Royal Blood The Complete Collection

by Amity Cross

  I felt the horror spreading through my veins at the thought of my brother, the boy I grew up alongside of, the boy I fought over building blocks with when I was five years old…He was a part of this. X had already cracked my heart today, but Sykes’ revelation split it in two.

  “I considered giving you to The Watchman, but breaking your spirit myself will be much more satisfying.”

  Who the fuck was The Watchman? I scowled, shaking my throbbing head. He was just trying to confuse me.

  Sykes cocked his head to the side, a thoughtful expression on his face. “X didn’t tell you?” His lips started to curl into a sickening smile. “He doesn’t remember, does he?”

  The Watchman…could it be the man X told me about? The one in the room where he was beaten and tortured? The man who conditioned him?

  Sykes stood, shoving his chair back. “You know what’s going to happen to you now, Alison?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m going to break free and shoot you right between the eyes, you sick motherfucker.”

  He laughed, adjusting the sleeves of his shirt. “You’re going to wish you were in that house with your family because a bullet in the head is a much more merciful way to die than what I have planned for you and that pretty boy killer.”

  My eyes widened. X.

  “I’m going to leave you here to think about your fate while I go disembowel X.” He smiled down at me, a wicked gleam in his eyes. “And that one’s on you, sweat pea.”

  I felt the blood draining from my face. I'd jumped the gun, I went against X's plan… I had no control over my family’s fate, but his… What if I was responsible for killing the man I loved?

  Sykes turned his back on me and strode across the room, his footsteps thumping on the stairs. A moment later, a door boomed closed.

  I couldn’t let that happen. I couldn’t just sit here and do nothing while Sykes went on the prowl for X.

  I’d fucked up big time.

  Time to get fucking real Mercy, I thought, beginning to pull my wrists against my restraints. Pain seared through my skin as the rope bit into my flesh and I gasped, but I didn’t stop trying. Compartmentalize the pain.

  X had been right all along. I was too emotionally invested and that had stopped me from seeing clearly. I’d acted irrationally right to the end. I had to separate myself or risk becoming a shell of the human I once was…and loosing X before I even had the chance to be happy with him. Before I could tell him how I felt.

  There was no way in fucking hell I was going to die in this hole.

  X, I’m coming. I’m coming...

  Chapter 29

  X

  Mercy was gone.

  Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

  I pulled my gun and I shot the guard in the kitchen at point blank range. The shot was almost noiseless as the silencer absorbed the sound. I didn’t blink as I stepped over the body, blood beginning to pool beneath it on the polished floorboards.

  Mercy… Where the fuck was she?

  There was no sound in the house, no struggle, no gunshots…

  I combed the top floor, but there was nothing. Twenty minutes passed. I combed the ground floor again. Forty minutes… The entire house was empty. They must have her. Fuck. They couldn’t have taken her far. I would’ve heard them.

  I stared at the dead guard in the kitchen, at a total fucking loss. I’d never been so powerless in my entire life and it was…it was fucking frightening.

  The sound of a door opening caught my attention and my gaze snapped towards the click. There was another room. A basement? There was no door…but this house was old, there could be all kinds of hidden doors and tunnels from the days of the revolution… I was such a fucking idiot.

  Heavy footsteps echoed down the hall and I readied myself to strike. If he’d done something to her, I’d fucking delight in torturing the asshole to death. He’d beg me to stop, he’d beg me to end it. The powerful leader of the Necromancers, Sykes wailing at my feet like a motherfucking baby. I’d become the devil himself to avenge her.

  Sykes stepped into the dining room. “Xavier Blood,” he declared, aiming his gun right at my head.

  Instinctively, I did the same, not even daring to blink in case he tried anything.

  “Where is she?” I snarled.

  “Who? Mercy?” he asked, cocking his head to the side with a smirk. “Or is it Alison? She’s actually a bit tied up right now.”

