Page 8 of At Your Mercy

When I’d spread my legs in the past, when I’d let strangers fuck me for the sake of an easy mark, I’d never once believed they saw me. I was an instrument of death, a beautiful trick.

But Wesley… He had looked at me like he was peeling back my mask with his eyes alone, like he could strip me bare with a glance and find something still beating underneath. And that terrified me.

Maybe I was looking too far into it. I probably was.

But what would it be like, I wondered, to stop running? To stop being Elias’s weapon? To stop pretending I wasn’t already breaking at the seams?

What would it be like to give in—to let that man’s rough hands close around my throat, his weight crush me down, his teeth sink in until I couldn’t breathe—and then not come back up?

The thought was poison, but it slid down sweet. My body betrayed me, shivering with something that wasn’t fear alone.

Maybe it was better this way. I didn’t deserve the clean relief of ending my life: no knife, no gun, no noose, no pills, no quiet drowning. Suicide would be too gentle, too merciful. Mercy was for people. I didn’t deserve to be considered a person.

But him—Wesley Cohen—he could take me apart piece by piece, and I’d welcome it. He could break me in two, and I’d thank him for it. And when the final moment came, when the blade slid home or the trigger pulled, it just might feel like absolution.

The steam fogged my vision, but in the blur I could almost see him—the silvery gray strands peppered throughout his thick dark hair, the steady burn of his eyes roving my body, the way he’d taken my wrist like he had a claim to it.

My eyes glanced down at where he’d left a cuff of bruises.

Did he do that on purpose, or was he just too strong for his own good? I couldn’t tell.

I pressed my nails into my knees, hard enough to leave marks. My pulse raced, and my chest felt too tight.

Maybe I wasn’t meant to survive him; maybe that was the whole point.

The thought settled in me like a stone, heavy but… comforting in a way, and for the first time in hours, I didn’t feel like I was spinning apart.

I tilted my head back, closing my eyes as the water lapped at my collarbones.

If he was the end waiting for me, then maybe I didn’t need to fight it; maybe I could finally just stop fighting everything.

Maybe I could be free.

And if he refused to pull the trigger?

Well…

I’d have to apologize to the universe for putting such a sexy man in the ground.

3

Wesley

The sound that woke me was a soft, precise scrape, like leather against metal, coming from somewhere in the dark. For half a second, my brain tried to make it mundane—the fridge, the building settling, a taxi passing. Then my hand moved instinctively, groping for the .38 I kept under my pillow.

I found cold steel, thumbed the safety off, and rolled onto my back, ready.

He was already there.

Ro straddled my hips, one knee on the mattress, the other hooked by my thigh. The blade he held glittered in the moonlight that seeped through the curtains, its edge pressed flat against my throat. He smelled of perfume and cigarettes, like a city at midnight. It was a scent that somehow felt both foreign and exactly right.

For one wild moment, I thought I was still dreaming. Then I reminded myself that I had a gun in my hand and a man with a knife at my throat who had not, by any stretch, asked to be let in.

“Sorry for waking you,” he crooned, his tone laced with smug amusement.

I let the barrel point between his eyes. He didn’t blanch, just smiled. The knife remained at my throat.

“How did you get in?” I asked.