by Amity Cross
“You shouldn’t…you shouldn’t…”
“Don’t push me away. Not when you need me the most.”
I could see his muscles beginning to coil and knew he was going to do something he’d later regret. Before he could react, I shoved him hard and he stumbled, his back hitting the wall with a dull thud.
I placed the palm of my hand over his heart and stared him down. “You slept beside me once before. You can do it again.”
His expression began to soften and he covered my hand with his own.
“I've always been alone,” he whispered, taking me by surprise. “Working alone, living alone… Never trust anybody.”
Except Weiss. But I didn’t voice that one out loud. That notion had been hard-coded into his programming, that I understood.
“I’m changing,” he said.
“Then change with me.”
I knew the exact moment he gave in, because his eyes began to droop.
Stepping back, I pulled my jumper off and dragged my jeans over my hips, tossing them onto the floor at the foot of the bed. X followed suit, stripping down to his boxers. I allowed my gaze to wander, taking in the ripple of muscles across his stomach and the tribal tattoo that covered his left side. In the half-light, I couldn’t make out the scars that peppered his skin, the marks that Royal Blood had put there. The marks that were a constant reminder of the brutality he’d suffered to be made into what he was today.
X stepped around me and pulled back the covers, climbing into the middle of the bed.
“Mercy.” He held the cover up and lay his arm underneath the pillow beside him, waiting for me to claim my place by his side. Suppressing a smile, I sank into the cool sheets, my back against his front, and let my eyes flutter closed. His arm curled over my waist, his hand flat on my stomach.
“I’m trying.” He whispered the words so softly, I almost missed them.
I covered his hand with my own to let him know that I’d heard him and I shivered as he brushed his lips against the back of my neck.
“I didn't lie,” he murmured.
“You just didn't say everything,” I replied, understanding he meant that a part of him was afraid of hurting me unintentionally.
“No.”
“One day at a time, okay?”
He kissed the back of my neck softly. “Okay.”
And for the first time since we’d met, we fell asleep in each other’s arms…without fucking ourselves to exhaustion first.
Chapter 2
X
I stood on the shore of a lake.
The surface was grey and wild, the air full of ice, the heavy coat I wore only cutting out half the chill. The mountains in the distance were capped with snow, the sky threatening to dump more onto the lake and the surrounding hills.
A mile offshore was a tiny island. Craggy, untamed, covered in tall pines that pointed high into the sky, their roots clinging into the unstable soil. Crossing the water was a small tin boat, the chug of an outboard motor barely audible over the wind that cut back and forth in unpredictable gusts.
At the helm was a man wearing a heavy, black, woolen overcoat, his wild, curly, brown hair was being blown in all directions by the wind. He shut the outboard motor off, allowing the boat to coast the last few meters until the bow hit the shore. To most people he would look like a Middle-aged fisherman, spending even the roughest winter on the loch like most of the men that lived in these parts. He was as rugged as the landscape and twice as hard for it.
I watched impassively as he dragged the small boat up onto the shore and out of the water, not bothering to assist him. When he was satisfied his runabout was secure, he navigated the rocky shore to come meet me.
“Xavier,” the man said as he approached, his hand rising to wave. “Haw ur ye?”
The man’s thick Scottish brogue was hard to decipher at times, but I’d spoken to him often enough to understand a majority of what he said.
“Douglas.” I nodded.
He was Royal Blood’s man in the north who looked after the narcotics arm of the organization. Runners, addicts, growers, chemists…they all answered to him. Then, when it was all said and done, he answered to Greggor.
“What brings ye aw this way?” He looked me up and down. “If Greggor sent ye, then it cannae be guid.”
“You’ve been a good man up until now,” I said, pulling off my gloves.
Douglas’ eyes widened as he sucked in a deep breath, then he let it go in a cloud of white vapor amongst the frosty air. “I suspected, but I didna believe it was ye.”
“Many people suspect. Rarely, they are right.”
“Does it sit well with ye? Killin’ for him?”
I shrugged. “It’s my purpose.”
He snorted. “It’s yer programmin’.”
“You know what you’ve done,” I said, ignoring his comment. I knew what I was, I didn’t need to hear it from a washed up drug runner. “Three offshore accounts filled with money skimmed off the top of transactions meant for the club. Undermining Royal Blood’s operations and dealing under the table. Unsanctioned growing.” Douglas shifted from foot to foot beside me. “Shall I go on?”
“How’d ye find oot?”
This time, I raised an eyebrow. “Does it matter?”
“I suppose nae.” He glanced along the shore and then up into the tree line. He was looking for an escape, but it was far too late for that.
Now that he’d seen me in my true form, an angel of death and pain, there was no circumstance that would lead to him leaving the shore of this lake alive.
“I’ve known you three years Douglas,” I said. “Any last words?”
He started to laugh, smiling in the face of his death. “I thought ye would hae a gun.”
“I wouldn't do you the disservice.”
“Disservice? Makin’ it slow would be a disservice.”
I smirked. Guns left evidence behind and I’d rather a clean break. Made my job a hell of a lot easier. “I like to use my hands.”
