by Ace Gray
I couldn’t finish the sentence or my thought or wherever I’d been going. I hadn’t been lying when I said he’d destroyed me. The hysterics took over any chance I had of saying anything else on her voicemail, and I just let the phone slide out of my hand and onto the ground. I curled into a ball there on the dark dirt of the parking lot by my passenger door.
I curled into a ball and cried for all the things that had been shattered that night, not the least of which was my hope.
“You keep looking at your phone.” Bert turned his words up with a quirk of an eyebrow as I checked the screen for the 837th time tonight.
Dantè had texted me, and in no uncertain terms, told me Danger was fucked. That wasn’t what kept me glancing at my unchecked messages. It was a voicemail from Mercy Graves. As in, Dantè’s Mercy.
Why is she calling me?
“It’s nothing.” I smiled as we walked toward my door.
And I really, really wanted to believe myself. After all, I was doing everything in my power to avoid the inevitable train wreck at the end of my tunnel. The one where Bert realized my name was Max, not Jordan, and that I’d helped put two of his roommates in the hospital in honor of the man I’d once loved. I scoffed and rolled my eyes, unable to hide my thoughts on my own idiocy.
“Okay, it’s not nothing. What’s up Jordan? Babes?” He turned me and pressed me against the wall behind me.
His irresistible smirk, and his arched eyebrow above his glasses, and I almost caved. Almost.
“You know that you can tell me anything.”
Not this was on the tip of my tongue when his phone rang. He gave me one hard and hungry look before he pulled his phone out and looked at his own screen. The cute little furrows in his brow replaced the panty-melting smirk.
“Diego?” he answered. “What?” He turned away from me when he asked and started a slow pace on the sidewalk. “I can’t understand you.”
The slink and prowl of his long, lanky muscles made me lick my lips. He looked over and I expected a playful gaze but his whole face folded in on itself.
“Bert?” I pushed off the wall and reached for him.
He swore as he pulled out of my grasp and walked away, still speaking in hushed tones. Shadow fell across him on the street. For the first time, Bert looked less than perfect and it rattled me. I shook my head and rubbed my eyes, telling myself my guilty conscious was playing tricks on me.
“I have to go,” he cut into my thoughts. “Diego is in some shit.”
“Is everything okay?”
“Don’t ask me.” He cupped my cheek. “Then I don’t have to lie to you.”
“What? What does that mean?”
“It means I have to go.” He bent down and kissed my forehead.
“Well that’s bullshit.” I couldn’t help myself.
He stepped back and shoved his hands into his pockets, rounding his shoulders and sending his soulful eyes downcast to the pavement.
“It is bullshit, Babes, but…”
“You’re going.” I put my hands on my hips as I finished his sentence.
“Yeah. And before you crumple up your adorable little nose and make some snarky little line, let me tell you, I don’t want to.”
I scoffed and rolled my eyes.
“I don’t, Jordan.” Every time. Every damn time, my sister’s name hurt. “But I have to get to the bottom of this. Help if I can.” He shrugged. “They both deserve that much.”
They? They who?
“What about what I need?” I blurted instead.
“An orgasm?” He reached for me with that silky smirk. I shoved at his hands. “Okay, kidding, kidding. But…”
Rather than placate him, I shook my head, pulled away from the wall, and walked toward my front door.
“Jordan,” he called but I didn’t turn; I just climbed up the stairs slowly with a scowl on my face. “Jordan, come on. I said it was important.”
I waved him off without another look as I slipped inside my building and up the stairs. Each footstep was as heavy as my heart, as I trudged up the stairs to my apartment, Bert calling my name—my sister’s name—trailed behind. I could even hear him when I slipped into my dark apartment and sagged against the door.
“He still make you weak at the knees?” Dantè asked from the heart of the darkness in the room. His acidic voice wasn’t meant to boil my skin.
