The Merciful
The campus is already halfway empty on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. Students who are traveling for the holiday have already gone home, and the professors don’t want to teach something important that they’ll just have to redo once half the class comes back, so they take it easy on us or let us out early. I’m on my way back to the dorm when I hear footsteps behind me. My spine stiffens, and I glance back, expecting one of the Sinners to be on my heel again, ready for another confrontation. Instead, a pair of teal eyes fixes on mine, hard with malice.
My heart stops.
Worse than the Sinners, it’s Heath. And though I know I’ll have to speak with him eventually, especially if I want every perspective on Eternity’s disappearance, I’m not ready. Not yet.
I turn back, relief rushing into me when I spot a trio of familiar figures in front of me, one with a pile of black hair that looks like it might be a nesting area for rooks, one with white hair in a series of spikes so sharp even a bird wouldn’t perch on them, and one with a sensible knit cap pulled to her ears.
“Hey,” I say, shuffle-running to catch up in my chunky clogs.
They turn back, and suddenly I feel stupid that I called out to them, since I have nothing important to say. I dart the quickest glance back and see that Heath has slowed, his hands in his pockets now, his pose casual as he strolls along, watching a few crows reel through the sky like he didn’t even notice I was here.
“What’s up, Mercy me?” Manson asks.
“I just—I didn’t expect to see you here,” I say. “I figured you’d ditch and go home all week.”
Manson sighs. “My mother ‘doesn’t believe in celebrating a holiday that rewrites colonial genocide as a breaking of the bread among friends.’ She says if they treated it more like the Last Supper…”
“She has a point,” Ronique says.
“Okay…” I say, glancing from them to Annabel Lee.
“I have to go home today, or my parents will hunt me down and drag me there kicking and screaming,” she says, rolling her eyes.
“And probably force feed you turkey,” Manson says.
Annabel shudders. “Ronique’s coming with me, since her family lives in Ohio and didn’t fly her home this year. I’d invite you, but… Y’know.”
She unlocks the door, and we all spill into the entrance of the dorm, but not before I catch one more glimpse of Heath standing there, a scowl on his face at being thwarted. The nun at the desk glowers at us too, probably wishing we weren’t here so she could have a break.
“Oh, no, it’s fine,” I say quickly. “I was planning to stay here anyway.”
“A lot of people don’t leave campus,” Ronique says, giving me a sympathetic smile. “People who can’t afford to fly home twice so close together, since Christmas is in a month, people without family… I’d be staying too, if it weren’t for Annabel.”
“Thanks,” I say, offering her a smile, since it’s the first time she’s been nice to me.
Upstairs, Annabel Lee invites me to come hang out for a few minutes, and even though I feel a little awkward around them, Manson insists. I need to ask them about something, anyway, so I acquiesce without much resistance.
“Oh, look, Brandon Lee Jr. is out,” Annabel Lee says when we step into her room. She scoops up a skunk from her floor and gestures us to come inside. “Don’t worry, he won’t spray. His scent glands were removed.”
“You know, if you and Mercy were roommates, it would be like Snow White’s dorm room,” Manson says, dropping onto her bed and propping himself up with one elbow. “Her room is all cottagecore pretty, and yours is full of animals and wild things.”
“If she had a roommate, it would be me,” Ronique points out.
I wince. Is that why she doesn’t like me? She thinks I’m trying to replace her. I think about how I felt when Eternity started to pull away, and that was only the beginning. If she had made other friends when we went to high school and abandoned me, I would have never recovered from the devastation. I hate myself for thinking that probably, she would have. I was too shy, too anxious, too much of a rule follower. I never belonged in the Quint. Not really. I was only there because Saint said I did, and I’m not even sure that he belonged.
“These little guys are my roommates,” Annabel Lee says, lifting the cloths to peer into each of her crates. “Hey there, pookie-wookie-snookiepants.” She makes her baby voice and reaches in to pet some critter I can’t see.
“True,” Ronique says, plopping down on her friend’s bed. “I wouldn’t want to wake up to find a snake wrapped around my neck. Besides, they kinda smell funny.”
“Rude,” Annabel Lee says, lifting the cover of one of the crates, which looks like a terrarium of some sort with a red light inside. I suck in a breath when I see that the thick branch behind the glass is actually a snake.
