The Saint
My feet pound the gravel, and I clench my fist around my phone, glancing at the screen for the hundredth time since I woke up. As usual, I picked up the phone to watch Mercy, the way I always do when I can’t sleep. Seeing her lost to the world, with her lumpy, handmade crochet blanket pulled up to her chin and the raggedy teddy bear I gave her tucked into her arms, soothes me as much now as it did when we were growing up. Then, I could slip into her bed, wrap my arms around her, cuddle her into the safety of my embrace.
Now, I can only watch.
I get a sick satisfaction from the fact that she’s as helpless to bridge the divide between us as I am. Not only that, but I can see what she’s doing any time I want. She has no idea what I do when she’s not around—especially that I watch her. Lost in slumber, she’s oblivious to the cameras we have above her bed, the ones through which we can see her sleep, do homework, play with her contraband kit. The one through which we watched her in bed with Angel, watched him force orgasm after orgasm from her reluctant body.
He knows, of course. He made sure we had the best view possible. Not of her pussy dripping with his spit and her cum when he fucked it with his tongue and his fingers, but of her chest heaving with sobs, her face twisted with helpless fury and bliss as she succumbed to the pleasure, tearstained and devastated. The thought makes my cock stiffen even as I slow and let myself back into the dorm.
I wipe sweat from my forehead and head up the stairs. Unlike the girls’ dorm, the boys don’t have a Father at the desk watching. They don’t care about our chastity, about who we might sneak into our rooms in the night.
I consider going to Angel and Heath’s room, the same way I did when I woke up and saw that Mercy wasn’t in bed. I checked the other cameras and saw her creeping through the dark, slipping off campus, before I believed it. Even then, I didn’t go to the others. They would have opinions I’d feel obligated to take into account, urges to quell and considerations on what we should do. That would take too much time. I already took too much time running to her dorm to check, to make sure she hadn’t tampered with the cameras, that my little mouse of a sister really left campus by herself in the middle of the night.
Fury throbs in my temples as I pad along the hallway on the fourth floor.
What the fuck is she doing?
I pound my fist on the door I want, then wait, checking my phone again, as if she’ll have reappeared so soon. It’s been twenty minutes. If she had a craving for ice cream, she’s had time to get it. She should be returning at any moment. I know she wouldn’t do something so reckless, and yet, I hold onto the impossible, na?ve hope that could more accurately be described as denial.
I’m about to knock again when the door creaks open and a boy peers out, his brown hair mussed and sticking up on one side in a cowlick. With his glasses askew and the scowl on his face making his lower lip draw in, he looks like an owl.
“I need to know where someone is.”
“Not my area of expertise,” he says, his voice raspy with sleep.
“Let me in,” I order. “And make it happen.”
“This is outside my regular business hours,” he says. “I charge twice as much after hours, and four times if you fuck up my sleep schedule.”
“Fine,” I say, shoving my phone at him. “That’s not an issue.”
The kid sighs and pulls open the door, raking a hand through his hair, which only makes it stand up more atrociously. He’s wearing flannel pajamas buttoned to the neck to combat the damp chill in the room caused by the half-open window.
“What am I supposed to do with this?” he asks, waving the phone at me.
“I don’t know,” I say, frowning down at him. “Aren’t you the hacker?”
“What do you want me to hack into?” he asks. “Your video feed hasn’t been disabled or put on a playback loop. It’s still going.”
“I know that,” I grit out, gesturing to the still campus shown on the screen before narrowing my eyes at him. “How can you tell?”
He shrugs. “I’m good.”
“Humble too,” I mutter, glowering down at the scrawny nerd. I could break him in half with my bare hands.
He arches an arrogant brow. “You want good, or you want humble?”
“Asshole.”
He cracks the slightest smile. Nate Swift is an enigma—no friends, no girls, no known attachments, only connections in his own dark web. No one knows for sure how far and wide that goes, though there are rumors of the powerful people who owe him favors. He’s known for his discretion and certain skill set that makes him invaluable to men from every walk of life, from fathers like mine to ones like Angel’s. He can get in and out without leaving a trace just about anywhere that the internet reaches–for a price.
That price is never cash, though.
