Perversion
The Perversion Trilogy, Book One
T.M. Frazier
Copyright @ 2018 by T.M. Frazier
ISBN-13: 978-1-7243667-7-1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, except brief quotes used for reviews and certain other non commercial uses, as per copyright laws.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Perversion
Edited by: Karla Nellenbach, Last Word Editing &
Ellie McLove, Love-N-Books
Cover photo by: Wander Aguilar Photography
Cover design & formatting: T.M. Frazier
Table of Contents
About Perversion
Definition of Perversion
Lacking, Florida
Opening Quote
Prologue
The Past
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Letter One
Chapter 3
Letter Two
Letter Three
Letter Four
Letter Five
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Letter Six
Letter Seven
The Present
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
A PREVIEW OF POSSESSION
A PREVIEW OF NINE
Also by T.M. FRAZIER
Acknowledgments
About the Author
About Perversion
Love is supposed to be a fairy tale.
Ours is a death wish.
I'm the executioner for the Bedlam Brotherhood.
She's a con artist working for my greatest enemy.
I use her.
She manipulates me.
We find ourselves on opposite sides of a bloody war.
My heart and head tell me I should stay away.
My lust doesn't give a sh*t.
Nothing’s fair in love and gang war.
For those who think you’re all alone in this world.
You are not.
You are loved.
You are unique.
You are important.
You are EVERYTHING.
For a boy named James aka “Little Preppy” who just got a himself a brand new heart.
All my love and more.
Always for L&C
ALWAYS
perversion | pərˈvərZHən |
noun
1 the alteration of something from its original course, meaning, or state to a distortion or corruption of what was first intended: a scandalous perversion of the law | all great evil is the perversion of a good.
2 sexual behavior or desire that is considered abnormal or unacceptable.
Lacking, Florida
STATISTICS
15,244: Number of residents
26.6: Median age of residents
$13,372: Average household income
74.8%: Poverty ratio
2: Score on the safe cities scale (100 being the safest)
“Evil has no substance of its own, but is only the defect, excess, perversion, or corruption of that which has substance.”
-John Henry Newman
Prologue
For years, the streets of Lacking have run red. The violence escalates with each passing day. Bodies riddled with bullet holes are left to rot on the streets and sidewalks. As a warning. A sign of power.
A message of who really gets to decide who lives and who dies, with each of the three main gangs competing for the honor.
People in this graffiti-covered town fear the constant bloodshed, the never-ending stream of bullets whizzing by, of walking into the wrong territory at the wrong time, wearing the wrong color, or saying the wrong thing. Not pledging the correct allegiance to the person holding the fucking gun in their mouths.
People stop leaving their homes after dark.
Some stop leaving them all together.
The only law here is gang law. Justice comes in the form of a bullet or a blade. It’s the wild west meets the aftermath of the motherfucking apocalypse.
It’s also home.
I am one of the reasons why people are so fearful to leave their own homes.
Murder surges through my veins like a derailed train.
You can’t do something well if you weren’t born with a piece of that something inside of you. If it was anything else, like art or business, people would call what I have a talent. A passion. I’m no fucking artist. I’m no accountant. My business is revenge. It’s what I thrive on. Taking lives to save the lives of those in the brotherhood. To make a point. To send a message.
For the sheer fucking pleasure of it.
It’s what I was made to do.
If this was the Middle Ages, I’m confident I’d be the man in the heavy hood, lobbing people’s heads off at the king’s command. I have the stomach for it. The tenacity.
The desire.
They call me Grim.
I’m the executioner for the Bedlam Brotherhood.
Death is upon you if you see me coming.
Kidding.
You’ll never see me coming.
A truce was reached shortly after the Governor threatened to send in the National Guard.
Since then, all has been quiet.
Too quiet.
If you listen closely you can almost hear the sounds of guns reloading.
Click click clack.
Click click clack.
The truce was for one year.
It’s been ten months.
Click.
Click.
CLACK.
THE PAST
One
Sixteen Years Old
Emma Jean Parish had wild curly hair and an attitude to match.
We met when she forced her pussy on me. Her cat. A mangy little thing with anger issues almost as bad as mine.
It was moving day.
I was loading the single garbage bag containing all my possessions into the car of a stranger named Marci. She’d popped up out of nowhere like the ghost of unwanted children’s past and told me I was coming with her.