“Cheers to the weirds,” Manson says, pulling a flask from his backpack. “Let’s have a little celebration of our own before you go traipsing off to enjoy your politically incorrect holiday.”
The other two crowd around him, and I hesitantly sink into the lone chair in the room while they take shots.
“Let’s play fuck-marry-kill with the staff,” Manson says.
“Too easy,” Annabel Lee says. “We’d all fuck Father Salvatore.”
My heart flips at his name, and my thighs tremble. I haven’t been able to meet his eye in class since that day in the library. I need to go to confession, but I can’t bring myself to.
“How about with the Sinners?” Manson asks, taking a swig from his flask and passing it to me. He wiggles his perfectly shaped, manicured, bleached eyebrows. “You first, Mercy.”
“I don’t know any of them,” I say. “Or even their names.”
Still, I don’t want to be totally left out, so I take a drink. It takes like one of the syrups Aunt Lucy put in her coffee—if it fermented before she could use it. I barely manage to swallow it, and my eyes water at the sting.
Manson laughs and accepts the drink back before handing it to Ronique.
“I’d rather do the Hellhounds,” she says. “I would fuck, marry, and kill Saint Soules.”
“We know,” Annabel Lee and Manson say in unison, like they’ve had this conversation a million times.
“I’m just saying,” Ronique says. “He can have all of me, even my kill. Hell, I’d let the whole dozen run a train on me if I got to have him as the caboose.”
The others laugh, and I think I’ll throw up.
“Okay, now do the Sinners,” Manson says, lounging back on one elbow.
“I’d fuck Salem,” Ronique says. “Humble her and make her my bitch. I’d marry… Which one stopped speaking? Was it Knox? If so, I’d marry him. Then he couldn’t annoy me. And I’d kill Killian.”
“What’s in a name?” Annabel Lee quotes, accepting the flask. “I’d kill Bain. Cut the head off the beast so the whole thing would die. I’d fuck Greyson because he’s the hottest one. I’d marry Archer because he seems like he could make me laugh and we could be unhinged together.”
The others make comments of approval, and she drinks and hands the flask on. I try to remember the names, so that later I can figure out which Sincero sibling is which.
“I’d fuck Rafe,” Manson says, drinking and handing the bottle to me again. “He’s dreamy. I’d marry Salem just to fuck with everyone’s head, plus, with all those brothers, you know she knows how to handle a man, which means she could keep my ass in line. And I’d kill… Archer. Something’s not right about him.”
“Is one of them really smart?” I ask. “Like, a computer genius or anything?”
The three of them stare at me like they forgot I was here.
“The triplets are all pretty smart,” Manson says slowly. “Why?”
“I—I have something I need to find,” I say. “Something sensitive that’s hidden online.”
“Oh, dear Lucifer,” Annabel Lee says, flopping back on the bed. “Please tell me no one uploaded a video of what my cousin did in the library, and you need it scrubbed from the internet.”
“No,” I say quickly. “It’s something else. A file with some pages missing. I thought there must be a backup online. Maybe it’s complete.”
“Sounds like a job for Nate Swift,” Manson says. “Boys dorm, room 417. He’s probably already gone, so catch him after the break. And be ready to do him a favor in return.”
“What kind of favor?” I ask, my throat tightening. “Like… A sinful one?”
They stare at me a second, and then they all burst into laughter. “Okay, I’m going to need the video evidence of what I heard happened in the library, because there’s no way you did that,” Manson says when he recovers.
“Not a sexual favor,” Annabel Lee assures me. “Nate’s not interested in that kind of thing.”
“More like, you owe him one,” Ronique explains. “I heard he doesn’t even call most of them in. He just likes the power of knowing you’re in his debt.”
The thought sits uneasily with me, but they don’t have any other suggestions, and I don’t have anyone else to ask for alternatives.
That evening, when the last classes and labs are done and the campus sits quiet except for an occasional student crossing to the dining hall, I head for the boys’ dorm. They said Nate was off campus, but I want to check anyway. I’m just reaching the fourth-floor landing when I hear footsteps in the stairwell above me.
I freeze, caught between the instinct to run and the one to stay still and quiet and hope whoever is there passes me without notice. As they move quickly down the stairs, I realize how foolish I was to go into the boys’ dorm on a night like this. Almost no one is around to help me if I need it, to hear me if I scream. What if the remaining guys on campus banded together like a lawless pack, like the Hellhounds, and attacked me?