“Time’s ticking,” he says, tapping the screen with a blunt, clean fingernail trimmed so close it looks painful.
“I want to know where she went.”
“You want me to hack into a closed-circuit security camera?” he asks, handing back my phone and powering up his tech center, which looks like something out of a spy movie. “Which one?”
“I don’t fucking know,” I say, throwing myself down on his rumpled bed. “Figure it out.”
“Off. My. Bed.” He stares at me with eyes so unflinching I’m reminded of those favors he’s owed by men far more dangerous than me.
“My bad,” I grumble, shoving off the mattress. It was a dick move to drag him out of bed and then toss my sweaty ass on it. Besides, the recently vacated sheets are disconcertingly warm. I’m not opposed to a little sword crossing when I’m sharing a slut with the bros, but there’s something uncomfortably intimate about feeling a stranger’s warmth in his sheets.
Nate turns back to his monitors and taps away like nothing happened. From the back, with his bedhead hair and ears sticking out, he looks like the guy that got wedgied by guys like me in high school. But he’s not a wimpy brainiac doing the homework of the popular jocks. It might seem like it at first. Protection is the first favor he asks—he’ll do something online for you that you can’t figure out yourself, and in return, you’ll guarantee that none of your crew will bother him.
But if at some later time a person finds himself in need again, he pays however and whenever Nate asks. If someone tried to refuse, he wouldn’t just have proof of whatever illegal thing they’d asked him for, but anything that’s ever existed in the furthest reaches of the internet. The kid can find anything. By now he’s racked up enough favors to earn him his own status, more untouchable than anyone on campus, including Hellhounds and Sinners. He plays both sides—on campus, in the town, in Washington, if the rumors are to be believed.
I sit down to watch him work, though I know there’s no way I’ll remember enough to replicate the steps he takes when I’m back on my own computer. That’s probably why he lets people watch. He pulls up a fucking hologram a minute later, probably just to show off. My phone’s video feed hovers in the air over his fingers. It moves backwards, a timer counting the rewinding numbers in the bottom corner, until Mercy comes into view, moving backwards in jerky, speedy steps. She goes backwards through the door, and then the campus is still again.
Nate acts without instruction, and a minute later, she’s in her room, getting dressed.
“Don’t watch that,” I snap as her clothes disappear—skirt, then jeans, until she’s in her underwear.
Nate shakes his head, but he doesn’t stop the feed. “That’s the least interesting part of my job.”
And then Mercy’s back in bed, and the screen hovering in the air disappears. “So, she got up at midnight, put on double clothes, and left campus,” I say. “How does that help?”
“I can only trace actions, not motivations,” he says, switching over to another screen. He leans in, examining a still from the video, the place where Mercy left campus. He pulls up an aerial map and studies it, then types for a minute. A dozen dots appear on it.
“I’ll look at these cameras, but it’ll take a while to hack into each one,” he says. “Get comfortable. But not too comfortable. Don’t touch anything.” Without looking away from his screens, he gestures to a fancy leather office chair in front of another computer.
I sit and watch, and we get lucky on the third try. The convenience store security footage is grainy and silent, but there’s Mercy, buying a hat.
“What the fuck?” I mutter, leaning forward and watching her. She leaves, and Nate freezes the feed, takes a screenshot of the license plate of the car she climbs into that’s barely visible through the window. He works on clarifying that for a few minutes, then traces it and somehow finds that it’s a registered rideshare.
“Can I ask you a question?” I say, sitting there in awe while he hacks into the rideshare app. “Why are you at a shitty college in Arkansas? Shouldn’t you be running cyber security for Black Rock or… I don’t know, the government?”
“It’s just undergrad,” he says. “I’ll go to an Ivy League for grad school, but I learn more on my own anyway. I doubt any school can teach me anything I don’t already know, so what does it matter where I go?”
“Connections? Impressing potial employers?” I wince at how much I sound like my dad when he starts in on his lectures. Nothing he could say would make me leave Heath and Angel, no matter how much he threaed to cut me off and disown me like he did Mercy. Eventually, he gave up trying to make me follow in his footsteps, though he can’t figure out why that’s the last thing on earth I want to do.
But Nate doesn’t have loyalty to anyone, so it’s a mystery why he’d insist on staying in Faulkner.