  She was alive. I began to edge around the table, relief coursing through my veins. She’d be pissed I took her revenge from her, but I had to kill Sykes now and get to her. I had to get her out of here. If she died now, then going on was pointless. I didn’t give a shit about my fucked up problems. I didn’t care about finding out what Royal Blood did to me… I cared about her.

  I should never have let Mercy into this life. I should’ve kept her at the cottage where she’d be safe from all of this. It was my fault.

  “Where is she?” I asked again, my voice thin with anger.

  “Awaiting her fate, Blood. You know what I’m going to do to her?” He laughed, his eyes soulless. Empty.

  I thought I was a monster? Sykes was the real deal.

  “First,” he went on, “I’m going to strip her naked. Then, I’ll tie her to the cross. Then, I’ll fuck her raw.”

  My blood ran cold. No. His hands all over her. His cock inside her. Unbidden, unwanted. My hand started to shake, the gun rattling.

  “I thought about chaining you to the wall,” he snarled. “Making you watch as I rape your whore. Making you watch as I break her.”

  I hissed, edging around the table. I couldn’t shoot him yet. I couldn’t until I disarmed him or I risked dying before I could free Mercy.

  “It would get me fucking hard to see you broken, pretty boy, but I don’t have time for that.” Sykes edged around the table, mirroring my movements. “Time to die, Blood.”

  The moment Sykes tensed, I ducked low and his gun went off with a boom that echoed painfully in my ears. The bullet whooshed past my head and I lunged, ramming my shoulder into his stomach. We fell backwards into a heap, both our guns dislodging from our grips and flying across the room.

  I sucker punched him in the face, his head snapping to the side. Blood began to ooze from the split I’d opened on his lip and I raised my fist again, but he bucked underneath me and I fell to the side.

  Sykes’ fist connected with my eyebrow and stars shot through my vision. I grasped for the knife in my boot and my fingers slipped on the hilt as I was shoved to the floor. I kicked, the toe of my boot connecting with Sykes’ knee, smashing it out from underneath him. With a roar, I pushed him off me and rolled to the side, my knife clattering to the floor.

  We both scrambled for it, but Sykes grabbed it first. His fingers curled around the hilt and instantly, he slashed.

  The knife cut into the arm of my coat and tore through my flesh like butter. For a sickening moment, I didn’t feel anything, but as my blood began to flow, a deep-set sting radiated through my nerve endings.

  “Stop fighting the inevitable, Blood,” Sykes said, with a triumphant smile as he climbed to his feet.

  He was getting off on the fact that he’d marked the indestructible X and I realized I was breaking every rule in the motherfucking book. I was letting my emotions rule me. I never failed because I never felt and I was about to crash and burn if I didn’t do something about it.

  My gaze flickered to my gun and back to Sykes. I was on my back, so I had to roll and lunge. My arm was slick with blood, but I could do it. No hesitation.

  Sykes glanced at the gun and back to me. It was now or never.

  I lunged, but a boot smashed into the side of my head. I fell short, pain blistering through my skull. Blood was everywhere, smeared down my face, splattered on the floor… I rolled onto my back, groaning.

  Sykes held the gun, my gun, and I was unarmed. I clapped my hand on my arm in a vain attempt at stopping the bleeding.

  He clicked off the safety and held it to my
head, smirking. “How does it feel X?” he asked, pressing the cool metal against the bridge of my nose. “How does it feel to lose?”

  Movement flickered behind him, but I never took my gaze from his. “I feel satisfied.”

  Sykes cocked his head to the side. “Greggor said you’d snapped, but this is a little too much.”

  “You know what’s too much?” He narrowed his eyes and I laughed. “Your motherfucking ego.”

  “Game over,” he snarled.

  “No,” Mercy declared, pressing the barrel of her gun against the side of Sykes’ head. “Your game is over.”

  Then, she pulled the trigger.

  Chapter 30

  Mercy

  It was brutal.

