by Amity Cross
The house was cold as I moved silently down the hallway, my fingers tightening around the gun. The leather of my gloves creaked slightly, my breathing even, my heartbeat solid. As I approached the doorway with the light, the sound of a male voice filtered through from the other side.
“Do they have any leads?” the man asked, his voice strained. He was in pain, emotional turmoil. It didn’t matter to me.
“I want to come back in and head up the search,” the man went on. “I know I’ve been… I don’t give a damn about protocol. I want to find the men responsible for my son’s death.” There was a pause and I began to turn the door handle, feeling the mechanism moving. “For all we know he’s still alive. There has been no word for over a year. My hope may be misguided, but I have faith in him. He is excellent at his job. If anyone could survive capture this long, it’s him.”
The door began to open, my gaze fixing on the room in front of me. It was a study, elegant and masculine in design, and the man who was speaking was behind a desk, his back facing me. His shoulders were tense, his hand gripped tightly around the mobile phone he was holding. He wore a dark suit, his graying hair swept back. It didn’t matter who he was, only that he fit the description. I had his photograph in my pocket and that meant he was to be eliminated.
“This isn’t over, Parker,” he snapped. “I will be seeing you at the branch in the morning. I expect full disclosure on this matter…and I want to see my son’s body.” He lowered his hand and pressed a button on the phone before dropping it into the breast pocket of his suit jacket.
I slipped into the room and raised the gun, the end slightly heavy due to the silencer screwed onto it. It was too late for him.
Abruptly, the man’s head raised, and his gaze met mine in the reflection in the window. He spun, his body coming to face mine. “Oh my god.”
I cocked my head to the side, barely registering his shock. I didn’t know why he was so surprised. Maybe it had everything to do with the gun in my hand. I pulled the trigger, and the bullet left the barrel with hardly a sound. He clutched his chest, blood seeping through his crisp, white shirt and soaking his dark suit even darker. His eyes began to glaze in disbelief and he fell heavily to his knees.
“What have they done to you?” he gasped as I stepped forward to finish the job.
I fired another shot, this time embedding a bullet in his head. He slumped to the floor, blood beginning to pool thick and fast onto the carpet.
There was a thump overhead and I cast my gaze toward the ceiling. My second mark was upstairs.
Glancing at the man, I confirmed he was dead without having to check his pulse. He didn’t move, and his eyes were empty. Quick, efficient, but one bullet too many. One should’ve been enough.
I left the door open as I left the room and strode toward the stairs. Glancing upward, I ascended, the gun raised as I trod softly. The woman would be easier.
The hallway above was dark, all the doors closed to keep the heat from the inbuilt radiators inside. I went for the light. The sound of the woman moving around as she no doubt readied herself for bed, was muffled through the wood. I’d be on my way out in one minute. Maybe less.
I opened the door in one swift movement and stepped into a bedroom. There was no time to take stock of my surroundings because the woman turned, her eyes registering me with the same shock as the man had. She matched the photograph. Blonde hair, blue eyes, a full, friendly face. It was her.
She held up her hands, her eyes full of terror as I leveled the gun at her head. “No… Please, no!”
I pulled the trigger.
This time, one shot was all it took.
Better.
I slammed open the door to Weiss’ office in The Gambler’s Inn and strode across the room.
He sat up in his chair, obviously surprised that I’d returned so soon.
“You’re early,” he drawled, looking me up and down.
I dumped the photographs on the desk. Weiss reached over and slid them across the table toward him.
“A bit dramatic?” he asked, raising his eyebrows at the marks I’d scratched over the faces.
X marks the spot.
I breathed deeply, flexing my fingers. “It’s done. Doesn’t matter how.”
Weiss leaned back in his chair and picked up his mobile phone, pressing his thumb against the screen. I waited.
“He’s back,” he said to whoever was on the other end, without as much as a hello. “Visual confirmation?” He glanced at me, and I stared back impassively. “Understood.” He hung up the call, tossing the phone on the desktop.
Weiss rose, straightening is jacket. “Congratulations, X,” he declared, holding his hand out.
I stared at it then back at him. X? Was that meant to be some kind of nickname?
“Shake my hand, asshole,” he said with a chuckle when I didn’t move.
I grasped his hand. “Asshole?”
“We’re going to be working closely,” he replied, clapping his other hand on my shoulder. “I’m going to call you much worse before the week is out.”
I cocked my head to the side.
“C’mon,” Weiss declared. “Time to see your new apartment.”
“Apartment?” They were giving me a home?
Weiss laughed and shook his head. “Welcome to Royal Blood, X. Enjoy your fuckin’ stay.”
Three
Mercy
I didn’t dream as much these days.
I used to close my eyes and see blood. Lots of blood. The faces of my dead parents, my dead brother, their vacant eyes and shattered skulls.
I used to look over my shoulder at every turn. I guess I was still doing it.
I didn’t see them often now. After I exacted my revenge on Sykes, it was like a switch had been flipped in my head. Things began to get easier…almost too easy.
