Royal Blood

by Amity Cross

  A tear slid from my eye and I brushed it away furiously. I stood there in the semi-darkness and stared at the crime scene photographs, reminding myself why I was here in the first place.

  Revenge. X was...

  The front door opened and I spun on my heel, my gaze colliding with a furious looking X. He was wearing his Royal Blood leather, which meant he was out doing something for them…continuing his ruse.

  “I told you I wouldn’t leave,” I said, pressing my back against the wall.

  He slammed the door closed and strode towards me through the darkness, anger bleeding through his pores…anger that was directed at me.

  “X, please, I-” He went for my neck again, but I swatted his hand away.

  With a snarl, he grasped my wrists, wrenching my arms above my head.

  “Why did you break free? Why?” he asked, leaning against me.

  I cowered against the wall, wincing as his fingers bit into my raw skin. “I was hungry,” I lied. It was a half-truth, but one I’d hoped he’d buy.

  “Hungry?” he scoffed. “Hungry?”

  I nodded, my gaze fixed on his.

  “Liar, liar…” he murmured. “You went through my belongings didn’t you? What did you hide, Mercy?”

  “I didn’t-”

  “Don’t lie to me!” he roared.

  “I didn’t take anything…”

  “Do you want to know about the terrible things I do with the things locked in my closet, Mercy? Do you want to know what’s in store for you? Believe me, you’re better off not knowing.”

  “I was hungry!” I cried, trying to choke down the sob that was threatening to escape my throat.

  “You want to look at it?” he snarled, letting my wrists go and pushing my face into the photo of my dead mother.

  “Yes,” I replied, opening my eyes.

  “Yes?” X sounded surprised at my response. “You want to look at the dead body of your mother? You want to see how her head was blown half off by Sykes? You want to see her insides smeared on the carpet?”

  “Yes!” I exclaimed, pushing against his chest. “It reminds me of what I’m fighting for.”

  “Revenge?”

  I stared up at X defiantly. “Revenge.” He smelt like leather and soap and I arched my back, jamming my breasts hard against his chest.

  X let me go, jerking back and separating our bodies. “You shouldn’t have escaped, Mercy.”

  “I didn’t escape,” I said through a sigh. “I’m still here.”

  His gaze flickered towards the hall and I wondered how far I could push him again. What did I need to give him in order to show the master manipulator how much I meant every word I said? I raised a hand and traced my left breast through the material of the T-shirt I wore, the same breast that bore his teeth marks. He’d enjoyed it…the look in his eyes as he gazed down at the pain he’d inflicted…

  “Bite me again,” I murmured, reaching for the hem of the T-shirt.

  X stared at me with a blank expression as I stripped, letting the material fall to the floor.

  “Hurt me,” I murmured, hoping that this was the thing he needed from me. “Take me, X… Take my pain...”

  Twenty-Three

  X

  Mercy stood in the orange glow of the street lamps outside, naked and palming her breasts, and I was captivated.

  “How many times do we have to go over this, Mercy?” I asked, resisting the urge to get my cock out.

  “As many as we have to until you understand,” she replied, beginning to roll her nipples between her fingers.

  “You had your chance to run,” I said, balling my hands into tight fists, trying to reign in the urge to taste her blood again. “You should’ve taken it.”

  “We both want revenge…”

  “What I want is none of your business,” I snapped, shoving my hands into my hair. This fucking woman…

  “You want your freedom,” she said, transferring her right hand to her clit and my cock began to spark into life. I wanted to bury myself into her pussy and fuck her into submission.

  “I-” I stared at her hand, watching her fingers swirl around the little ball of nerves.

  “You told me,” she said through a sigh.

  We can take our lives back.

  With a feral snarl, I stepped into her, closing the space between us in seconds. I fisted a hand into the hair at the base of her skull and dragged her towards the sofa. She cried out, but didn’t fight as I twisted her black locks in-between my fingers.

  I pushed her face down onto the sofa, wrenching her naked ass up into the air. She had such a perfect little behind, I’d slapped it quite a few times, but… I leaned down, fully intending to sink my teeth into her, but I stopped at the last moment, my lips brushing against her skin. Something stopped me, something I didn’t have the capacity to understand.

  I breathed in the musky sent of her arousal and I couldn’t do it.

  “Do it,” Mercy moaned, rearing her ass against my lips. “Let me feel you. Let me give you what you need.”

  Give me what I needed? I wanted the feelings that were racing through my body to stop. I wanted to go back to the numbness, but she kept pulling me under into a heaving ocean of emotion…

  “I can’t.”

  “You can, I’ve seen it.”

  I grazed my teeth against her skin before murmuring, “Seen what?”

  “Feeling. Emotion.”

  My entire body stiffened at her words.

  “You’re showing it to me now,” she went on.

  “What?” I was showing her nothing but weakness.

  “Tenderness,” she said, like it was the most obvious conclusion in the world.

  “Tenderness?” I scoffed. “A monster, tender?”

  She pushed up onto her palms, arching her back and opening her pussy to me. “If you’re truly a monster, then show me.”