“Git off on it, do ye?”
I knew better than to let his comment strike and I knew it shouldn’t have, but it did. I curled my fingers into a tight fist and struck, my knuckles connecting with Douglas’ temple. He stumbled on the uneven rocks of the shoreline and I shoved him hard. He landed on his back, his left leg stuck underneath his body.
I straddled him and he gasped as my fingers tightened in his hair.
“Don’t do this.”
I pulled his head up and smashed it back into the rocks.
He blinked hard, dazed. “Xavier, you cannae…” he pleaded, his voice dripping with desperation. “I hae we bairns…”
“Shut up.”
“This isn't real.” His voice sounded different. His accent was gone.
I fisted my hand into his wild hair and pulled his head up from the rocky shoreline. His gaze fixed on mine and for a moment I hesitated. His eyes. They were blue…but they were green before.
Blinking hard, I smashed his head against the rocks and he cried out in pain. It was this shrill, piercing cry infused with desperate pain, but it passed straight through me. It was my job not to care. It was the way I was made.
“X, please….X…stop!”
I was wrenched someplace dark, the rocky shoreline of the loch disappearing into murky darkness. It wasn’t rocks that pressed into my knees, but floorboards and my hands… I stared down into her eyes and they were full of fear.
“Mercy?”
“X...fuck, X, let me go.”
“Where am I?” My fingers began unwinding from her hair and I blinked hard. We were no longer in bed, but on the floor beside it and I was over her…I was...
I was smashing her head against the floor.
“You’re in your cottage,” she whispered, her voice strained. “You were asleep…”
I pulled away sharply, scrambling to my feet. I tried to kill her…I tried to kill Mercy in my fucking sleep.
“This is what I was afraid of,�
�� I hissed and fisted my hands into my hair, my heart pounding.
Fear. It was another new emotion and I fucking hated it already. Fear was weakness.
She reached out for me, one hand on her head, the other coming for me and I twisted out of range.
“X…”
“I’m…” I didn’t know what I was supposed to say, so I didn’t say anything. I just pulled a blanket from the end of the bed and strode from the room, slamming the door closed behind me. Thankfully, Mercy didn’t follow.
I paced back and forth, wringing the blanket in my hands. Monster.
All the people I'd killed...Douglas had had children. Demon. Devil.
Mercy trusted me and I'd tried to kill her. Psychopath.
I sank down onto the sofa and shoved a pillow underneath my head. Staring up at the ceiling, I wondered if we were doomed to fail before we even began. If I couldn’t keep a handle on it, then we’d both wind up dead. Mercy would die at my hands...
I was beginning to doubt my actions and if I was on a job, then that doubt would see me killed. I couldn’t doubt, I couldn’t be afraid. I couldn’t fail her now.
The problem was, I didn’t know the truth from the lies. I didn’t know what was real or a memory they’d planted in my subconscious.
That’s why I was afraid of sleeping next to Mercy.
I was afraid I’d kill her without even knowing what I was doing and I almost had.
Monster.
It felt strange being awake during the day. Much of my life had been lived in the shadows, operating in darkness, that the light kind of hurt my eyes.
Sunlight streamed in the windows of the little cottage, illuminating my workspace. While Mercy slept, I retrieved the sniper rifle from its case and laid out all the parts on the coffee table. It had been a while since I’d used it and doing something familiar and mechanical stopped my mind from splintering further into insanity.
Because that’s what was happening to me.
I was walking the fine line between being merely broken and totally losing the fucking plot.
I picked the sniper rifle because she'd asked for it. She wanted to learn and this was how we would begin. In a sick and twisted way, it was my pathetic attempt at pleasing her.
I heard her moving around in the other room and when she turned on the shower, the pipes rattled.
I’d purchased the cottage and grounds from the local Lord five years ago, in cash under an alias. He wasn’t exactly clean himself, so he never batted an eyelid when I handed over the briefcase stuffed full of bank notes. He never asked my name, or where I was from, or even what I wanted the property for. I paid him handsomely and he kept his mouth shut. In return, I got my safe haven.
Something had spooked me early on in Royal Blood’s game with me and I found myself needing a place that was mine and mine alone. I came here when I needed to get away, when I needed to settle my mind and regain my focus. I was here a few weeks ago when Weiss ordered me to take time off. Apparently I was getting uptight, his words not mine, so I’d come here to commiserate my sorry life. Then I’d gone back to the city, ready to get back to work, ready to feel the rush of blood again, and the first person I’d met was Mercy Reid.
The bedroom door opened behind me and I caught the faint smell of soap. Mercy's footsteps echoed in the silence as she crossed over to the sofa.
“What’s that?” she asked, her gaze running over the dismantled rifle.
“It’s a gun,” I drawled.
“It’s the sniper rifle.” I heard the annoyance in her voice, but I ignored it.
“Good girl.”
“My head’s fine by the way,” she said. I could feel her staring down at me, her words heavy with an unspoken challenge.
I grunted, ignoring the guilt that was swirling below the surface.
She sank down unceremoniously in one of the armchairs and I stiffened when I realized she was wearing my T-shirt. It was something so simple, yet it had a profound effect on a long neglected part of me.