He chuckles. “I’ve already got connections.”
“Not the same ones you’d make there, though.”
“Not going to scold me about how humility is a virtue again?”
“I didn’t scold you,” I grumble.
“Her rideshare dropped her off here,” Nate says, zooming into his map again.
I stare at the Fred’s store that’s been closed and boarded up for years. “What’s she doing there?” I demand.
Nate shrugs. “Store’s closed. No cameras.”
“I know that,” I grumble, yanking the tie from my hair in frustration. “Fuck!”
Nate watches me from behind his glasses, his eyes serene but wary. “I can check a couple intersections, but there aren’t a lot of cameras in that area,” he says. “Mostly industrial buildings.”
I tell him to go ahead, and I sit and stare at the map he left up while he works at another screen. I remember that Fred’s store. The Quint used to go in and buy sodas and candy. The last time we went in, we were walking around for a while, until an employee accosted us.
“You need to buy something or leave.”
Heath argued they were kicking us out unfairly, that there was no law that you had to buy something when you shopped. The guy said there was a law you couldn’t shoplift. Mercy got all offended and said they were profiling us, even though Angel was the only one who wasn’t white. We left, though, and we weren’t even out of sight of the shop when Heath pulled a half dozen bags of chips and candy out of his hoodie, and Eternity pulled bottles of nail polish and makeup from her pockets.
We laughed and high-fived, because we’d got one over on the guy, but Mercy wanted to go back and return it. She pouted for an hour and refused to speak to us.
“Stealing is wrong,” she said, and even though she was right, I was embarrassed of her, not my friends who had stolen. That has to say something about my morals and hers, about some people being born good and others not.
But what is a good girl with strong morals doing at an abandoned store? There’s nothing to do there but break in, and Mercy wouldn’t do that.
“If you can’t find her, how can I find out where she went?” I demand of Nate when the traffic cams come up empty.
“If you can get me her phone, I can install something for you to track,” he says. “But she’d have to take it with her, and if you check that video you have of her room, she left it on the charger.”
“Fuck,” I mutter. I didn’t even notice that. I need to watch more closely, to monitor her more thoroughly. We only did it to fuck with her, to get video of her in her room, invade her life and violate her privacy. Now, it’s more than that. Now, she has a secret, and Mercy doesn’t get to have secrets.
“So how do I keep tabs on someone who leaves their phone at home?”
He scoots back from his desk and ambles over to the wall. He moves aside a framed poster from The Matrix and reveals the front of a high-tech metal safe. “If you really need someone’s location, you can put a tracker on their person,” he says. “It’s not a camera, but you’ll know where she is.”
“How do I do that?” I ask, thinking about those ugly fucking clogs she wears all the time. I could track those.
Nate is doing a retina scan to open his safe, and he doesn’t speak until it beeps, allowing him to put in a code next. “It’s a bit difficult to do it without her noticing, since it goes inside her body,” he says. “Would she agree to that?”
“What do you think?” I snap.
“I think you’ll need to make a small incision or shoot it through her skin,” he says. “She might feel it in there even if she doesn’t know when you’re doing it. But I’ve got something that will help her sleep through the insertion, if you’re interested.”
He hands me a baggie from the safe. I scowl at him, realizing this is a whole new level of violation I hadn’t considered. I relish the thought of it. Not just knowing where she is, being able to follow her every move, but doing it without her knowledge or consent. Picturing her fury and hurt and indignation when she finds out has my cock stirring, especially when I think about plunging it to the hilt inside her while she howls with rage.
Fuck. I can’t think like that. She’s my sister, for god’s sake.
I snatch the bag from Nate and stuff it in my pocket. “What do I owe you?”
He looks me up and down, as if considering what he could use a guy of my size for. I don’t like the thought of being his goon, beating up guys I don’t know for crimes I can’t imagine, but I knew when I came here that I’d do whatever he asked.
He stands and stretches, then motions me to the door. After stepping out into the hall, I turn back.
“I’ll call you,” he says, and before I can give him my number, he closes the door in my face.
“Asshole,” I mutter, but I turn away and hurry out of the dorm. I may have lost Mercy, but she’ll come back to me. A lost lamb always returns to its flock.