  Her scent washed over me and my cock strained against my jeans. It would be so easy to take her, hurt her, skin her alive…but I couldn’t. Keep her or kill her. Did I want to keep her? One moment I was hiding the fact that I had her from Weiss, the next I was teetering on the edge of taking her life. Where was the medium? What did I want?

  I palmed her ass, massaging her flesh in my hands. Sex…sex was how she did it. It was how we were connecting. I didn’t want to connect. I didn’t fucking need it.

  Grabbing her around the waist, I flipped her onto her back, spreading her legs wide. I wasn’t going to fuck her, but I was going to show her what it felt like to get so close to the one thing you wanted only to be denied. Kneeling in front of her, I delved into her pussy, licking her length before sucking on her clit as hard as I could. She bucked against me, rubbing into my face and I bit down, slamming a hand over her stomach to keep her from pleasuring herself.

  I thrust a finger into her wetness, not completely sure how I was meant to take the state of her arousal. She was turned on by the dark places inside of me. The places that had never come into contact with my sexual desire. She was turned on by pain, just as much as I was…perhaps even more.

  Mercy Reid kept blurring the fucking lines.

  I stroked the walls of her pussy with my fingers, tasting her against my tongue while she purred like a kitten in heat. She muttered and moaned incoherently, her fingers curling into the sofa in her ecstasy. Tearing my mouth away, I leaned over her, palming her clit while I fucked her with my fingers, rubbing her to the edge of an orgasm that was going to shatter her. I could feel it through her skin as she writhed below me, giving me all the power.

  There was this thing about power though, one moment you had it all, the next it could be taken away. All Mercy Reid had to do was open her eyes and catch me in her gaze and it would be all over for me.

  But Mercy Reid didn’t open her eyes.

  Her thighs tightened around my waist as her pleasure swelled to unbearable levels and I pulled my fingers from her pussy, breaking all contact. She moaned loudly, mewling for release, but fucked i
f she was getting it.

  “X,” she gasped, her chest heaving. “Give it to me, fuck me. Fuck me.”

  She slid her hands down over her breasts and buried her fingertips into her pussy and my hand darted forward grasping her wrists, denying her the satisfaction.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Denying you,” I snapped, pulling her roughly into a seated position.

  “You can’t-”

  “I can do whatever I fucking want with you, Mercy,” I murmured, lowering my lips towards hers.

  “You wouldn’t.”

  I didn’t move to kiss her, I held still, my cold gaze boring into hers. Her blue eyes looked like hellfire in the unnatural orange glow from outside, hellfire and brimstone.

  Sucking in a sharp breath, I stood to my full height. Flinging her over my shoulder, she squirmed against my grasp as I hauled her lithe little body back into the bedroom.

  “No,” she gasped as I dropped her onto the mattress. “Don’t tie me up again. Please, X.”

  Ignoring her pleas, I took the rope that she’d escaped from and began winding it around her wrists, binding her hands together. I secured her to the bedpost before standing over her. She was bruised all over, the black marks my hands left behind standing out against her creamy skin. Beautiful pain.

  She watched me as I stripped, dumping my clothes on the floor and winced as I climbed into bed behind her.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, her body reacting to my nakedness by rubbing against my cock.

  “Letting you feel what you won’t get.” I flexed into her, driving my point home.

  I held onto her as she tried to squirm against me, a hand splayed across her stomach, the other arm wound underneath her neck and under the pillow.

  I held onto her until sleep eventually took her once more. Her body slackened against mine and I breathed in her scent, vanilla mixed with the musk of sex, before sliding off the bed and retreating to the sofa.

  I could deny her, but I couldn’t deny myself if I remained.

  Twenty-Four

  Mercy

  I wasn’t sure when I woke again, but the room was still dark, the curtains closed tight.

  But one thing was different. The blackout curtains weren’t so blackout. Grey light streamed in from a crack around the edges where the material didn’t sit flush with the wall. Light that fought against the thing that was trying to keep it locked out.

  That was a fucking metaphor if I ever saw one.

  My skin hummed with the continued frustration of pent up sexual frustration, but something else sang across my skin. Without moving, I glanced down towards the bedroom door, but that’s not where I found him.

  X sat on the floor, his naked back pressed against the side of the bed, his long legs stretched out across the carpet. He wore a pair of sweatpants, but even the sight of his tattooed chest was enough to flare my frustration into life again.

  He had the switchblade in his hand, the one he’d used to cut me free the other night, using the tip to pick at the dirt underneath his fingernails. I swallowed hard, not liking the fact that he had a weapon at the ready. X with his bare hands was formidable enough.

  “I know you’re awake,” he murmured, flicking the knife closed.

  “How do you know?” I asked with a sigh. “I didn’t even move.”

  He glanced back at me, his eyes flashing in the muted light. “Your ability to bite back when you’re at the mercy of a killer is un-fucking-believable.”

  I pouted, pulling against the rope around my wrists. “Thank you.”

  Knowing a strange fascination had brought him back into the bedroom to watch me, I lay on the bed, watching him in return. He came to say something or to ask me a question and I had all the time in the world to wait since I was his prisoner and all.

  “What stopped you?” he asked after a moment.