Just like that.
From the way Marci talked about her place, I figured it was some sort of transitional home for kids like me. Too old to get adopted and too troubled for anyone to voluntarily take on. I didn’t ask her anything else, not just because I knew I really didn’t have a fucking choice, but because I didn’t talk. It wasn’t that I couldn’t. I just didn’t.
Words don’t mean anything. After you realize that, you find the need to speak more of a bullshit burden than a tool to communicate.
Besides, I was a kid in the system. I went where they took me, and every few months, they took me somewhere new.
Sometimes, I hated it.
Sometimes, I really hated it.
This time was different. In more ways than one. Usually, I was dropped off by my caseworker, and the people receiving me were about as excited as they were about junk mail.
No one has ever come to pick me up before.
As long as she wasn’t sizing me up for a skin suit, it didn’t matter. I was itching to get out of the fucking boys’ home. Especially since I wasn’t really a boy. Even when I was, I never really felt like one.
I was about to go back into the boys' house where Marci was talking to my caseworker about my transition and probably my behavioral problems—record, problem with authority, anger issues, lack of communication skills, etc—when I spotted her.
A girl a few years younger than me, stood across the narrow street looking both ways slowly and cautiously, repeating the process twice more before suddenly sprinting across like it was a busy highway and not a small, unpaved, rarely traveled road.
Crazy, honey-blonde curls stuck out from her head at every angle, a cross between Little Orphan Annie and Medusa. Hair meant for a doll, not a living, breathing, human kid. And this one was cradling a little, tiger-striped pussycat in her arms. Tears streamed down her red blotchy face. Teeth marks marred her bottom lip where she’d been biting down to try and hold back the flood. She wore long, ripped, denim shorts that grazed the top of her knees with an oversized t-shirt tied in a knot at the side of her hip. Whatever logo used to be printed on the front was so faded it was no longer legible.
“Hey mister!” she called, coming to a stop on the sidewalk in front of me.
I looked to my left and right, then over my shoulder, but there was no one else around. I was sixteen. There was no way she could be talking to me, but then she came huffing and puffing right up the driveway until she was standing before me. Her humungous eyes were too big for her face, a deep, tear-filled blue-green.
I tied the top of the garbage bag in a tight knot and gave her a what do you want look.
She held the kitten in a choke hold around its neck, legs dangling in the air, but oddly enough the thing didn’t seem to mind. When the girl got closer, the little shit hissed at me. The girl giggled loudly. I shifted uncomfortably, not used to such a sound.
Her laugh was gone as quickly as it came. Her expression turned very serious as if she remembered something.
“My foster mama, Aunt Ruby, said I can’t keep Mr. Fuzzy.” She sniffled. “She…she said I gotta give him...” She breathed in a shaky breath and clutched the little fur-ball tighter to her chest. Her shoulders shook as she cried.
I crossed my arms over my chest. Maybe, it was because behind her giggles and tears for Mr. Fuzzy, I spotted a familiar sadness.
She glanced at the house. “You’re a foster kid, too, right?”
I nodded.
“You can’t talk?” she asked, without judgement.
I didn’t shake my head or nod. It’s not a yes or no question. It wasn’t that I couldn’t talk. It’s just that I didn’t.
Ever.
She looked me over, taking in the sketchy tattoos on my arms. They were all done by thugs and wannabe artists during my many visits to juvenile detention centers around the state. They were just a bunch of crooked scratches dug into my skin, done with paperclips or sharpened pencils then rubbed in with pen ink. I planned to get them covered up one day with something compelling, epic, and meaningful.
As soon as I had something like that in my life.
The girl glanced down to the cat, then back up to my face, her long eyelashes wet with fresh tears. What the fuck did she want with me? Even though it was nearly ninety degrees outside, I raised the hood of my sweatshirt up over my head.
“You…you okay, mister?” She wiped her red nose with the back of her hand.
What the fuck is wrong with this girl? She was the one crying, and she was asking if I was okay?
I didn’t know shit about kids, even though I was technically still one myself.
I slammed the trunk of Marci’s car. The license plate, adorned by a bleeding black rose around the stamped numbers, rattled with the force. I turned my back on the girl and started up the driveway.
