decided what she would do with the years she had not been given.
“I don’t know why you’re over here. I’m protected as the mother to Hiro’s twins.”
I leaned over her. "You're correct, Kiko, but not about being protected.”
“What?”
“You’re correct.” I lifted my hands. "I'm not a boss."
“Get away from me—”
My hands closed around her throat.
I sneered as I choked her. "I'm a fucking queen."
She didn't have time for a scream. All that came was this wet, broken little sound at the back of her tongue—a huk—as my thumbs pressed in over the soft place under her jaw and the rest of my fingers locked behind her neck.
Her hands came up fast and she began clawing at my forearms. Her nails were long. They were painted a glossy red. They tore long burning red lines down my brown skin.
But I kept that hold on her fucking neck and thought again about all the memories of my baby girl and how she had smiled at me in those visions.
Kiko’s eyes bulged as she scratched at my arms and kicked the bed.
“You’re definitely a boss, Kiko.” I stared into those bulging eyes filling with tears and terror. “And now you get to die like a boss, by a furious queen’s hands. Be lucky I came off my throne to do it, bitch.”
The whites of her eyes swelled. Those brown pupils drowned. Red spread fast through the whites in tiny burst lines, branching outward from the corners.
“Protected? You think I’m going to let you raise Hiro’s twins?”
Her mouth opened, and her tongue pushed forward. Air rasped out of her in a dry, sick scrape and did not come back in.
“I’m going to tell them that you fucking died during childbirth, bitch.”
Her nails dug deeper.
Blood welled up on my forearms in beaded lines and slid down.
“And you’ll just be a footnote in their lives. That’s the difference between a boss and a queen.” I felt all of it. The wet warmth on my skin. The bones of her neck under my thumbs. The tendons. The cord of her windpipe, the wrong shape now, crushed into a flatter shape than it was meant to be.
The way her shoulders started to twist as her body figured out what was happening to it and tried to throw me off one final time.
But, I held on.
I was stronger than her now.
Stronger than ever before.
The sacrifice and Kenji’s blood had given me a new body, mind, and soul.
She thrashed some more. Her legs kicked under the sheet. The bed banged against the wall once, twice.
A thin red line of blood ran out of her left nostril.
“That’s right.” I watched it and smiled. “I won’t be the only woman on this island to bleed tonight. You’ll bleed too.”
The blood ran down the curve of her lip. It pooled in the corner of her mouth where her tongue still pushed at the air she could not catch.
And then. . .her hands left my forearms. They went up to my face. She tried to scratch at my eyes. Her nails scrabbled across my cheekbone and missed. She tried for my throat.
Her hand was too weak now. It slid off my collarbone, bumped against the soul pin, and fell back.
I leaned harder. The bones under my thumbs gave a little.
Her tongue came farther out of her mouth.
The red in her eyes had taken over almost all of the whites.
Then finally. . .her hands fell, and her body shuddered and then went still.
She was gone.
Yet. . .I just. . .couldn’t let go.
I had to make sure.
So. . .I stood right there. . .and continued to choke that lifeless body. . .
How long did I do that?
Surely, time passed.
I remembered hearing someone call my name.
Maybe, Deja.
Perhaps, Yoichi.
Tears spilled from my eyes and I thought of my baby girl and choked that bitch some more.
And Yoichi’s hands wrapped around mine and pulled me off of her utterly broken, purple neck. A vision hit me when we connected.
The room disappeared and I stood outside several feet behind Yoichi as he stood outside too. It was raining and Yoichi was staring in the window.
I walked over and saw that inside the house was a young woman singing to a baby as she rocked him.
And I knew that the woman was Kenji’s mother, and the baby was Kenji, and that Yoichi was looking at the next mission he had to complete to hopefully end his curse.
Then, the vision left and I finally let go.