“What’s wrong?” I pushed away from the door and walked across the small kitchen to the counter top that I could lean on as I tried to finally decipher his brooding mood. He had been quiet for the past couple days. He flicked a lighter, lit a candle on the coffee table then raised his big bear paw and held it over the candle, snuffing out what little light it had produced. I got the sense it was a repetitive motion for him.
“Rousse said Mercy wasn’t involved, that she never knew.” He blew out a deep breath and my eyes went wide.
My whistle was automatic. “When did you find out?”
“When I pulled him out of the car.” He snapped the lighter in his hand and stared at the flame.
That’s what he’d been beating himself up over. I hadn’t seen him eat or drink, just stare. What he saw, I couldn’t even begin to guess. There was a rightness to this revenge. They deserved it. But…I’d felt the same halting steps. The weight of secrets and lies and pain hung on my shoulders too. Especially when it came to love.
When love and vengeance battled, there can only be one winner.
“What do I say to her? How do I explain?” He gulped audibly. “Or do I say nothing at all? Did I ruin it…”
The sadness in his last sentence was as palpable as my own heartbeat. I pushed away from the counter to go to him where he sat, but the buzz of my phone stopped me short.
When I pulled it out, there were a few texts from Bert but the reminder of Mercy’s voicemail held my attention. I slid my finger across the notification and held my phone up to my ear.
At her very first words, my eyes went wide.
I was waiting for Max to answer, for guidance from my only real friend, when she flipped on the kitchen light.
“What?” I shot up and over to her the second I saw her face, shoving the lighter I’d been playing with into my pocket. “What’s wrong? What happened?” I cradled her elbows palms, ready to drag her to my chest for a hug, but neither of us moved. She stayed frozen, her phone to her ear, shock marring her face beneath those big, shaggy bangs.
“Max.” I tried to snap her out of it.
Slowly her eyes slid up my body and searched my face. They darted side to side, looking for an explanation I couldn’t give her. Then a single tear slid down her cheek and puddled on her chest.
“For the love of Christ, Max, what’s going on?” I bellowed loud enough that her bangs rustled in the breeze of my words.
She still didn’t answer me. Instead, she held her phone out, hit the screen once, then pushed it up against my ear. I was confused for a second but then a voice came through. A voice I knew better than my own. My heartbeat raced for a moment as Mercy’s words branded themselves on my brain. The beats sped up, my shoulders heaving, when I processed what she was saying.
I pulled the phone down when she digressed into full sobs and played it again. And again.
The world tilted. He’d hurt her. Fuck all that he’d done to me, he’d hurt Mercy. Mercy who was mine, who always had been. Mercy, who I’d abandoned, whom I’d brought this on.
I threw Max’s phone on the counter. I didn’t bother with a shirt as I shoved my feet into boots and drug my keys off the counter, letting the sound of metal scrape against tile be the nails down the chalkboard of my soul.
Max called after me but I couldn’t stop my feet. I wouldn’t. Rage propelled me toward the door. Then into my car. Rage and fury and hate and vengeance. Rage and guilt. Guilt that I shoved over in a corner as I let the fury consume me.
I hadn’t fully formed a plan for Diego, but now I knew I’d kill him outright.
The temptation
to pull over and scream into the sky was almost overwhelming. The rumble of my engine soothed me enough to keep going. The storm brewing on the horizon too. I almost bit a hole in my lip. But I had to keep driving. I had to find him. I had retribution to give.
Priest had told me how he didn’t regret revenge, he just regretted the flash in which it was over. That it winked out of existence almost as quickly as his enemies did. He’d wanted to savor it. As I pictured the ways I’d kill Diego—fast and full of hate, face to ever-loving face—I didn’t think I’d mind that much.
I made my way to the parking lot overlooking the cliffs on muscle memory and instinct alone. Our surf spot was below, the trail to the house veering off to the right. I would creep through the woods we’d played in as boys, the woods full of blood oaths and foolish notions, the woods where they’d set me up and left me to wither and die, and when I arrived at his back door, he wouldn’t know I was the angel of death with my sights locked on him.