  Shooting someone at point blank range wasn’t clean like in the movies. It was messy. Bloody and messy.

  My first kill had been brutal.

  X reached out and tentatively pulled the gun from my grasp.

  “It’s over,” he murmured.

  I nodded slowly, unable to tear my gaze off the carnage. Everything had been leading to this…everything. Blood on the floor, blood on the wall, red everywhere. Color and beauty…I’d wanted color and beauty…

  “We need to leave,” X said, coaxing me away.

  I thought I’d feel satisfied. I was…it was just...I did that?

  X pulled me away, leading my shocked body through the house. It wasn’t until we were outside that I drew breath again. My lungs filled with the crisp air of Versailles and my heart started to beat, slowly at first, then faster. So fast…

  Realization slammed into me and I forgot about my aching wrists, my throbbing head… I’d done it. I’d killed Sykes.

  X stood beside me, his hand in mine and I realized he was covered in blood. I glanced up at him, taking in the strong line of his jaw and the week’s worth of stubble that coated it. “You’re hurt.”

  “I’ll be fine,” he said. He grasped his arm with his free hand, his expression impassive as always, forever the tough hitman.

  “Thank you,” I murmured.

  His lips curled into a smile. “You’re welcome.”

  A hitman with manners? I began to laugh as X pulled me down the stairs and into the yard.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  He glanced back at me, a mischievous gleam in his eye. “Home.”

  Home? I wondered where that was, but it didn’t really matter. Home was wherever X was.

  As we jogged through the grounds towards freedom, the world that I once knew felt so far away. It was like another life, another person, a stranger...a parallel universe. The moment I pulled the trigger, all the things that made me me, seared and dissolved into ash. I’d burst into flames and was reborn.

  Alison Crawford was dead.

  Long live Mercy Reid.

  Chapter 31

  X

  I stood in the bathroom of our little hotel room in Montparnasse, my bloodstained clothes on the floor.

  The gash in my right arm stretched a full ten inches, bicep to forearm. It was shallow but it had been a bleeder. I washed and bound it, forgoing stitching it up myself. I didn’t have a needle and thread anyway and there was no way in hell that I was going to a hospital.

  Glancing into the room, I took in Mercy’s sleeping form. She was in shock, her mind and body totally exhausted.

  She’d gotten exactly what she’d wanted in the end, but at what cost to her soul? That was something that was yet to play out.

  I shoved my soiled clothes into a plastic bag with a sigh and crossed the room, sitting next to her. The mattress dipped slightly and she whimpered softy, but didn’t wake.

  Carefully, I traced the curve of her shoulder with my fingertips, thinking about all the ways I’d changed since I’d met her…how alive I felt because of her faith in me. Somehow, I knew that Mercy would turn out to be the strongest of us all, despite all the things she’d suffered through.

  I’d done so many things wrong in the last week.

  We’d been lucky and in this life, you couldn’t bet on luck.

  Before… I wanted to get out of Royal Blood and carve out my own path. It was past time to let it go.

  Laying down next to Mercy, I slid my hand over her waist and pulled her against my chest, breathing in her scent.

  I didn’t give a crap about anything else but this.

  I flicked the lamp on, illuminating the darkness.

  Allaire blinked up at me, dazed at the sudden burst of light. Here was a man who delighted in other people’s suffering. Here was a man who knew who Mercy Reid was.

  “I assume Sykes is dead,” he rasped, bowing his head.

  The blood on his face had dried hours ago, his body still tied to the sculpture of the angel that watched over this place. There was no angel coming to save Mr. Allaire. Not then, not now, not ever.

  “Yes,” I said blandly, my thoughts drifting to Mercy, who I’d left sleeping in our hotel room.

  She would never know I came here. She would never know the monster was alive and well underneath all the feeling that she’d awoken inside me.

  There was one simple thing I’d learned while fighting Sykes. I needed to be able to switch my emotions off. I needed to be the monster Royal Blood had created. It fed the darkness in my hollow heart and stopped me from hurting the one person I wanted above all else.