X was restless next to me¸ his body shifting in bed as he dreamt, causing me to drift in and out of layers of sleep. Light, vivid dreams and then the heavy darkness of restfulness as he calmed. Since returning from France, he always slept next to me. There wasn’t a night where we didn’t drift off tangled in each other, but there were still nights that were fraught with his demons.
I didn’t understand his need to forget his past and move forward without it. It kept coming back to him in waves, some small and some that hit him hard like a tsunami. There had to be a point where it all became too much and the levee broke inside his mind.
Sensation burst through my skin, beautiful pain and pleasure, bringing me closer to wakefulness. Was this a dream? A body lowered ontop of me, my legs spreading, the wet warmth of a mouth against my breast. If it was, then it was a good dream. A damn fucking fine one.
My eyes began to open, darkness still shrouded the room and I knew something was wrong. X hovered above me, his mouth latched onto me through my T-shirt.
“Did you have a dream?” I asked as his teeth tightened around my nipple.
X didn’t reply, he just pulled my shirt over my head, tossing it onto the floor and continued his slow torture, swirling his tongue around and around. I moaned, fisting my hands into his hair and thrusting my hips upward. I guess he wasn’t interested in talking, which could only mean it had been a bad one and I knew what that meant. He needed his anchor.
He shoved his hand down my knickers and found my clit, circling his thumb around the little ball of nerves. Gasping, I pressed into him, wanting more…needing more. Always a lot, never a little.
A groan escaped his parted lips as he slid a finger into my wetness. Delving deeper, his palm rested against my clit and began to rub in slow, torturous circles, like a fucked up halo of pleasure. My breath came faster and I whimpered softly, riding his hand to chase the release he was building.
He pulled his hand away just as things were getting good and shoved my knickers down my legs. I moaned in complaint, kicking off the annoying material, my hands searching for X’s cock inside of his boxers. I tugged him free and began stroking him in
my hand, his heated skin feeling divine against mine.
X grunted and his hands circled around my wrists, making me lose my grip. He wrenched my arms over my head and my breasts thrust up into his chest. Fuck me…
His body was over mine, the weight of him pressing into my pussy, and I spread my legs, knowing exactly what he wanted without him having to utter a single word. He wanted to fuck, maybe for the wrong reasons, but his touch always drove me insane, so it was fine by me.
He fisted his hand around his cock and positioned himself just inside my opening, teasing me to madness. The master of fucking anticipation. His hand returned to my wrist to join the other and suddenly he thrust, burying into me deep and hard. I cried out, jerking against his hold while instinctively rolling my hips against his. This was going to be hard and fast, which meant his dream had been bad. He was a master at controlling what he wanted others to know, but he couldn’t get anything past me. Not anymore. He’d taught me all his tricks. I knew his game back to front.
X’s lips brushed against my neck as he drew back, his cock sliding out to the tip, and thrust again. He was using me to come back to himself yet again and I wondered what excuse he’d give me once he was done.
He fucked me in long strokes. Each time we came together I moved to meet him and we joined in forceful slaps. Our breath mingled in desperate pants, our bodies beading with sweat underneath the heavy blanket.
Usually he told me what he wanted, talked dirty, manipulated his control over me, but tonight, he just fucked without a word. He grunted and moaned, chasing some kind of fucked up absolution. It felt fucking great from my end, so I wasn’t complaining. I’d try to talk to him afterwards and probably get shot down. X didn’t talk and he especially didn’t talk about his dreams.
I felt my orgasm rising under his onslaught and I increased my pace, tugging desperately against his grip on my wrists. I wanted to touch him, I wanted to dig my claws into his back, feel the flex of his ass as he pounded, but he didn’t let me go. Pulling my knees up, I opened to him further and locked my ankles around his back. He took it as an invitation to fuck harder and I crashed, pleasure tearing through my body and blinding me to everything but him.
I tightened around his cock and he was coming with me, spilling hot into my core, his hands leaving my wrists and burying into my hair, his mouth finding mine. Our tongues twined greedily, muffling our moans as the last of our strength left us. Fuck, I tingled all over, his touch sending aftershocks across my skin.
A lot or nothing at all.
X pulled away, burying his face into the crook of my neck as he caught his breath, his chest heaving, then slowing as he calmed. I tightened my walls around his softening cock and he moved, sliding out and rolling off me. Feeling cold at the sudden loss of his weight, I followed him, lying across his chest.
“X?” I whispered, covering the clear skin above his heart with my palm. I felt his heartbeat and a tiny smile tugged at my lips. The tattoo that covered his left side, the black ink that covered the scars that had been inflicted during his conditioning, didn’t reach his heart because he believed he didn’t have one, but I knew better. I felt it growing every day.
X grunted in reply.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No.” Of course he didn’t.
“Was it bad?”
“It was nothing,” he murmured.
Bullshit.
He pressed his lips against my forehead. “I just wanted you, is all.”
Liar. “X.”
He lifted his hand and trailed his fingers through my hair. “Shh…”
“What are we doing?” I asked, my voice a mere whisper.
He stilled his movements, his body tensing. “Don’t question it, Mercy.”
I raised my head. “Question what?”
His eyes sparkled in the moonlight. “Things are…static. Don’t push it.”
Don’t push it. I felt like rolling my eyes, the notion was so absurd. I felt like shoving him…hard.
