Bad Blood

by Amity Cross

  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.

  Thirty

  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.

  Thirty-One

  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.

  Thirty-Two

  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 himself 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.

  The here and now.

  Blood Rites (Royal Blood #2.5)

  Expected Release: May, 2015

  A beautiful star, a dark prince with a price and an affair that pushes the limits of sanity...

  Sebastian Vaughn has a secret.

  Lorelei Lansford is the epitome of perfection.

  Vaughn has darkness inside of him. Recruited by a criminal organization at a young age, he leads a double life. He deals in women, arms and intelligence, but to the outside world he's just another rich playboy living the lifestyle. That is until he crosses paths with a shining star, a beauty he can’t keep his hands off.

  Lorelei was born into a wealthy family and has certain responsibilities she is expected to obey without question. One of those is not falling in love with high society bad boy, Sebastian Vaughn. Money, sex, danger... Vaughn exudes it and like a moth to a flame, she can’t stay away.

  When Vaughn steps into something out of his control there’s only one way he can escape with his life. He has to make a deal that will betray everything he holds dear.

  The price?

  Lorelei.

  Warning: This is a story about pain and retribution. It does not have a happy ending. There is strong language, sex scenes and violence. It is not intended for those of a squeamish disposition. Blood Rites is dark, dangerous and smooth. You have been warned.

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  BLOOD RITES (Royal Blood #2.5)

  To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people just exist.

  One

  Vaughn

  The thing about double lives is that no matter how hard you try not to cross the streams…nature always finds a way to fuck you over.

  I stood on a side street in Kensington, London, the noise of the city ebbing and flowing around me. This whole area stunk of money and society, and the stores on this street were of the boutique variety. High prices and quality.

  My gaze ran over the display of crystal in the shop window I stood out front of. Twenty-seven years on the planet and my life had amounted to this? What was next for my empire? Expansion was on the horizon, international expansion, but I needed a partner to take me there.

  “Vaughn?”

  I
glanced up at Nathaniel Hawkes, my trusted bodyguard and advisor. He was the brawn of our outfit. Standing at six foot five, he had the shoulders of a rugby player and the aim of a military trained sniper. He was deadly with a weapon and his fists. He was ugly as fuck with his shaved head a pock-marked skin, but he was quality. We looked the right pair together, slick suits that screamed wealth and a dangerous kind of refinement.

  “Ready for some fun, Hawkes?” I asked, grinning.

  “Always.” He gestured for me to lead the way.

  Opening the door to the shop, I strode inside, the little bell ringing to signal our entrance. The shop floor was lined with all sorts of items, antique grandfather clocks, an assortment of vases and sculptures and display cases of crystal and jewelry. All old, all vintage and all worth a lot of money.

  Our target emerged from out the back, a huge smile on his face. He was this thirty something, deadbeat business owner, who couldn’t seem to handle his cash flow very well for such high-ticketed merchandise. His business was suffering for his crack habit. When he laid eyes on us, his expression fell.

  “Good morning,” I declared. “Expecting someone else?”

  I picked up a business card and flipped it over. Jameson Jones, Pawnbroker. Glancing up at Jones himself, I flung it at him, my eyes narrowing. He looked like he was about to piss himself.

  “Your payment is late, Jones,” I said, running a finger along the top of the glass display case. Diamonds sparkled under the lighting as I moved. Rings, necklaces, exquisite workmanship. Too bad he didn’t make them or I’d probably spare him the right hook he was about to cop in his jaw.

  “I know. I’m sorry, but-”

  I held up a finger to silence his pathetic excuses. Hawkes hovered by the door and there was a click as he locked it. Jones glanced from me to Hawkes with a look of absolute terror.

  I rarely went with the brawn to send a message to my clients, so Jones was right to be terrified. The short of it was, from time to time I enjoyed getting my hands dirty. As long as it didn’t mark my suit and I got what I wanted, then we were all good.