  I needed to be a monster to save her.

  I stood over my prey and regarded his pathetic soul. “You’ve seen our faces, Mr. Allaire.”

  His eyes widened as his fate was revealed to him, his gaze flickering from me to the gun. “No. No, I gave you what you wanted. No—”

  I fired.

  Chapter 32

  Mercy

  Home turned out to be X’s cottage.

  To his credit, Vaughn got us out of France and back to familiar soil without incident. I suspected he’d gotten a lot out of us eliminating Sykes and we’d inadvertently made a friend because of it. Well, at least until it wasn’t convenient for him anymore. Such was the seedy underworld.

  I sat on the trunk of the fallen tree in the front yard and stared out across the darkening field. Right there, X had fucked me from behind…and right here, I’d sucked him into oblivion.

  I heard X open the door to the cottage and his footsteps crunching on the gravel behind me. I glanced up as he approached and smiled.

  “It’s cold out,” he said, draping his coat over my shoulders. He sat next to me and stared up at the sky.

  “You like the stars, huh?” I asked.

  He grunted in reply. We’d only been back a day and there was still so much left unsaid between us. It was obviously going to take some time to get past everything that had happened in Paris.

  I lightly traced the bandage on his arm, remembering the blood that had coated his skin. So much blood. “It’s going to scar.”

  He shrugged. “I’ll get another tattoo.”

  I thought about the scars on his chest, the ones he’d covered to forget the things that had happened to him, and remembered something Sykes had said to me in the basement of that house.

  “Sykes said something…” I began.

  X glanced at me. “What?”

  “He said he was considering giving me over to a guy that went by the name of The Watchman.” X frowned, his brow furrowing. “He said he wanted to break me…He seemed surprised that you hadn’t told me about him. The Watchman.”

  “I don’t know who that is…” he trailed off, but I suspected he was slowly putting the pieces together.

  “You know, I made a mistake that day,” X said, shoving his past into a box once more.

  “Since when?”

  “First, when I allowed us to be separated in that house. Then, when I let my emotions get the best of me while fighting Sykes.”

  “You thought you were going to lose me,” I said, leaning against him. “You’re allowed to feel, at least a little.”

  He shook his head and I knew he wasn’t going to let himse
lf off the hook any time soon. He’d get it when his conditioning eventually bled away to nothing. It was a part of his evolution back into humanity.

  “Some men would feel emasculated letting a woman save their lives,” X declared wryly.

  “Did your balls shrink?” I laughed, shaking my head. X was the manliest man I ever knew.

  His lips quirked. “A little.”

  “You've changed so much, X.”

  “So have you.”

  “Maybe we're meeting somewhere in the middle,” I mused.

  X glanced up at the sky. “Maybe.”

  We sat in silence as the last of the sunset faded across the horizon. X hadn’t told me he loved me and I hadn’t grown the balls to either…but maybe we didn’t need any grand declarations. Maybe leveling a street block, or teaching me to defend myself or even giving me the opportunity to kill the man who murdered my family was enough. We were here together, alive and in complete and utter trust… Maybe that was enough.

  “Do you feel better about it now?” X murmured.

  I shrugged. What I felt was indifferent. “I knew killing him wasn't going to bring them back, but somehow I still feel cheated.”

  X slid his arm around my back. “Nothing is certain in this game, Mercy.”

  “He’ll never hurt me again. There’s that.”

  X breathed in deeply. “There’s that.”

  “What now?” I asked, staring up at the stars like they’d show me the way.

  X was silent so long, I thought I’d triggered one of his moods, but he shifted next to me, tightening his grip on my waist.

  “We’re okay,” he said, shoving his hand down the back of my jeans. He placed a chaste kiss on my lips, taking my breath away. And he said he didn’t do tender.

  “For the moment,” I replied.

  Because that’s all we were ever entitled to.