1
Mercy
It turnedout human remains were difficult to get off of grass, especially remains that had recently exploded.
At least I wasn’t right out in the middle of the mess anymore. From the living room window, I could see the Noble lackeys who were hosing down the front lawn. The blood that had painted the grass looked thinner now, but the blades shone faintly red under the morning sun.
When I breathed, a metallic taint remained in the back of my throat. I’d rinsed my mouth out in the shower several times, but I couldn’t quite get rid of it.
An hour had passed since the unknown man had burst apart all over the lawn outside the Noble mansion. Even now, the visceral violence of the moment replayed in the back of my mind over and over. That and the moments leading up to it. The video he’d played for us… That creepy-ass dude who’d claimed he was going to take over Paradise Bend now that Colt and the Steel Knights were destroyed…
It all left me with a clammy sensation wrapped around my gut.
Wylder and his inner circle were lounging on the sofa and armchairs around the room, but none of them looked remotely relaxed.
“Do we have any idea who this Xavier guy is?” Rowan asked the room at large, as if he knew exactly what I was thinking. “Did any of you recognize him?”
Wylder shook his head. “No, never seen that fucker. I think I would have remembered him.”
Anybody would. The X shaped scars on his cheeks, raised and pinkened with age, had shown clearly even on the small tablet screen. And the way he’d spoken, so chilling and impassive, was burned into my memory. The man had to be a psychopath, maybe even a worse one than Colt.
I tore my gaze away from the window and started pacing. “I’ve got no idea either. What the hell does he want with us?”
With me. He’d addressed me directly in the video. A shudder ran down my spine.
Kaige got up and caught my shoulders in his hands. “Mercy, come sit down.”
I almost argued, but his expression was so concerned I gave in. I didn’t think I could feel any worse on my ass than on my feet anyway. And Kaige didn’t show emotions other than flirtiness and rage very often, so when you got something else from him, you knew it was a big deal.
I sank onto the sofa between him and Wylder, and he slung his arm around my back. I let myself lean against the hard planes of his brawny chest. When I looked up at Rowan, I thought I saw a flicker of something in his bright eyes, but he looked away.
Wylder had a nonchalant air, but I knew that was only a front. I wondered if he and Kaige had discussed the threesome we’d had the other night on the terrace. Not that now was a great time to be thinking about that interlude, as spectacular as it’d been.
Gideon seemed oblivious to the rest of us, clicking furiously at his tablet with one hand as he raked the other through his jagged blue hair. Then he let out a short exclamation of victory. “Here it is.”
“Here’s what?” Wylder asked, leaning forward.
“I was checking the CCTV footage in the area. I figured a guy wouldn’t walk up here with a bomb in his stomach unless he had a reason to believe not following orders would be worse.”
“And?” Rowan asked.
“See for yourself.” Gideon held up the tablet to us.
I squinted at the grainy image from a traffic cam. It only took a moment to recognize the row of shops in the background, just a couple of blocks away from the hill in Paradise City where the Noble mansion stood. And then another moment to notice the beefy figure at the corner of the screen, whose frame and salt-and-pepper hair in its short ponytail immediately triggered a sense of recognition.
That was Xavier.
He was standing by a car parked at the curb. With a motion that looked almost careless, he shoved another figure—the young man who’d appeared at the mansion’s doorstep—away from him, down the street. The man hesitated for a second and then passed out of view.
Xavier lingered, glancing down at what I assumed was his phone from time to time. Gideon sped up the footage. Finally, Xavier got into the car and drove off.
A chill ran down my spine. “He was so close. He must have been monitoring things to make sure the guy went through with it.” And then triggered the explosion when he was done. What had Xavier threatened to do to the guy if he’d chickened out?
“He’s been here before, much closer,” Wylder said, his voice grim. “He confessed on the video that he was the one leaving those grisly things around the house—first the dead cat and its tail and then the dug-up corpse.”
I didn’t want to focus on those gruesome memories. I finally had my answers about who’d been leaving me the horrible “gifts,” but I couldn’t say I was at all comforted. The realization that this psycho had been right outside my bedroom, just inches from the place where I’d been sleeping, made my skin crawl.
“In what part of his fucked-up brain did he think those were gifts?” Kaige growled. His body curled tighter around me as if he could somehow shield me from the rest of the world.