SICK HEART by Huss, JA (nice books to read TXT) 📗

of happy surprise on his face when he sees us. “Ah. There they are!”

Yeah. There is definitely something going on here. And we’re in the dark about all of it.

“Cort! My son!” He walks over to me and claps me on the shoulder. “You look… fabulous. Fabulous,” he repeats. “You always did thrive in solitude.”

I’d like to point out that I wasn’t alone on the Rock, not for one fucking second, but his words are just dressing. Just frosting. Just… fluffy air to fill the empty space in this room.

“And Anya.” He moves on to her, taking her hand in his, even though she doesn’t offer it, and bringing the tips of her fingers to his lips. He kisses them. Licks them. She tries to pull her hand back, but he doesn’t let go. So she gives in.

It’s a lewd gesture. One of disrespect. One that pretty much calls Anya a whore, in my opinion. He leers at her, looking her up and down like she is a sexual thing.

This is a tell with Udulf. We are playing some sort of game. Because Udulf only has sex with children. In his perverted, sick, twisted version of the world, Anya is much too old to sexually excite him.

He lets go of her hand, bypasses Rainer completely, and his gaze lands on Maart. Udulf laughs. “Well. Here you are. Are you still in?”

I look over at Maart as well. “In? In what? What the hell is he talking about?”

Maart ignores me. “You bet I’m in.”

“What the fuck are we talking about?” I ask again.

“We”—Udulf turns to face me—“we,” he stresses the repeated word, “aren’t talking about anything. Yet. But Maart and I, we had a deal.”

“What deal?” I look over at Maart. “What fucking deal?”

Maart draws in a deep breath. He glances at Rainer for a moment, but decides to skip whatever thought first comes to mind and concentrate on me. “You and I both know how we got here, Cort.”

“Maart—”

“He got you here,” Udulf interrupts. He walks over to Maart and stands next to him. “Isn’t that what you’re trying to say, Maart? Hmm? You’re the… what do they call it?” He flips his hand in the air. “The wind beneath the wings, so to speak?”

“Maart—”

“You were never strong enough,” Maart says.

“Strong enough for what? Because the way I see it, you’re a free man today because I was strong enough in all the ways it counts.”

“Exactly!” Udulf beams. “He is a free man. You are all three free men. And Maart has decided—”

“No.” I shake my head. “Fuck that. You’re not staying here. You’re not staying behind.”

“Behind?” Udulf guffaws. “He is out in front, my boy!”

“Maart. I’m not gonna say this again. What the fuck is he talking about?”

“The next fight, of course,” Udulf says.

I ignore Udulf and lock eyes with Maart. “What. Fight?”

Finally, Maart speaks. “The final fight. The only fight that has ever mattered. The one fight you were too weak to even think about, let alone accept. The one fight that can free them all.”

“No.” I’m shaking my head. “You cannot be serious.”

“The ultimate fight,” Udulf says. “Listen to me, Cort.” Udulf grabs my shoulder and squeezes. And he is very fucking lucky I have spent all of my twenty-seven years practicing restraint. Because I want to kill this man. I want to rip his head off and feed it to the fish below the rock. “You have no vision, Cort. Sick Heart. Whatever you call yourself these days. You have never had vision. Not like Maart. He has always known how to get what he wants.”

“And what is that, Maart?” I ask. “What do you want that you don’t have?”

Maart is silent for a moment. Thinking, I guess. His expression is one I don’t exactly recognize, so I can’t be sure how to interpret it. But finally, he says, “One life, right? We get this one chance to go through life. And this”—he pans his hands wide—“this shithole training camp is what you settled for? That forty-year-old platform ship? A fucking crumbling-down decommissioned oil rig? That’s the best you could do, Cort? Really?”

Udulf laughs again. But I ignore him. “It took me twenty-two years to get this shithole training camp, that forty-year-old platform ship, and you just said yourself, right back there on the cliff, that the Rock was how we raised—”

Maart guffaws so loud, I stop talking. “For a man who prides himself on keeping silent so he can practice the art of reading others, you sure do miss a lot, Cort.”

“What the fuck does that even mean?”

Maart nods his head to Rainer, who has been silent this whole time. “Everyone in the camp knew he was never going to leave.”

“Even I knew that.” Udulf laughs. He walks over to Rainer, claps him on the back, and says, “Rainer is a man who knows his place. He knows where he belongs. And that place is here. Well”—Udulf pauses to look over at Maart and smirk—“not here. Tell him, Maart. Tell him where Rainer belongs.”

“What is he talking about?” I growl these words out at Maart.

But it’s not Maart who speaks up. It’s Rainer. He steps in front of me, blocking my view of Maart, and sighs. “We don’t want to work on a supply ship, Cort. We don’t want to drift for the rest of our lives.”

I push Rainer aside so I can look at Maart again. “What did you do?”

“You say those words like they’re a bad thing, Cort. But all I did was elevate us.”

“Not true,” Udulf says. “Not all of you. That’s the price. There is always a price. And while you were never willing to splurge on the finer things, Cort, Maart and Rainer here have a different perspective on the meaning of a life well-lived.”

I have a lot to say about that, but Maart speaks before I can. “You would leave them behind. You would never fight for them the way I would.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” I