My headlights hit a small silver car just before I shut them off and returned to the darkness. The crash of the waves below echoed what was thumping in my heart as gravel crunched beneath my boots. My hands flexed and my forearms rippled with barely contained hate as I started toward the rooted path. I stopped just long enough to look back at the silver car. Just long enough to see if there would be witnesses. The slight pause was enough that a new sound caught my attention on the whipping wind. A small sob that twisted up in my heart before I really understood why.
I turned in the direction of the sound, squinting into the night. The gravel crunched again but it wasn’t under my shoes. It was on the other side of the silver car. My brow lifted and I turned back toward the trail, toward Diego, but then the soft whimper rose against the oncoming storm and stopped me again. Small steps punctuated the sound just before a car door opened.
Mercy’s small frame trembled inside her overalls as she slid into the front seat of the car. It didn’t take much light to see that she was bruised, and her hair was matted with mud. Her clothes were torn. Anger whipped all the more furious in me, almost blinding because he’d hurt her. I was going to exact those pains on him tenfold. I was going to storm down that path and make him whimper.
If only she’d stop crying first.
My anger ebbed at the soft sound; I’d always been a willing slave to it. Before I’d never put anything above her. Above soothing her. And tonight, hearing her cry, knowing what she’d been through…I cracked.
I wasn’t aware I’d made the decision to turn back for her. The magnetic attraction that had drawn us together on a soul deep level hooked into my skin and drug me over.
“Mercy?” My voice was almost a whisper, but she turned. She turned and she saw right through me.
Her gaze narrowed as tears spilled down her cheeks. She looked me over, head to toe, then back again. When she finally stilled her gaze, it was on my chest, but there was no heat. She was trying to see into my chest, into my heart—I felt it. And I knew she found me wanting.
“Merce?”
Her eyes slowly found mine. I searched them for the blue that I loved best then panicked. Here in the dark, I couldn’t quite remember the color. Or the feel of that crisp, cool water color washing over me. I’d seen her two days ago, but I’d seen her through eyes filtered with hate and bitterness.
“How dare you.” The tone of her voice told me she saw me the same.
“Merce—”
“Don’t. Don’t you fucking dare, Dantè.” Her strength grew as she shot out of the driver’s seat and she stepped forward to shove my bare chest. Whether it was my name from her lips or her touch, a wild bolt shot through me.
“Say it again,” I begged.
“Say what? That you hurt me? That you let me down? That losing you stung but knowing you stayed away by choice was the death I never wanted to live through?” She threw up her arms then shoved at me again. “What do you want me to say, Dantè?”
It was my name. My name. I wasn’t Row on a warpath. I wasn’t a wicked man. I was just me. Just Dantè. And my name was my undoing. I fell to my knees, decimated by one, two, three, four, five letters from her lips. Thunder rolled in the background as she let me stay there.
“Do you know what he did to me tonight?” she asked, and the hair on the back of my neck stood on end, my fists balled automatically. “Do you know what he did to me a month ago? And the month before that? Do you know how he touched me? How he watched—”
“Stop!” I begged.
“Why?” Her voice wobbled. “You did this. My only reprieve was when he was gone or when Danger played with us. And you let them.”
“They’re the ones that did this!” I shoved my hand toward the trail to the house. “And I thought you stood with them,” I shouted as I thumped my own chest. Mercy’s whole face folded, and her venomous words stopped. “I thought you were part of my downfall. I had no choice.” The tears pricked at each of my words.
“Of course you had a choice. How could you?” Her shock warped her beautiful face.
“How could I?” Betrayal rose up and crashed in my voice. “How could they?”
“What?”
“Danger, Diego, and Rousse ruined me. My life.” My shoulders heaved. “They ruined US!”
