“You got rid of it?” Rowan asked.
Mercy nodded. “I got a chance to flush it down the toilet. The cops left empty-handed. But I have no idea how the baggie got there in the first place… I’m pretty sure it must have been during the afternoon when I was out of the apartment yesterday, but maybe I’m wrong. And why set me up like that?”
The rest of us exchanged a glance. We hadn’t had a chance to fill her in about the incident at the waterfront property yet.
“It seems to be Xavier’s new strategy of choice,” Wylder said tightly. “Get drugs on our property and then sic the police on us. A few of the Storm’s people had a whole Glory party at the new waterfront property yesterday. The cops got there before we could break it up. They almost caught us.”
“What?” Mercy’s eyes widened. “Why didn’t you tell me anything?”
“It just happened, and it didn’t seem like something you needed to know about urgently. I figured I’d bring it up the next time we dropped in.” He ran his hand through his auburn hair and grimaced. “Those Storm assholes. Using our own fucking strategy against us. We were going to sic the cops on them with the truck we stole, and now they’ve stolen our plan and spun it around on us.” He smacked his fist against the floor.
I’d have pointed out that we had bigger problems than copyrighting our schemes, except just then I caught a blurred shape on one of the screens. Sucking a breath through my teeth, I tapped the controls to pause that one and cycled back through the frames to the right spot.
Mercy caught my reaction, looking from me to the screens. “Did you see something?” Her whole posture had gone rigid.
“Not anything happening right now,” I assured her, and her shoulders relaxed just a bit. “It’s footage from one of the cameras around the apartment building—from yesterday afternoon, like you thought…”
There. He was only on the screen for half a second, but I recognized Xavier’s burly form. He hadn’t come right up to Mercy’s building, though. He was heading into the run-down office building next door.
Everyone around me had fallen silent, clearly recognizing him too. Wylder swore a few times. “How’d he get from there into Mercy’s apartment? There’s no sign of him going to her building?”
I shook my head, my stomach twisting. “He must have used similar tricks to what she has in the past—gone from a window or the rooftops to one of her windows.” I had a camera in the hall outside her front door, so he definitely hadn’t gotten in that way. None of the feeds had been covered or cut out even briefly—I’d come up with a way to program the system to alert me if either happened.
But he’d found a way around it anyway. My hands clenched on my lap. “I’m sorry,” I said, my strained voice rasping in my throat. I couldn’t hold my own in a fight, couldn’t physically protect her, so I was supposed to manage it this way. And this prick had shown me up yet again.
Mercy looked up at me with concern in her dark eyes—concern for me, when she was the one who’d been in danger—which knotted me up inside even more. She reached for me again, grabbing my hand this time. “It’s not your fault. He’s beyond anything any of us have had to deal with before. But we’re not going to let them win.”
I had to figure out how to stop him from winning before we could be sure of our victory.
“I get why they came at us through the waterfront property,” Kaige said. “But why target Mercy?”
Mercy’s brow knit. “Yeah, it’s not as if I’m such a huge threat.”
“You’re selling yourself short,” Wylder said. “I’m sure Xavier found out how big a role you played in taking down Colt. He might be happy with the result, but that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t realize you could cause problems for him too.”
“And he’s seemed to have some vendetta against you for a while now,” Rowan pointed out. “Leaving that crap at the mansion for you to find… For whatever reason, he’s fixated on you.”
But he was still playing with her, terrorizing her without following through—yet. It probably amused him to know he could get under her skin. Like a game of chess he was playing with us, and he kept catching us off-guard no matter how many moves ahead I tried to see.
“He was obviously in your apartment,” I said abruptly. “You can’t go back there. It’s compromised.”
Wylder nodded. “We’ll find another safe location to move you to.”
But what location would actually be safe? What place could I keep safe for her? I stared down at my tablet, and a wave of anger and despair washed over me.
If I didn’t step away from this conversation, I might hurl the device at the screens I’d put so much work into setting up, and that wouldn’t help anyone.
I pushed to my feet. “I need fresh air to think properly. Give me a minute.”
The other guys blinked at me, but I walked right past them and hopped out of the van into the cool early morning air.
A hazy greenish glow was just touching the distant sky as dawn crept closer. The narrow alley we’d pulled into stank of urine, but I didn’t dare walk farther than the end of it several paces away. What if I screwed us over again by letting someone catch a glimpse of me?
The van door thumped behind me. Mercy walked over. “Hey, are you okay?”
“I just… have a lot to think about,” I said. The last thing she needed was to be burdened with my worries along with her own.
She nudged her shoulder against mine. “Nowhere to get acceptable coffee around here. It’s definitely too early to go without caffeine.”