I consider waiting for her at the spot where she left campus, but I don’t trust her to return the same way, so in the end, I make my way to her dorm.
I’m lying on her bed when she steps into her room a few hours later.
She only pauses a second before pulling the door closed behind her. “What are you doing here?”
I sit up and swing my legs off the side. I can’t believe my sweet little sister has the audacity to ask me that when she’s been sneaking around doing god-knows-what all night, until the window shows the first light of dawn outside. But then, maybe she’s not such a meek little lamb after all.
“I think the better question is, what were you doing?” I ask, stroking the head of the grey kit that made itself comfortable on my stomach while we waited. “Where exactly have you been, little sister?”
She takes her time turning back, unwinding the scarf from around her neck, and shrugging out of her cardigan. She hangs them on the back of her chair and then slips off her clogs, pushing them under the edge of the bed. “I can’t believe Dr. Jekyll let you pet him,” she says, eyeing the cat. “He hates me.”
“Don’t avoid the question.”
She sits down on the edge of her bed, curling her toes inside her white socks, burying them in the fuzzy rug next to her bed. “I went to meet someone who had information about Eternity,” she says, rubbing her temples. “Now I’m tired, and I’d like to get some sleep, if you don’t mind.”
Of all the things she could have said, that one surprises me. In truth, I didn’t expect her to answer at all. I thought she’d fight me, hedge and avoid, and maybe, as a last resort, lie. I thought maybe she went to meet that bastard Royal, or some asshole from one of her classes who she knew we wouldn’t let her go out with. Guys only want one thing when they call a girl at midnight, but she’s probably too na?ve to know that. I thought she’d try to make excuses, say whoever she met was just a friend. I didn’t think she’d be playing detective.
“Who?” I ask.
“What?” she asks, sounding exhausted.
“Who did you meet?”
“I don’t know his name,” she says. “Juvenile cases are closed, so getting files isn’t exactly legal. It was all very discrete.”
“Where are they?” I ask. “The files you were supposedly getting.”
“I only read them,” she says. “He said it would be incriminating if he gave them to me.”
“Of course it was a guy,” I say. “And what did you give him for this information?”
She sighs. “Money.”
“I don’t want you leaving campus to meet guys in the middle of the night,” I say. “Especially criminals. You don’t know what he could have asked of you—or taken without asking.”
“Like you?” she challenges, and I see a flash of that fire I remember so well. Sure, she was my pain-in-the-ass, goody-two-shoes little sister who wanted to bring back a pack of Starbursts when we shoplifted, but she stood her ground. She didn’t eat a single one, not even when we waved them under her nose tempting her to join us and made a big show of eating the pink ones, her favorite.
“Like me,” I say blandly.
“But you’ve taken nothing,” she says, standing and going to her closet. She opens the doors and steps inside, but I catch movement in a sliver of mirror. I watch her drop her skirt, then the jeans she’s wearing under them. I swallow hard and tear my eyes away.
She’s your sister.
I take the opportunity to ask her a question I’d rather ask when I don’t have to see her reaction, analyze it. “If you want to know what happened to Eternity, why don’t you just ask us?”
I can hear her moving in the closet, but I refuse to look, no matter how much I want to.
“Would you tell me?” she asks at last.
I swallow and glance at the mirror, and then I wish I hadn’t. Her back is turned to the gap in the door, but a stripe of light illuminates her bare skin, her narrow waist, the flare of her hips. She’s wearing full-coverage cotton underwear, almost aggressively unsexy. For some reason, that captivates me more than if she was wearing a black lace thong or another popular choice that one of the numberless, nameless girls I’ve fucked showed up in. Now that I’ve caught sight of her undressing, I can’t look away.
Her ass is only hinted at through the sturdy fabric, but I can see its shape, plump and round, can almost feel its weight in my palms as I support it, fucking into her slow and deep while her head falls back, her hair tumbling down her back, tears of silent agony dripping from her temples.
I pull one of her throw pillows into my lap to hide what she’s doing to me.