She gasped and those small hands I wanted to collect in my own flew to her mouth. Her eyes went wide as she looked between my car and the mouth of the trail that lead through the woods to that house. That godforsaken house. When her eyes returned to me, they searched for something.
“What do you mean?”
“Do you want me to spell it out?” I snarled. “They set me up. They drugged me then they killed someone and washed my hands in the blood.” My gestures were the punctuation to the pain of the memory. “They sat there and lied to the cops. On the stand. To you. To me. They lied about everything. And for what? For some imagined revenge?” I shouted. “I know firsthand revenge is tempting but I gotta tell you that I don’t know whether it’s worth it yet. I’m about to find out.”
Her eyes darted toward the trail again then back. Understanding flashed in her eyes just before thunder clapped behind me.
“You weren’t here for me tonight,” she said behind her fingertips.
“Yes and no,” I admitted with a heavy sigh as the first few droplets of rain hit my face. “I know what he did, and I’m furious with him. How dare he put his hands on you. How dare anyone.” My voice was crescendoing again, riding the wave of pure emotion inside me. “I didn’t want to make him wait for his reckoning like Rousse or Danger. He was going to face it. Tonight. I wanted to draw it out but the idea of his mouth on your collarbone…”
“How did you know that?” She crouched before me and leveled her eyes with mine.
“Max is the only friend I have left…”
Mercy folded onto the ground inches across from me but we were still miles apart.
“You had me. You always had me,” she whispered as she reached for me but let her hand fall away.
I didn’t know what to say, how to answer. Her, the very essence of her, was suffocating the flame of betrayal I’d been fueling for months on end now. The emotion inside me wasn’t definable anymore. It was a whirlpool that I was spinning in.
“And Diego? What about him?”
“Let him go.”
“You would say that after all he’s done?” I snarled.
The rain started a little faster, a little more furious, washing the mire of this night from her beautiful face.
“Yes,” she whispered, and I remembered the way that whisper used to fill me up so completely.
But that was before revenge. Before I’d turned my back on her.
“I can’t.” My voice cracked, and the power I’d started with crumpled into a defeated whisper. “If you take my revenge, I have nothing. I am nothing.”
Tonight had been a lesson in hurt. Razor sharp and deep cuts littered my heart, and Dantè was responsible for some of them. But seeing him stay in the parking lot
, in front of me, a beautiful and broken man battling emotion as it threatened to drown him…
I launched myself at him, throwing my arms around his neck, and crashing into his hard, naked chest. There was no reason to console him, but I couldn’t stop myself. Perhaps it had been naive to think that I could find myself without him. I wasn’t sure I existed without him at all. Every need I’d ever had began and ended with him. Even now when I was bleeding out, he was the one I was concerned with saving.
His body felt so different, bulky, rigid, and rough, but what zapped through me was exactly the same. It was the electric want that always paired with the complete contentment of home. He didn’t hug me back but I didn’t care. I buried my face into his unfamiliar and scratchy neck and took a deep inhale of the sweat and pineapple of Dantè. Of the man I’d loved.
Of the man I still loved.
“You have me, Dantè,” I murmured against the oncoming storm.
“How can you even say that?” He shuddered beneath me.
I knew the answer but I didn’t know how to phrase it. I didn’t know how to share the shape of my heart with him. Before he’d always known. I swallowed down the want of what was, and accepted the truth of what still could be.
“Hope, Dantè.” I filled the empty space with the only answer there was. “That’s why I can say it.” I sighed and slid my hands from around his neck to his grizzled chin. “I thought it finally broke tonight but seeing you here, I don’t know…I can hope.”
His eyes searched mine. He started to speak a few times but his mouth just flopped. Something sorrowful set into his features. I got the sense that it wasn’t just the rain on his cheeks.
“Every month I stayed in that house,” I left his skin only to point toward the house on the hill, “was another check I could send that lawyer. And every check I sent was a small kernel of hope that you’d come back to me.”
