Cracked Porcelain by Drake Collins Read Free Book Online Page A

degenerate gamblers who were destined to never feel the warmth of the light of victory on their chapped, pock-marked faces, that would be the god whom Mardo had unwittingly won the favor of.
    Summarizing Mardo's fiscal shortcomings were simple: H e owed lots of money to the wrong people. Dropping 150,000 uni-creds in games to the nephew of the head of the Tsen-Tze crime family wasn’t a wise fiscal life decision. Kylaxian crime syndicates were genetically predisposed to gambling, loved to win and loved even more to collect winnings.
    This wasn’t 150,000 uni-creds that Mardo was good for. He hadn’t earned an honest uni-cred in years so every bit of money he called his own was pilfered from someone else, either directly or indirectly through the criminal indiscretions of his mongrel crew. Mardo knew this, but, much like with his passion for young girls, he couldn’t help himself. He was on a thin wire with the Tsen-Tzes and had little to no collateral to keep his neck from being detached from the rest of him. They humored him because of how pathetically comical they found him. He was a court jester who thought himself a king. Unfortunately for Mardo, they had finally lost patience with him.
    When a representative from the Tsen-Tzes showed up at the compound, Mardo knew reality had shown up at his doorstep. The man , named Kee, immediately stood apart from the mangy native riffraff: from his clean-shaven head, his pressed suit, his polished, gleaming, glossy-black shoes and the digital holographic timepiece bound to his wrist, he wasn’t a Bruiser.  His shoes were worth more than the lot of these mouth-breathing scoundrels. They didn’t send a single unpleasant look in his general direction, though. He was human, like them, but breathed the rarified air regularly; he was of different stock and with qualitatively different benefactors. He was a messenger from unseen gods that could strike the Bruisers down at any time so they played the role of obedient dogs expertly.
    Kee stood in the broiling destitution of Mardo’s slum kingdom, eyes scanning the rusted steel canopy above. “You live well, Mardo.”
    “Hey, I have modest standards. Freedom is my currency,” the fat man chuckled nervously.
    “You have no currency, Mardo. That’s why I’m here.”
    Mardo’s uneasy smile faded. “I want to pay. We’re good earners. We’ve got cash coming in through different enterprises. We can offer bulk percentages on the monthly collections until we smooth this out.”
    “That’s a start!” a sharp, disembodied voice barked out.
    Kee held up a small metallic disc in his palm and a beam of shimmering holographic pixels materialized in the space above his hand. The pixels congealed into the form of Dom Tsen-Tze, the gang’s irascible figurehead. The top of the pyramid. The capstone. His rigid, angular features mirrored his personality. His brown exoskeleton was peppered with glints of silver; his was a royal veneer. His eyes were soft, yet penetrating. They commanded respect.
    “I could’ve put you in the ground at any time, Mardo, you tub of shit. No one would’ve missed you. Your litter of miscreants down there would’ve found a new pair of tits to suckle from, too. Low-level messiahs are in heavy supply nowadays, especially messiahs big on talk and small on action.”
    The typically silver-tongued Mardo had nothing to return. No pithy retort. He absorbed the verbal salvo with uncharacteristic passivity. Maximillia inched towards him. He was a sick, abusive pervert, but she’d grown a depraved bond with him. She knew he was an unrepentant degenerate time-bomb but the very nature of their association reflected and amplified her
self-hatred. She felt that he was the only thing she deserved; in her mind she deserved this pain, this life.
    “I’m going to take a chunk out of your rackets. That’s right,” Dom declared. “That won’t suffice, though. I’ve assumed management of an establishment uptown. I need