“Wait! Wait! Don’t go! We haven’t been properly introduced.” She ran around and threw herself in front of me to keep me from heading back into the house. She shifted the cat to the crook of one arm and extended her hand. “I’m Emma Jean Parish. I just turned twelve, and I like magic and reading. I also like fairytales even though Aunt Ruby says I’m too old to like ‘em. Also, I don’t like scary movies or yelling,” she rambled. “What about you?”
She offered me a small, sad smile and sniffled, her hand dangling in the air.
I sighed heavily. I knew from the determined look in the girl's eyes that she wouldn’t scram until I answered her. I glanced down at her hand and raised an eyebrow.
“You don’t gotta talk if you don’t want to. Do you sign?” she asked, and I realized she was looking straight at me so I could read her lips. “I learned how to sign the alphabet from an old encyclopedia. I can spell things out, but I don’t know much else.”
She thought I was deaf.
A lot of people did at first.
When I was first put into the system, they placed me in an American sign language class because they thought I didn’t know how to communicate. While I was in there, I picked up a thing or two.
She began to spell out the same thing she just said with the hand not choking the kitten. Her tongue hung out the side of her mouth as she concentrated on making each letter perfect. If she continued like that, she was never going to leave.
Frustrated, I blurted out, “Tristan. And I’m not deaf.”
The sound of my own voice, which hasn’t rattled my eardrums in years, startled me as much as it did her.
“Tristan?” She smiled, cocking her head to the side. “You’re not deaf?”
I shook my head.
“Tristan,” she repeated. She reached out and removed my arm from my chest until she freed my hand. She shook it with more force than most grown men, but that wasn’t what shocked me.
It was the zap of her skin on mine. The feeling of something shattering all around me until gone. I was too young to be having a stroke, so what the fuck was that?
I stared down at our connected hands in wonder. It’d been a long time since I’d spoken and even longer since I let anyone touch me. That’s all the feeling was. I shook it off, but the current still hummed between us.
“Funny, you don’t look like a Tristan.”
No, I didn’t. I looked like a criminal. A thug. Although, I did agree with her. I never cared for my name. Tristan sounded like someone who went to a fancy private school and did his homework before lacrosse practice. Not someone who spent more time in a cell than a classroom, and the only time he ever touched a pencil was to sharpen it into a weapon.
“I like it though,” she mused, stroking the kitten. “I mean, it’s a nice name. Not for you, though. You might want to look into that.” She pressed her lips to the cat’s head.
I lit a cigarette. Over Emma Jean’s head, I spied my social worker inside, sitting at the table and talking Marci politely while smiling and nodding. I hoped they’d hurry up so I could finally get the fuck out of there.
I leaned back against the black Firebird and took a deep drag, wishing I hadn’t sold the last of my weed this morning to Mr. Arnold, the eighty-year-old man who lived next to the boy’s home.
“You even gonna ask why I’m so upset?”
I shook my head, but Emma Jean continued anyway.
“You see, it’s because of Mr. Fuzzy here. By chance, do you know anyone looking for a pet kitten? ‘Cause Auntie Ruby says if I don’t get rid of him today, she’s taking it to the…the…the shelter.” She squeezed the cat who hissed and wiggled, but she held on tight, unaware that she was practically crushing the thing. “And…and…”
She began to sob again. Her face reddened. Her mouth opened wide, and she closed her eyes as she started to bawl.
I s
cratched my wrist under the sleeve of my hoodie. Shit, I didn’t know what to do when kids cried. How the fuck do you turn it off? I glanced around hoping that someone was going to come take her away, but there was no one.
“So, do you? Know of anyone who can take Mr. Fuzzy? He’s a really nice kitty.”
Mr. Fuzzy disagreed with a hiss.
I shook my head again.
Emma Jean’s deep blue-green eyes were already huge, but they grew even more significant with her panic. The crying only became louder. She reached out with her free hand and grabbed my arm once again. The zap between us happened again, stronger this time, like I’d stuck a dime in a light socket.
Why the fuck does she keep touching me?
I wanted to peel her hand off my arm, but she was locked on like a pit bull's jaw in a dog fight, and I couldn’t pry her off without breaking one of her fingers.
Hurting a girl would land me back in juvie, and I’d only just gotten out. No way did I want a return trip so soon, especially since the judge told me that the next time he saw me, he’d make sure I was tried as an adult.
Perversion (Perversion Trilogy Book 1) Page 1