Bad Blood Read online

  Maybe I should tone down the bitch.

  He wasn’t telling me what this Vaughn guy had said, but I still needed a game plan. I didn’t like being in the outer circle. Especially since our circle was made up of two.

  “So what do we do now?” I asked, letting my annoyance go.

  X eyed me. “I need to think.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “You need to think?”

  He nodded once and picked up his fork again. “In the meantime, you can show me your marksmanship.”

  I nodded and poked at my own breakfast. Taking a deep breath, I wondered what I could do to extract the information I needed out of him.

  The only reason I could think of, that would force X not to trust me with the intel on Sykes, was the fact that he saw me as too emotionally invested. I was hotheaded and lacked the ability to pull the trigger. I also seemed to suffer from a guilty conscience, even though the bastard deserved every bit of pain I inflicted on him.

  If I tried to manipulate X into telling me, he’d see right through it. Maybe if I coaxed it out of him while we were fucking… No, I couldn’t do that. Sex was when we were the most intimate with each other. It was when we truly connected. I couldn’t use that against a broken man.

  That only left one thing and it was the right way.

  I needed to prove to X I could do this. I needed to follow his rules, support him, listen to his needs, but most of all I needed to trust that X would be there with me until the end.

  If he wasn’t, then I was doomed to fail before I even started.

  Six

  X

  At first there was nothing but darkness.

  Darkness and confusion.

  I tried to remember, but all I could see were shadows. I didn’t know who or where I was, only that I was alone. So alone.

  Then the man started to come. He’d come with his bag of tools. Objects whose sole purpose was to cause pain and suffering.

  I hung from the ceiling, my fingers numb…cold.

  My toes scraped against the earthen floor of the little room that was my world, the iron shackles cutting into my wrists. The blood that had flowed down my arms and down my body had long since dried and I had learned that struggling was futile. The more I attempted to escape, the longer the man would leave me here, hanging in agony. The more I struggled, the more my wrists would hurt.

  I began to associate the man with suffering.

  The chain holding my body aloft was let loose and I fell to the ground, pain searing through my wrists. I couldn’t move my arms, the blood had drained from them hours ago and I was numb. The man stood over me as I tried to move, like a useless lump of flesh.

  There was a whoosh of flame as he ignited a blowtorch, focusing the flame on a long piece of metal in his other hand.

  “There’s something beautiful about flame,” he said in his gravelly voice. “How it can burn. How it can cleanse the body of parasites.”

  He stared down at me, the blowtorch falling silent. The tip of the poker in his right hand radiated a fierce orange hue and I knew it was meant for me, but I was too broken to try and defend myself. He’d taken my will a long time ago and now he was taking the rest. He wouldn’t stop until he had my soul.

  The glowing poker hit my skin and I roared in pain, the sound and smell of burning flesh filling the room, mingling with that of my own filth.

  Then it was gone, but it still burned. I writhed on the ground, my eyes wide and my mouth drooling onto the earthen floor of my prison.

  “Get up.”

  I couldn’t obey, I couldn’t move, my senses were overloaded.

  The poker hit my side again and I wept, my voice completely gone. The man held it there for so long my flesh started to melt away.

  Obey or suffer. To disobey was pain.

  He burnt and beat and flayed me until there was nothing left to take.

  When he came back for the last time, the man gave me a name and put a gun in my hand. He gave me a life, which was all I ever wanted after living in the dark room.

  The man that had caused me such pain had now become my savior.

  He presented me with a choice, a final test, and another person entered my room. A faceless man in a hood. He was on his knees before me and I wasn’t sure what I was meant to do.

  I had a gun in my hand and the man commanded me to shoot. Who he was, was of no concern to me. It didn’t matter.

  When he asked, I obeyed. No hesitation.

  I pulled the trigger.

  Pain.

  My eyes snapped open and I sat up, fisting my hands into my hair with a groan. I was covered in sweat, it stuck to my skin like shame and as the blanket fell away, the cool air sent a chill through my body.

  I'm in the cottage. I'm in the cottage. I'm in the cottage.

  There was no man in the hood. He was long gone.

  “X?”

  I glanced up at the sound of Mercy’s voice and found her curled up in the opposite armchair, a blanket tucked around her. I was still sleeping on the sofa, the previous night had been a strictly one-time affair.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, my voice sounding ragged.

  “I couldn't sleep.”

  Mercy Reid was going to be the end and the beginning of me.

  How could one woman elicit such a violent response one moment and such a tender one the next? Was that the true sign of a madman or was that how things were meant to be?

  I straightened up, placing my feet on the floor. “Come,” I said, nodding to the sofa.

  She shifted from the armchair and sat next to me without hesitation, straightening the blanket so it fell over both of us.

  “Are they getting worse?” she whispered.

  There was no use hiding it from her. She’d seen and heard me in my sleep. I’d tried to cave her head in… There was nothing to gain from keeping it a secret from her.

  “Yes,” I replied. “I’m beginning to remember things.” I sighed, shoving away the patchy memory of the room where I’d been conditioned. “Horrible things.”

