Chapter 8: No Justice
The station was muted, stunned. It took her ten minutes in the captain's office, her face a sculpture of brittle resolve, her notice of resignation on his desk. Her union rep tried to speak. She silenced him with a cold glare. Her badge and gun were surrendered in the small armory downstairs, metal clinking against a wooden tray like a distant funeral bell. The dispatchers watched her walk out. She didn’t stop at her desk, didn’t touch the framed picture of her graduating academy class. Her partner, McCallister, caught her at the front doors.
“Jaz. You can’t be serious.”
“I am.”
“The Coronas case? It’s dead now.” He moved to block her path, his face tight with frustration and fear. “One month. You’re not sick. There’s something wrong.”
She looked through him, not at him. Her mind was a cinema of dripping walls and the feel of creaking leather beneath her palm. The smell. The four-letter names carved into her lower back.
“It’s personal, Mack.” She shifted her leather bag higher on her shoulder; it felt empty without the weight of the Glock. “I’m done.”
He grabbed her arm, lower than intended, his fingers pressing into a fresh bruise. She jerked her arm back with a sharp hiss, her eyes flashing wide with a pain that was more than physical. It was an error. The first she’d made.
His gaze went from her arm to her eyes. The suspicion was there now, a hard, cold piece of certainty crystallizing in his unspoken stare.
She left without another word.
Night came early. The garage entrance this time. Val had left the door unlatched for her.
The main bay smelled strongly of bleach and lemon cleaner, an inelegant attempt to conceal the stains and the activity of the previous night. But beneath that chemical tang, it remained, the memory of musk and salt soaked deep into the poured concrete.
The heavy bass thump from the back room was different—a live recording of old anarcho-punk, a woman screaming into a void. A group of them were gathered around a low courier bike, arguing over cylinder-head specs. They went quiet when they saw her. Glances were exchanged: amusement, contempt, possession.
No one said ‘pig’ out loud. They didn’t need to.
Vesper, the one with the shaved head, looked up from a torque wrench. A slow, nasty smile spread. “She cleans up better than I expected.”
Raker, the silver-haired giant, grunted. “Still a filthy mess underneath.” She gestured with a blackened thumb. “Back room. Val’s waiting. She wants you ‘initiated’.”
Every word was a gavel strike.
The back room had a clinical feel. It was smaller, with reinforced glass-block walls and surgical-grade halogen lights suspended from a stained drop-ceiling. A fold-out barber's chair stood at its center. Anodized steel tool trays held combs, hair clippers, and long coils of chemicals—relaxers, bleaching agents. Beside it was another tray, where an elaborate tattoo machine sat coiled like a chrome snake, a foot pedal on the floor beside it. Needle clusters gleamed. Jars of ink ran from primal black through toxic, garish neon.
Val was there, talking in a low murmur to a short, wiry futa whose hands were covered in intricate, blotchy ink. She turned as Jasmine entered.
“You came back.” Not a question. A flat observation with heat behind it.
“Where else could I go?” Jasmine’s voice was rough, still ravaged from prolonged use.
That answer pleased Val. She nodded to the barber's chair. “In the seat.”
It was cold against her jeans and the small of her back. The hydraulic hiss as the seat was pumped up felt obscenely loud. The tattooist, a woman called ‘Puncture’ according to the ‘PUNCTURE’ scrawled in ink along her knuckles, began without ceremony. She worked first with powerful commercial electric clippers, shaving close tracks down to Jasmine’s scalp. The vibration hummed through her skull.
Jasmine stared at her reflection in the smeared glass block opposite. Watched sections of her long, blonde hair—a point of professional pride, worn up in a tight bun under her cap for years—fall in silent, weightless clumps onto her shoulders, to the tarp spread below the chair. The sight made her throat tighten, but she forced her hands to lie limp in her lap.
From the tray, Puncture mixed a thick white cream in a ceramic bowl. It smelled of ammonia and sulfur. She used a small metal spatula, worked in sections, coating each narrow, shaved track of scalp with the burning chemical relaxer. Jasmine breathed shallowly, eyes watering.
Val leaned against the steel tray near the tattoo gun. She watched, slowly unbuttoning her own leather trousers, one button at a time. The fabric fell open. In the stark, unforgiving halogen light, her flesh emerged, heavy and impossibly thick, the length of it resting against the inside of her thigh, a rosy-purple landscape of veins. The sight was not a secret now; it was furniture in the room. A designator of rank.
