8
Mercy
Somehow I was standingat the banquet table for my rehearsal dinner all over again. Gunshots thundered all around me.
Grandma fell, blood gushing down her dress. One bullet and another caught my father in the chest—but it wasn’t Colt firing them. His face had been replaced by Xavier’s, while an even larger shadowy figure loomed behind the scarred giant.
Another bang—and I jolted out of sleep, the sheets tangling around my limbs. My heart was thumping hard. It took me a second to realize that I really was awake in the bedroom of the Nobles’ apartment, but for some reason the banging sound hadn’t stopped.
It was coming from the apartment’s front door: an insistent heavy knocking.
“Open up!” a muffled voice hollered. “Police!”
Shit. My heart practically lurched right out of my chest. I vaguely registered the glowing numbers on the clock perched on the dresser: 2:06 a.m. What the fuck were the cops doing here in the middle of the night?
What were they doing here, period?
Another bellow cut through my confusion. “If the door isn’t open within thirty seconds, we’re busting it down. This is your final warning.”
I scrambled off the bed and grabbed a hoodie off the floor. I’d gone to bed in just a tank-top and pajama shorts, no bra. Tugging the hoodie on, I checked that I hadn’t left anything incriminating lying in view. My gun was on the mattress lying next to my pillow—I shoved it between the headboard and the wall, grabbed my knife, and shoved that into the pocket of my hoodie on the way to the door.
After fumbling with the lock and yanking the door open, I found two cops standing in the hall outside. They gave me a once-over, their eyes lingering on my bare legs. I had the urge to see if they wanted an even closer look, like if I slammed my knee into their smug faces, but I wasn’t quite annoyed enough to be that suicidal despite my interrupted sleep.
I hadn’t seen much of the police in the two decades that I’d lived in the Bend. They mostly focused on civil disputes and personal crimes, looking the other way when it came to all the gang activity in the area. Most of them were getting payoffs from one organization or another.
“Are you alone in here, ma’am?” the shorter cop asked, saying the last word with a bit of a sneer. The suspicion in his eyes convinced me that he knew who I was—or more importantly, who my father had been.
I didn’t like to admit to being on my own, but if I said someone else was here, they’d probably demand I bring them out. “Yep, just lil ol’ me,” I drawled. “Is there some reason you woke me up at two in the morning, officers?”
The tall one glowered at me and barged right past me into the living room. “We got a complaint about a disturbance, some sort of ruckus that had people concerned. We’ll need to check the place out and make sure everything’s in order here.”
That was total bullshit. If there’d been a “ruckus” in or around the apartment, that would have woken me up instead of these bozos. It was just an excuse to get them inside without a warrant.
So what did they actually want?
The tall cop started prowling through the apartment. A prickle of apprehension ran down my spine, but it was hard to keep an eye on both him and the short dude who stepped inside and planted himself in front of me.
Shortie narrowed his eyes. “Miss Katz, isn’t it? You’ve been a difficult woman to find.”
I folded my arms over my chest. “Who’s been looking for me?”
“An awful lot of people, I suspect, after the massacre we found in that restaurant downtown. Whoever was responsible took out your whole family… but somehow missed you. Very interesting.”
My stomach tightened. “‘Interesting’ isn’t the word I’d use.”
“You couldn’t be that torn up about it,” Tall Guy tossed out from where he was opening and closing the kitchen cupboards. Did he think the “ruckus” had been started by a cereal box and a stack of plates? “Isn’t it strange that nobody came forward to receive the bodies, especially the last remaining member of the family?”
“I didn’t have much choice about that,” I snapped, and then clamped my mouth shut. I’d had to steer clear to save my own life. No way would Colt have stood back and just let me claim the bodies, arrange funerals—I’d have been lucky to make it through the doorway of the coroner’s office alive. But what did these assholes care about that?
Guilt twisted through my gut anyway. I’d assumed that by now it was too late to do anything for my family, but maybe I’d dismissed the possibility too quickly. “Are the bodies still in… custody, or whatever?”
Shortie snorted. “They were cremated a couple of weeks back. We don’t have room to hold onto a pile of corpses for ages, especially with how many of ‘em have been turning up lately.” He shot me another narrow look. “I believe the coroner holds onto the ashes for a while, if it actually matters to you.”
“That’s good to know,” I said, stiffly grateful. I could still do something for them then. There were a few places Grandma and my aunts might like their ashes scattered. Dad… He’d be lucky if I didn’t drop his down a sewer drain.
But right now I had nowhere safe to keep the ashes. Even this apartment didn’t really belong to me. I couldn’t take a stash of urns with me while I was on the run.
“And what exactly are you doing here right now?” Shortie asked, raising an eyebrow.