  “Which part?”

  He leaned his head back against the mattress and closed his eyes. “Pulling the trigger.”

  “Fear, I guess,” I replied without hesitation.

  He tilted his head and opened his eyes, fixing his gaze on mine. “Fear? You can’t have fear in this game.”

  “I wasn’t born that way. I wasn’t born to do those things.”

  X stilled, raising his head.

  “Neither were you,” I went on.

  His shoulders tensed, which was a glaring indicator that I was toeing the line and he narrowed his eyes. “Why didn’t you leave?”

  His other question kind of blindsided me. Why didn’t I leave him when I had the chance? He still didn’t get it and probably wouldn’t for some time. His mind seemed to be in a constant state of flux and I wondered if that meant he kept forgetting things. You know, like a goldfish had a memory of only three seconds. When I was growing up, I’d watch the fish in the tank at my parent’s house and wonder if they ever got bored, swimming around the same three feet of water day in day out. I’d even begged my mother to buy new fake rocks and castles to put in there so they’d have something new to look at. Then my brother ruined it and told me that by the time they’d gone around for another lap, they’d forgotten where they’d been.

  It was a poor analogy, but X was fighting against the changes inside him, forgetting then remembering every time he laid eyes on me. A repetitive battle, but one that I seemed to be gaining ground on. He’d go out, forget, then come back and remember, each time his newfound feelings deepening. Or so I suspected.

  “Because I believe in you,” I replied. “I believe in us, together.”

  He snorted, picking up the knife again.

  “Why would I lie to you?”

  “To save your own skin you would,” he said, flicking the blade out. He tilted it from side to side, inspecting the sharpness.

  “No. It’s more than that.”

  “I don’t know more.” He emphasized the last word, meaning that he couldn’t understand that what he could be feeling was the beginnings of love. Fuck, he couldn’t understand a lot of emotions and asking him about the most difficult one of all? That was suicide.

  “Regardless,” I said, my voice firm, “I’m not leaving you.”

  He muttered something that sounded a lot like 'silly little girl’ and began picking at his nails with the knife again.

  “How old are you?” I asked, desperate to keep him talking while he was in the mood.

  “Twenty-nine. I think.”

  “You think?” I asked. How could he not know how old he was? That seemed…weird.

  “I don’t know,” he said simply.

  “How long have you worked for Royal Blood?”

  “Eight years or so.”

  Eight years? If he was as old as he thought he was, then whatever they did was done as a young man. He would’ve been twenty or twenty-one…taught how to kill… The scars were on his body to prove it. Fuck, he wasn’t taught though was he? He was conditioned.

  “Did you ever want to do anything else?” I whispered, not quite sure if I should be asking.

  He stilled. “You know the answer to that question.”

  Yeah, I could take a guess. He didn’t know.

  “Did you always want to kill Sykes?” he asked with a sneer.

  Narrowing my eyes, I bit back, “No. I wanted to be an artist.”

  X flicked the knife closed and glanced up at me, staring right into my eyes with that 'deep into your soul' crap he always did.

  “So you did,” he murmured, a thoughtful expression on his handsome face.

  I rolled my eyes. “So says my file?”

  “So says your file.” He tossed the knife onto the floor. “And so says you.”

  “I wanted color,” I whispered. “Color, not corpses.”

  “And that’s why you couldn’t do it, Mercy,” he stated coldly. “There is no color in murder.”

  “I still want it. For them.” No matter the consequences for me.

  “If you manage to kill Sykes, what then?”

  “After?”
I asked. “The moment I woke up here, I figured I’d help you find out what Royal Blood did to you to make you like this.”

  X snorted, running his hands over his face. “And why should you care?”

  God, I had to say it again didn’t I? He was having another goldfish moment. “Because I believe in you. In your potential as a human being.”

  “My potential?” He let out a thin laugh that said it all. Disbelief.

  “I’ll show you eventually.”

  “Eventually…” he murmured. Pushing to his feet, X unfolded his long frame into a standing position.

  He padded across to the closet and slid open a door, revealing all the darkness within. Guns, knives, whips, other devices that I had no idea how depraved they could be… He reached up to a high shelf and pulled something down, something I couldn’t see. He turned and glanced at me on the bed, hesitating before he decided he was going to use whatever he’d gone looking for.

  I jerked against the rope, my heart hammering in my chest.

  Then I realized what he held in his hands. It was a blanket. He’d only gotten a blanket out of the closet...

  He frowned at my reaction before laying the blanket over my naked body, tucking me in with that thing he thought he was incapable of. Tenderness. Leaning over, he cupped my face, stroking the pad of his thumb across my lips.

  “Sleep, Mercy,” he murmured.

  Like he was some crazy-ass hypnotist, my eyes fluttered closed, one thought lingering in my exhausted mind.

  He gave me a blanket…

  Twenty-Five

  X

  Talking. Getting to know another person for who they were.

  Mercy Reid was digging her way inside my flesh the more time that she was conscious and in my presence. I held her hostage in my apartment, but against everything I thought was proper in these kinds of situations, she was a willing captive. She wanted revenge for her family, but what did she want from me?