  She lay her head on my shoulder, her hand finding mine underneath the blanket. She didn’t ask any more questions, she just held onto me. She was just…tangible.

  “Vaughn had a price,” I said after a moment.

  “And what was it?”

  “He wants me to complete a hit.”

  “No.” She sat up, her eyes widening. “No, you can’t.”

  “He’s giving up a lot considering he wants to kill Sykes as much as you do.”

  “X…”

  I held up a hand to silence her. “It’s his price and if we want information, then I have to pay it. If I complete the hit, then he will assist us. Whatever we need.”

  Mercy didn’t look convinced. “Can we trust him?”

  “I believe so.”

  “You said Sykes hurt him too…how?”

  “Does it matter?”

  She pouted. “It might help me understand why I shouldn’t be such a bitch about you killing someone for him. I don’t like it. I don’t like you having to do that when…” She clamped her mouth shut and glanced away.

  She was right about a lot of things. She had a lot of reasons to be frustrated with this whole charade, one of them being me and my instability as I began to remember… The fact that she’d dropped my aversion to telling her about Vaughn’s intel so bluntly at breakfast yesterday meant that she was trying to see things my way. For a woman like her, fiery and temperamental, it must be difficult.

  “Her name was Lorelei,” I murmured. Mercy’s expression fell and the color began changing in her face. She looked paler than usual. “Sykes took her from him.”

  “He killed her?”

  I nodded. Sykes had done far worse than just take the woman’s life, but I wasn’t going to tell Mercy that. “Vaughn went mad with grief and fell off the face of the planet for several years.” That had been early on in my hitman days and I’d gotten to know him before and after. “When he finally resurfaced, he was
different. There had been whisperings about a man in Europe who they called The Hangman.”

  “Vaughn?”

  I nodded. “He built an empire in secret, trading in intelligence and arms. Now he’s extremely rich and answers to nobody.”

  “Then why hasn’t he killed Sykes? Surely he could manage it…”

  “He could, but for a man like Vaughn, revenge comes at a price. Sykes has been much more valuable to him alive than dead, despite what he did to Lorelei.”

  “Then why now?”

  I shrugged. “Something must have changed. It’s not my concern as long as we get what we want.”

  Mercy swallowed hard, casting her gaze onto her hands. “He loved her, didn’t he? This Lorelei.”

  “Yes.”

  I could see the look in her eyes and wondered if that’s what she thought would happen to us. I wasn’t ready to define our relationship, so I avoided her gaze, picking up the knife on the coffee table. The knife was tangible to me. Mercy and what she represented were not for the moment.

  “Do you ever wonder…” She trailed off, letting her unasked question hang in the air.

  The knife was heavy in my hand and I let the point rest against the surface of the coffee table.

  “No,” I said, preempting every facet her question could have. If I wondered who I was before, if I could love, if I had loved, if there were people looking for me, what my life would be like now. The answer was no.

  “Was Xavier your name before?”

  It was a futile question. I didn’t remember and every time I tried there was pain. I started scratching at the tabletop with the point of the knife, trying to separate myself from the unbearable confusion that was welling in my mind.

  “It was the name he gave me,” I replied, watching the tiny shavings of wood begin to pile up on either side of the marks I was making.

  Mercy glanced at the table, then back at me.

  “Is that why?” she asked nodding at the knife.

  Focusing on the table, I realized I’d let a compulsion come to the surface. It was my need to cross something out. Cross off a mark on my list, but this time there was no photo. I was still trying to hold onto something I knew and understood.

  “You can be anyone you want,” she said.

  “Anyone?” I scoffed. I was certainly not Xavier Blood anymore. “Like you?”

  She flinched slightly, but shrugged like she was trying to cover up the gesture. “New life, new name, I suppose.”

  “You’ll always be Mercy to me.”

  “And you’ll always be X.”

  I glanced at her, letting the knife go. Sometimes I wondered if she was using me to get to Sykes. Other times I wondered if she had a death wish. And sometimes when I was alone with my thoughts, I wondered if she wanted me for whoever I could become. I didn’t know any of it, let alone which direction was up.

  “You have something now that you never had before,” she said, her eyes haunting in the darkness.

  A strange feeling shivered through my body. “And what is that?”

  “Who you are now is up to you.”

  Seven

  Mercy

  I was running, the shrill wailing of an alarm piercing the night air.

  The gun was heavy in my hand and suddenly it felt like a dead weight.

  My feet pounded across the bridge that spanned the canal near the mansion that housed a monster. I tossed the gun into the murky water, the plop it made as it hit the surface was loud in the silence.

  I kept running.

  He saw me. He didn’t see me, he saw my eyes. Just my eyes. I ripped the balaclava from my head and tossed that too, heaving fresh air into my lungs.

  I ran down the side of the canal, my feet pounding on the asphalt, my heart thumping like it was going to burst right out of my chest. The main road crossed the water above, the old bluestone bridge coming into sight around the bend. I glanced back over my shoulder, but there was no movement…yet.

  They were coming, they’d seen me flee. They were coming.

  I had to run or I’d be dead.

  Once I reached the bridge, I took the stairs at the side, two at a time, and emerged onto street level where a night bus zoomed past, followed closely by a taxi. The footpath was empty save for a street sweeper that droned a block away to my left.