She reaches to grab a garment from the rack in her closet, her muscles stretching. Her back is toned, her ass, her thighs, her shoulders. I picture myself stepping in behind her, sliding my hands around her, cupping her heavy breasts, squeezing her nipples. I can hear the gasps and whimpers so clearly I think she’s really making the sound for a second. Then she drops one of her long nightshirts down over her body, and my cock strains against the underside of the pillow, and I know the moment is over. She opens the closet and marches back to the bed.
“Would you?” she demands.
I shake my head, trying to clear it, to remember what she asked instead of how tight she was around my finger or the sweet smell of her cunt.
“You wouldn’t?” she asks, watching me for an answer.
“Wouldn’t what?”
“I asked if you’d tell me what happened to Eternity,” she says, sounding annoyed, like I’m playing games with her on purpose. “The truth.”
“We didn’t do it.”
She scoffs and turns away. “And that’s why I didn’t ask you.”
I snag her hand and tug her back to the bed, for a half-second contemplating whether to toss the pillow and slam her down on my erection. But judging from how eagerly she smeared my dried up old cum into her pussy, she wouldn’t hesitate to milk the fresh, warm stuff from my cock the moment she had a chance, and one of us has to be strong.
I just didn’t think it would have to be me.
I pull her down beside me, wrapping a tight arm around her shoulders. “We didn’t do it.”
She stares at her knees, bare below the hem of her oversized shirt. “You swear?”
“On our mother’s grave.”
“Your mother.”
“ Our mother’s grave,” I say again, my fucking chest hollowing out at the small, defeated tone in her voice.
She raises her gaze to mine, and I see all the hope and fear and confusion churning there, and for once, I don’t want to make it worse. I want to wipe it all away with her tears, kiss it better, the way I did when we were kids.
“Promise-swear?” she asks, just like she did back then. “Cross your heart and hope to die?”
“Stick a finger in my eye.”
“I want to believe you,” she whispers, dropping her gaze. She stares at the pillow instead of my eyes. “That’s why I had to know what was in those files. So I would know if you were telling the truth. I want to trust you again, Saint, like I used to. Don’t you want that?”
She lifts her gaze again, swallowing hard as she searches my eyes for some answer I can’t give her. I want her to trust me, but not the way she used to. I want it all to be different now, and I want her trust for different reasons. I want it so that I can break it, and break her, and watch her shatter into a million beautiful pieces that never make me feel this way again.
“If you want us to trust you, tell me what you found,” I say, turning away.
“I don’t think you did it,” she admits. “Not anymore. Did you know they never did a DNA test on that body they found, the one they said was hers? They just said it was her, closed the case, and moved on. What if it wasn’t her, S?”
That nickname is a knife between my ribs. She hasn’t called me that in years, not even before it all fell apart. I wanted to be cool, tough, adult. I wanted Eternity. I didn’t want her to think of me as a little boy anymore, the one called by an initial, as we all were. Of course, she still called me S to annoy me, but Mercy didn’t. She had more respect.
And yet, it didn’t bother me when Eternity did it. Nothing she did bothered me that year. Everything was flirting. When she called me Clown Shoes because my feet grew before the rest of me; when she gave me wet willies; when she put ice cubes down the back of my shirt at the diner to make me jump up and look like an idiot in front of a table of popular girls from my school. I didn’t care what any of them thought. I only cared what E did.
“You should get some sleep,” I say, standing and going to the electric kettle Mercy has on an old wooden table near the window. Of course she has to have her hot tea. Angel’s mom always said she must have been an English lady in another life. Our mom didn’t believe in things like that. If she’d known, she would have said it was heathenism to believe in past lives, and Mercy would have parroted her because she wanted so badly to be loved that she’d say anything, believe anything, if she could believe that someone loved her.
I hope she still does.
I drop the pill Nate gave me into her tea before delivering it in the tiny cup on the tiny saucer with flowers around the rim. She might object to what I’m doing, but it’s for her own good as well as my peace of mind. It’s not like I’m some pervert who’s going to touch my own sister once she’s asleep.
I even erase the video feed from the night, in case the others check it over. They might not like what I’ve done, though it’s for the good of all of us. I don’t want them to know she left, to wonder where she went or get pissed that I went easy on her. I believe her, but they might not. For now, I’ll keep tonight between us. Next time, I’ll know exactly where to find her, and when I follow her, I’ll know if she was telling the truth or if she’s lying like she did before.