7
Mercy
Ezra did not lookpleased with our victory. He kept stalking around the sitting room where the guys, Anthea, and I had gathered to discuss the results of yesterday’s ambush and our next steps, his mouth set in a rigid line. About a dozen Noble men were staked out in the yard around the mansion. I wondered if he was getting paranoid. Maybe the news that he wasn’t really the top dog around here had gotten to him.
“So, Xavier showed up?” Anthea was saying. “How did he find out?”
Gideon looked up from his tablet. “I’d imagine he was tracking the shipment. He must have been able to tell the truck had stopped for longer than made sense and immediately rushed over.”
“Thankfully all our people got out of there in time—with the truck and all the weapons,” Wylder said with a tight smile. “The prick got distracted by his obsession with Mercy.”
“Seems to be a common problem,” Ezra muttered without stopping his pacing. Wylder shot him a brief glare, and then everyone pretended he hadn’t spoken.
I rubbed my hands over my knees, which were scraped under the fabric of my jeans from my leap across the rooftops. The faint sting barely penetrated my thoughts. My fingers drifted up to trace the line of myLittle Angelbracelet in my pocket.
The way Xavier had said Mom’s name:Josey. The familiarity in his tone. His certainty that she was gone. I hadn’t mentioned it to the guys because I knew we had much more important things to focus on—like, oh, the fact that the Long Night was counting the hours until he’d send his people in to slaughter us all—but my nerves were still rattled.
I’d never known what’d happened to my mother. She’d just vanished one day—all her things gone from the house when I’d gotten home from school. Dad had refused to say more than that she’d “left.” I hadn’t known whether to believe him, knowing how he was… but how could Xavier know anything about her fate?
It didn’t make any sense at all, and I didn’t like that.
I pushed those thoughts aside. “All’s well that ends well. We struck a good blow, and now we have more weapons and the Storm has fewer people here. How do we hit them next?”
“Yeah!” Kaige smacked his hands together. “I’ll punch as many of those assholes as we need to.”
As I gave him an affectionate kick from my seat next to him on the couch, Ezra scowled. But my gaze was drawn to Gideon, whose face had darkened as he peered at his tablet’s screen.
“We definitely hit them hard,” he said, “but the Storm is stepping up his game too.”
“One of our properties was attacked this morning,” Ezra snapped. “Let’s not beat around the bush.”
“We had to expect some kind of retaliation,” Rowan said. “It didn’t go that badly. The men at the factory were able to defend it, so the Storm didn’t take anything from us. There was one casualty, but that’s it, right?”
Ezra’s scowl didn’t shift. “One too many.”
I bit my tongue against pointing out that if he’d pitched in more from the start of the conflict, it might never have gotten this far.
Gideon cleared his throat and raised his head. “There’s actually another thing, one I’ve only just confirmed. The truck last night was the biggest consolidated influx of Storm troops to come into the city in the past day, but it wasn’t the only one. At least three other smaller trucks arrived. From what I can tell from the footage I’ve been able to dig up, they’ve still added a couple dozen men to their ranks.”
Wylder muttered a curse. “And there are probably more coming. Can we catch them before they get here like we did with the transport truck?”
Gideon grimaced. “I haven’t been able to find a pattern yet that would allow me to predict which trucks are associated with the Storm and when they’ll be arriving. These were much more low key than the big one. I’m working on it, though.”
Ezra let out a snort but said nothing.
“Fucking hell,” Kaige said, running his fingers through his short, dark hair. “So yesterday was for nothing?”
“Not exactly,” Anthea pointed out. “You took their weapons and at least half of the manpower they hoped to add to their forces. If the strike hadn’t hurt, the Storm wouldn’t have pushed back at us right away. Xavier’s pissed off.”
“Anthea’s right,” I said, grateful for her logical thinking. “We can’t give up. We still madesomeprogress, and we’re only just getting started with the new intel we got from the Long Night.”
“Right.” Kaige perked back up again. “So, when are we going to go shoot them all down? That’d be a quick way to deal with the pricks.”
Wylder shook his head with a crooked grin. “While I appreciate the sentiment, going head to head against the Storm’s people without surprise on our side is only going to mean a bloodbath for all of us—and I don’t know that we’ll come out on top even then. We have to play this strong but smart.”
“But we have to do something.”
“And we will,” Wylder promised. “Thankfully they can’t know that we’ve secured the alliance of the Long Night. That’s our wild card.”