  The sound of pounding footsteps reached me from behind and I glanced over my shoulder. Three men in head to toe black were running the way I’d come, following my flight path.

  Fuck.

  I twisted on my heel and ran across the street, not even looking for oncoming traffic. My breath came in heaving gulps, my chest burning with the exertion. I hadn’t run this far or fast since I was on the track team at school. A fucking age, and a different life, ago. That girl was long gone the moment she found the dead bodies of her family. Dead and gone.

  I rounded the corner and legged it down a side street to where I’d stashed a car. I fumbled in my pocket for the keys and they fell to the ground. Cursing, I picked them up and slid them into the lock, my hands shaking uncontrollably. Wrenching open the door, I slid into the drivers seat and gunned the engine.

  Glancing in the rearview mirror, I saw the men emerge at the corner, slowing and looking right at the car. I wrenched the steering wheel all the way to the right and flattened the accelerator to the floor. The car shot out into the street, the tires squealing on the asphalt.

  I didn’t look back.

  I sped through the city, dodging busses and delivery vehicles, glancing every now and then in the rearview mirror, but nobody was following. My heartbeat never slowed, worried that I’d be found the moment I stopped, but I kept driving and stuck to the plan. The plan that I’d spent months going over.

  I’d cased the house, gaining entry as a cleaning lady, walked the escape route, and tested the alarm system. I’d researched how to disable it, but I hadn’t counted on the secondary system. I hadn’t counted on a lot of things.

  I parked the car in a spot on a side street and killed the engine. I waited for ten minutes, the engine clicking as it cooled, waiting to make sure that I was clear of any tail that had picked up my scent.

  Nothing moved.

  I left the car behind and walked the rest of the way, keeping to the shadows, watching for movement. Hugging my arms around my stomach, I glanced up and down the empty street before crossing to the opposite side and yanking open a window at the base of an old apartment building.

  I wriggled legs first through the window, the metal frame scraping my ass and back. I landed feet first onto the floor and froze, listening so hard I heard the whoosh of blood pumping through my brain. Silence greeted me, and the low hum of the boiler at the far side of the basement I’d dropped in on. I was in the clear.

  Pulling out the backpack I’d stashed behind some old boxes, I stripped the clothes I was wearing and stuffed them into the incinerator. The boiler flared as it was fed the evidence of where I’d been and I dressed in the clothes from the backpack. A pair of dark jeans, a grey T-shirt, black cardigan and a leather jacket. Street clothes.

  I held the last piece of the puzzle in my shaking fingers and like I wanted to feel the pain, I flipped open the cover on the passport. Alison Crawford stared back at me, blonde, healthy, happy.

  I sucked in a deep breath and tossed the passport into the incinerator. Alison Crawford was dead.

  I turned to leave and at the last moment I caught my reflection in an old mirror stored against the far wall. A scared, desperate little girl with hastily dyed black hair stared back, a streak of dirt smeared across one pale cheek.

  Failure.

  I entered that room as one person and left as another.

  That was the night Mercy Reid was born, kicking and screaming into futility.

  Mercy Reid started out as a coward who didn’t have the guts to avenge her murdered family.

  Fucking pathetic failure.

  My eyes began to open and I shook off the remnants of my dream.

>   I was curled up on the sofa, the blanket tucked around me. The room was full of warmth and the scent of wood smoke. X was right when he said the cottage had a deep chill of a nighttime. The days had been mild but ice settled during the darkness. The mild English Summer was fading fast into Autumn.

  The cottage was silent, the chirping of blackbirds outside the only thing that broke through the soft crackling of the fire.

  I sat up, listening. X wasn’t in the cottage and after last night’s deep and meaningful, I began to worry. I’d fallen asleep and where had he gone?

  Vaughn wanted X to complete a hit. If it wasn’t for me and my single-minded revenge, then he wouldn’t have to do it at all. What if killing was the thing that made X revert? What if it was the thing that made him snap completely?

  I rubbed my eyes as parts of my own dream surfaced. I was running from Sykes’ home. I was running from my failure.

  X hadn’t asked me outright why I’d chosen the name Mercy Reid. I guess he thought it was just a random selection, a random name assigned to me by the guy who’d created my fake passport and ID, but it was far from that.

  Mercy was a euphemism of course. Because that’s what Sykes would do when I held the gun to his head. He’d beg for mercy and that was the thing I wanted, second to blowing his head clean off his shoulders. I wanted his fear.

  Things had been so tense the last few weeks it was no wonder the memories I wanted to keep locked away were surfacing. First it had been the memories of my dead family. Blood on the walls, blood on the floor…Bam, right between the eyes.

  Once I’d pulled on some clothes and my boots, I found X outside.

  He was sitting on the trunk of a fallen oak along the edge of the yard, looking out over the field where we’d been practicing my shooting. The sunrise was spectacular. All orange and red, the sky ablaze with dancing color.

  I crossed the yard, gravel crunching underfoot, and climbed up on the trunk next to him. He didn’t acknowledge my presence, but that was X. He knew I was there.