Knowing that arguing with X was futile, I let my head fall back against his chest as he pulled the blanket over us. Instead of moving through the pain, he was running from it.
We were meant to love, hate and hurt. We build ourselves up to be broken. That’s what being human was all about. A constant cycle of destruction and rebirth—one couldn’t exist without the other. Life was a merry-go-round of bullshit, and the highs after the rock bottoms were what made it all worth it.
Being alive? That was the point. Being alive with X.
His demons would destroy us eventually whether he wanted them to or not.
It was inevitable.
“You want me to fire that?”
I stared at the gun in my hand, the gun that X had just loaded with the bullets I’d made the day before.
X just looked at me blankly, waiting for me to complain some more. The sun was shining down on us as we stood in the field outside of the cottage. Rare warmth for this place. He’d wanted to do some target practice, and I was all for it until he’d loaded a cartridge with the monstrosities of ammunition I’d mangled into shape yesterday.
“The fucking thing might blow up in my hand,” I declared sullenly. “I like my hand.”
“You’re good,” X replied, a small smile pulling at his lips. He was amused. Great.
“How do you know? Have your bullets ever been shit?”
“No.”
“Then how do you know—”
“Just fire the gun, Mercy.”
Rolling my eyes, I turned sharply, raised the gun and fired. No hesitation, just like he’d taught me. I blinked once as the bullet left the barrel. Then again as the target on the back of the gate splintered.
X began to laugh, a rare sound that doused my anger. I glanced at him, lowering the gun to my side.
“See?” he asked.
I shrugged.
“Give yourself some credit,” he went on, shoving his hands into his jacket pockets. “If you’re in a bad spot, you know how to make your own ammunition. Out there it can get rough.”
I cocked my head to the side. I knew about it getting rough and so did he. Our midnight fuck still hadn’t escaped my mind, and when we'd woken that morning and gone for round two, I’d attempted to ask him again. Obviously, he’d kissed the fucking words right out of my mouth.
“What now?” I asked, narrowing my eyes.
“Fire the whole clip.”
I drew a deep breath and raised the gun and squeezed the trigger in quick succession. One, two, three, four, five.
Ironically, this had become second nature to me. Under X’s tutelage, I’d learned faster and more efficiently than I had learned anything else in my entire life. He drove a hard bargain, didn’t like mistakes, made me work at something until I’d perfected it and rewarded me when I succeeded. He was a good teacher, even though he was a bossy asshole.
“Your hands are still intact,” X mused beside me.
“Thank fuck for that. How would I ever give you a decent hand job without them?”
He grabbed me around the waist and tugged me against his chest. “Who needs hands when you have a mouth?”
“You’re such a man,” I retorted.
He smiled and leaned in for a kiss. His lips were soft against mine in a rare show of tenderness, the tip of his tongue caressing my skin before claiming me in a slow, passionate dance. Fuck that man could kiss.
“X?”
He ran his lips down my neck. “Hmm?”
“About last night…”
He pulled away sharply, his playfulness suddenly evaporating. “Seriously, Mercy?”
“I can't understand it,” I said. “You don't want to know where you came from, you don't want revenge on Royal Blood...you don't anything.”
“Stop trying to fix me,” he cried, stepping away from me. “I can't be fixed.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” I retorted. “But maybe it’s not about that.”
X stared at me like I’d gone stark
raving mad. “Then what the fuck is it about, Mercy?”
“Maybe it’s just about coping. Did you ever stop to think about that?”
He ran his hand over his face. He badly needed to shave and his hair had grown some, making his usually controlled exterior wild.
“I’m not a fucking genius,” I went on, “but even I know that fucking like we do is just a Band-Aid. One day it won’t be enough.”
X glared at me and began to pace up and down the field. He strode four paces away from me, spun on his heel, and strode four paces back. He’d stare at me each time he came around, his eyes echoing whatever he was working through in his mind. He was pissed. More than pissed, actually. He was enraged.
He didn’t like to show weakness, let alone acknowledge it, and neither did I. If I backed down now, he’d lose respect for me. I had to stand up to him and fight.
“I’m fucking right,” I snarled as his gaze met mine. “I’m fucking right and you know it.”
He curled his lip in distaste and turned away.
“What are we doing, X? What—”
“All I want is you!” he roared, turning back to face me. “Isn’t that fucking enough?”
“And all I want is you!” I cried, curling my fingers into tight fists. I began to shake as adrenalin began to sear through my veins.
“Then fucking drop it.”
“I can’t.” I stepped forward, my gaze never leaving his. “I can’t leave it alone. You’re not dealing.”
“I am dealing,” he snarled.
“No, you’re not.”
His features contorted and he tensed. He was either going to get physical with me, take me out in the fucking field yet again and threaten to tie me up like he had back in the city, or I was going to beat some goddamned sense into him.
With a snarl, I strode forward, hooked my leg around his and yanked his knee from underneath him. His footing slipped on the grass and he fell, taking me with him, but it was exactly the position I wanted to be in. On fucking top.
He landed heavily on his back with me over him, nose to nose, our gazes burning into each other’s eyes.
