Flesh Cartel, #8: Loyalties

respond. Talking about his own past and expecting the same in reply was the action of a man with ulterior motives, and no way was Roger the type. He was too . . .
    God, he was too pure .
    “I know. Nikolai talks to me about you.” He put up a hand before Dougie could respond, before the flash of jealousy Dougie felt at that knowledge—Nikolai confides in Roger—could fully form, let alone be analyzed. “Nothing too personal, I mean, nothing you’d be ashamed of me knowing. But where you came from, I know that. We’re alike in that way. That’s why Nikolai chose us: we want so badly to serve. I wanted to serve the law, serve my community. You wanted to serve people’s mental health . . . which I guess serves the community, too. But the kind of service we were striving for? It’s a losing battle, and we’d have burned out and the world would have eaten us alive. Even worse, it’s not what we really want. It’s just . . .” He shrugged. “A Band-Aid. A symptom of a deeper disease, of a pain we’d never have figured out how to heal on our own, one we were trying so desperately to guard against feeling again. But this kind of service . . .” He gestured in a way that encompassed the room, Nikolai, even some unknown new master waiting in the future. “This we can do. Nikolai won’t let us fail. And Nikolai healed me.”
    Roger met Dougie’s eyes, and Dougie was shocked to see them shining with wetness, with a kind of devotion he himself had never known, never understood. “Nikolai will heal you too, if you let him.”
    Dougie swallowed hard, and thought about school, and studying, and his old dreams of a practice, of rescuing Mat from a life of fighting, rescuing himself from . . . from what? Maybe Roger was right. Maybe he had been trying to rescue himself from a life of misery and fear. Maybe he’d picked psychology not out of passion but out of self-preservation. If he could master the human mind, if he could master the art of therapy and healing, then maybe he could heal himself. Was that what he’d been doing all that time? Chasing futilely after some panacea for his wounded soul and inadvertently making himself even more miserable in the process?
    Could Nikolai really help him stop running from himself?
    Looking into Roger’s earnest, open eyes, he dared to hope the answer was yes.

Mat adjusted the rope around his neck, wishing he knew how to tie a noose instead of a simple slipknot. The ceilings weren’t high here. The chin-up bar was even less high. When he stepped off the chair, his toes would be only inches from the floor. He didn’t want to screw this up, didn’t want to give his instincts a chance to kick in and fight.
    Knot over the carotid. He spun the leather, placed it carefully. Just like a sleeper hold. He’d be out in seconds. Dead in a couple minutes. And with any luck—any at all—it would be Nikolai who came in and found him, Nikolai who’d first get to see the fruits of his twisted efforts. Would he look at Mat’s limp body and see a person ? A life lost? Or just a waste of a million dollars and several weeks of his time?
    No. Don’t think about Nikolai. Not now. Don’t give him that.
    Happier thoughts. Happier. There’d been a time when he could call up such memories so easily. Everything seemed so far away now, so out of his grasp.
    He curled his toes into the seat of the chair. Pressed a palm to the wall. Smooth and cool beneath his fingers. Tried to ignore the touch of the leather around his throat. Focus.
    The taste of homemade lemonade.
    The day Knockout had stumbled, hungry and wet, onto their porch, stared warily at Mat, and started meowing. Can we keep him, Mom? Never any question she’d say yes.
    Christmas with Dougie, the year they’d gotten a Super Nintendo and played it so obsessively that their mother had to lock it away.
    His first kiss. The taste of cigarettes—the forbidden stacked on the forbidden—sticking to his lips.
    His first state championship, Mom and Dad and Dougie cheering wildly from the bleachers when the last bell rang.
    His first KO in a pro MMA fight, just forty-five seconds into round two, Mom and Dad and Dougie hugging and fist-pumping from the front row.
    The look on Dougie’s face when he’d opened his acceptance letter to his first-choice undergrad school—the letter he’d left unopened for four whole days so he could do it with Mat instead of Pattie and Mike.
    Dougie’s college graduation, Mat sitting with Mike, so