Ownership. It was like she’d acknowledged her link to me again, despite what I'd done to her last night.
“Are you going to teach me?” she asked, her gaze never leaving mine.
“Yes.”
She smiled like she knew what I was trying to say. She seemed pleased with me and it resonated among the tattered remains of my heart more than I liked.
I stared at the fading marks on her neck and found them oddly beautiful. I’d tried to strangle her multiple times, but here she was, still in the clutches of a monster. Not just in his clutches…in his bed.
I’d never marked a woman before like I’d marked her. I’d indulged in what sated my needs and nothing more. Slaps, bites, red marks that would fade in a few hours. I’d fucked hard, tied women up and had never heard any complaints. In fact, I’d often been begged for more. That was the extent of my sexual brutality, until Mercy awoke something inside me. She opened the last floodgate to my inner darkness and it was all I could do to not let it consume her…and me along with it.
Now I craved pain, the edge between life and death…blood.
“Come,” I said, gesturing toward the empty space beside me on the sofa. “I’ll teach you how to assemble it.”
To her credit, she didn’t hesitate when she stood and moved over to sit beside me. A few days ago, when I had her tied up in my apartment back in the city, she would’ve flinched, or I would’ve caught the uncertainty in her gaze, but there was none of that. Not even after I tried to smash her head in.
She perched beside me, letting her body meld against mine, enough to give me room to show her the rifle, but close enough that I felt the connection hum in my bloodstream and right into my cock. I imagined seeing Mercy with a gun in her hand would do more than give me a hard on.
Tilting my head, I glanced at her hands. She was wringing them in her lap, a nervous gesture or maybe something else. She sucked in a deep breath, unconsciously leaning toward me.
I couldn’t imagine she’d want me to fuck her after I’d tried to cave her skull in, so I picked up the first piece of the rifle.
“Listen and watch,” I said. “One thing snipers must learn is how to put their weapon together in seconds. Once you take the shot, you may only have a short window to extract yourself from the scene.”
Mercy nodded and I went through piecing the weapon together slowly, explaining how each piece fit with the next, then I dismantled it. I showed her once more without the explanation, slotting each component together. Once I was done, I set the rifle back onto the coffee table in bits.
“Your turn.”
She was staring at the table with a fierce determination in her eyes and fucking hell it was sexy. She picked up the first piece in her slender fingers and then the second, slotting them together just like I’d showed her. She worked slow and methodical, thinking before she placed her hand on the next piece of the puzzle. When she hesitated, I made her disassemble what she'd done and start again.
The more I watched her work, the more I realized my opinion of her had been right. I’d been in Weiss’ office, contemplating her disposition, while I held her captive and had felt it then too. Mercy had the all markers. She could live this life of murder if she got over her conscience.
But the more I watched her, the more I wondered how she would suffer for it. She’d never killed anyone. She’d tried, but hadn’t succeeded. Killing someone changed you. It chipped away at your soul until there was nothing left. I was a broken man, barely holding on. There was a chance that going after Sykes would take what was left of her…all the good bits. The good bits of her were the things I was holding on to.
Did I want to help her become like me, knowing what I knew of this life?
“There,” Mercy declared, holding the completed rifle in her lap, laying the muzzle across my thighs. She smiled at me, obviously proud that she’d done it all on her own.
“Very good,” I murmured.
“When do I get to fire it?”
Chapter 3
Mercy
I’d never seen X during the day before.
At least not until yesterday in the car. Our lives had been lived in the dark until he broke away from Royal Blood. That was a fucking metaphor if I ever saw one.
Right now he was standing in full sunlight in the field by the cottage, wearing a pair of aviator sunglasses, tight black T-shirt, jeans and scuffed up combat boots, holding the sniper rifle across his chest and all I could think about was jumping him.
“What?” he asked, scowling at me.
I hadn’t confronted him about that thing that had happened during the night and wasn’t sure I should press it. He’d tried to crack my skull open in his sleep and I wasn’t sure what I was meant to do. If I asked him about it, would he even want to talk about it? Probably not, but the thing I wondered about the most was who was he really trying to kill?
It was a stupid thing to worry about, since I should probably be contemplating the fact that he might do it again.
“How long are we going to stay here?” I asked.
“As long as it takes.”
“As long as it takes to what?”
X narrowed his eyes. “To teach you. To plan.”
I watched him closely and realized that something had changed. After his break last night, his cool exterior was back like a defense mechanism. Maybe that was a good thing.
“Don’t look at me like that Mercy,” X snapped. “You’ll get your chance to kill Sykes however you want, but if you want my help, we will do it my way.”
“Your way?” I asked, crossing my arms over my chest.
He narrowed his eyes, the only indication he gave that I was pissing him off. “You’re too…emotional. There is no emotion in this kind of killing. There can’t be.”
I knew I was being unreasonable, but I said it anyway, “There’s more than one kind of killing?”
“You know what I mean.” He sighed as I rolled my eyes. “Contract killing.”
“This isn’t a contract,” I said sullenly. “It’s a revenge killing.”