Puncture braided with practiced speed, working the now-softened, straightened hair into tight, clean cornrows that pulled at the skin of Jasmine’s forehead. Each braid a tiny, fierce declaration of ownership, a painful root.
Jasmine, feeling the sting in her scalp and the void on her floor, met Val’s eyes in the reflection.
Val uncrossed her legs.
Her cock, a fleshy weight the color of a ripe aubergine, swung free. She didn't move from her spot. She just stood, her blue eyes pinning Jasmine’s green ones in the glass mirror. “Get it for me.”
No one else in the room moved or spoke. Puncture’s hands never stopped their quick, silent work, but her eyes darted to the scene for a second, a flicker of anticipation.
Jasmine stared. The pressure of the situation, the weight of everything surrendered, converged into a single point. Her former partner's suspicious stare outside the precinct vanished. The hollow clink of her badge was irrelevant. Her new existence was in the halogens and cornrows and in the commanding, silent expectation between Val’s thighs.
Slowly, awkwardly in the angled chair, she bent forward. The braids tugged. She stretched her neck, lips parting. It was out of her reach by two desperate inches.
Puncture gripped the back of her skull and gave it a shove downwards, into the necessary alignment.
Jasmine’s face was now pressed against cold, naked leather on one side, soft skin on the other, and hot, heavy, quivering flesh between. Val’s musk was immediate—spice and heat and iron. Up close, it looked monstrously veined, curved, alien. It was asleep, thick with its own blood-weight.
Jasmine had a shocked thought of a serpent in the sun. Then, feeling her duty, she stuck out her tongue.
The first touch was damp. She licked a bead of sweat from a bulging vein. Flat of her tongue first, hot skin tasting of clean salt. She licked the length from base to tip, a moist stripe in the glare. She didn't know what she was doing. Instinct drove her mouth over the corona, sucking it past her lips. It filled the hollow of her mouth without effort. Still soft.She worked. Taking all she could accommodate into her mouth, hollowing her cheeks, bobbing mechanically. All while the fucking chemical brew hissed on her scalp.
Then, a deep tremor that started in Val’s belly and ran the length of it. It grew heavy, dense. Ripened. It expanded against the roof of Jasmine’s mouth, filled it to stuffing, and crept deeper, forcing her lips to their absolute limit. The desk-thick shaft was awakened by her wet heat.
Jasmine pulled off with a ragged gasp, strings of saliva snapping. Her face was flushed.
She repositioned, worshipping. One hand moved unconsciously to cradle it, to hold its dizzying weight. She explored the anatomy of it with lips and tongue: the meatiest head she’d ever seen, like a swollen plum; the seamed scar beneath it; the brutal drum-tight throb it now possessed. She sniffed it. That scent of iron and sea-puddles went deep into her nostrils.
“Yes,” Jasmine slurred against it, the work continuing on her head, Puncture’s fingers plaiting. The words tumbled out, drunk, evangelical. “Thank you. Thank you for letting me. Thank you for letting me suck it. Please… thank you. It’s… beautiful.” She gorged herself on it again, muttering ‘beautiful’ past her gag reflex, past her shame.
Above her, Val’s breathing had slowed, evened. Her face showed a kind of apathetic worship, the practiced ease of a cruel god receiving justifiable prayer.
Puncture finished the final braid, pulling it so tight Jasmine’s eyes slanted. She clapped her hands free of loose hairs. “Side profile’s sharp as fucking knives,” she noted to no one. “Shit.” She gestured towards the pen sterilizer and the gun. “Ready for the pasteboard?”
Val looked down at Jasmine, who was now suckling, working, lost in worship. Nuzzling.Sniffing. “Slut pig’s ready.”
Puncture swabbed the back of Jasmine’s neck with alcohol. While Jasmine was preoccupied with inhaling the scent-sweat-salt, while she was murmuring ‘beautiful gang service please,’ Puncture clicked on the tattooing gun.
The high buzz joined the thump of the punk album from the other room.
The very first needle did not descend on her neck. Puncture gently pushed Val's hip to clear some space and grabbed Jasmine by her chin, pulling her from her interlude. Jasmine’s lips gave a plaintive pop as they separated.
Puncture tapped Jasmine’s chapped, swollen mouth. “Open.”
Jasmine opened her mouth.
The tattoo needle buzzed toward her flesh. Jasmine felt its promise, an unnatural, humming vibration signaling a new permanence.