The thought is more thrilling than it should be.
“Well, hello there, little sister,” comes a familiar, cruel voice on the stairs above.
I swallow hard and drag my eyes up, my heart hammering in my chest. My words catch in my throat when I see Saint standing there in a pair of grey sweatpants and a black tee that stretches taut across his muscular chest and shoulders. His tattooed forearms are bare, corded with muscle and threaded with veins that make me lightheaded. I tear my gaze back to his.
“Sneaking around again, are we?” Saint asks, a taunt in his deep voice.
“I—Why aren’t you home?” I blurt.
“Because my father is a power-hungry fraud who uses his children to reflect his moral superiority while treating them like disposable, subhuman vermin behind closed doors, and my mother is a spineless piece of shit who lets him. But then, you already know that, don’t you?”
“But… They chose you,” I whisper.
A sardonic smile twists the corner of his lips. “Indeed. But you haven’t answered my question yet. What are you doing here, M?”
My heart nearly stops when he calls me by the nickname. I never expected any of them to remember, and when Angel used it, I thought it was already too good to be true. I never even hoped the others might.
“The same thing I was doing the last time,” I admit. “I was hoping to find a copy of the digital file, maybe see if the missing pages are present online. I heard there’s a guy here who might be able to help.”
Saint stares at me a long moment, then comes down the stairs between us. “You need to stop digging,” he says, his voice flat and hard, more commanding than I’ve heard it before.
“What?” I ask, taking a step back. The railing stops me, and Saint steps forward, trapping me against it.
“There are things you don’t know, that you don’t need to know,” he says. “You’re going to fuck up the balance of this whole town if you don’t keep your nose where it belongs.”
“What are you talking about?” I whisper, my throat closing as I stare at my brother, who looms over me like a threat. His clear eyes are as cold as ice, a stranger’s eyes, moments after he reminded me we are the furthest thing from it. We share an upbringing, parents, a family. And yet, we don’t share the one thing that matters—the truth.
That day is what separates us, and despite his kindness the day he caught me sneaking into my room at dawn and made me tea, he’s telling me now that he doesn’t want that obstacle removed.
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” he warns. “You’re going to piss off the wrong person, and it’ll be a fucking war, Mercy. This whole town exists as it does right now because the people at the top of each faction pull their string to keep the powers in balance. If you disrupt that…”
“But it’s a lie,” I say. “If covering up Eternity’s murder is keeping the town in balance, then the town is built on a lie.”
“The town was built hundreds of years before any of us came along,” he says. “This is how it’s always worked. You’re not going to change that. All you’re going to do is get yourself killed too.”
“If the truth will do that much damage, then maybe this town needs disrupting,” I say, refusing to back down. Saint’s jaw clenches, and he stares down at me with disbelief and fury. I’ll take it. It’s better than the chilly indifference of a moment ago.
“You don’t know what you’re fucking with,” he grits out.
“The man who murdered her is out there, Saint,” I say, pressing a hand to his chest. He doesn’t yield, forcing me to look up at him from a position of supplication instead of facing him across the space of the stairs. I go on anyway. “If she was even killed. If she wasn’t, the one who knows it, who knows why it was made to look that way, is probably right here in Faulkner. And he doesn’t want us to find out. Don’t you want to know why?”
“No,” he growls. “If you’re smart, you won’t either.”
“You’re wrong,” I say. “You can force me to do all the sick things you and your perverted friends want, but you can’t change what I know. You can’t change who I am. I’m going to find out. I have to know what happened. Why don’t you, Saint? If you’re innocent, and you didn’t do it, why don’t you want me to know who did?”
His palms crack down on the railing on either side of me so suddenly I jump back, jostling against it. The sound echoes up and down the stairway, and I lean away from Saint, whose eyes blaze with fury now. “Because it doesn’t fucking matter,” he yells. “She’s gone, Mercy. She’s gone, and she’s never coming back. It doesn’t matter who did it, or why, or what you know. It won’t change anything. All it will do is make you disappear too. So let it go and walk the fuck away from this.”
I know I should be scared, that he’s bigger and meaner than the boy I knew, that he’s filled with rage and pain that could destroy me. But I know that rage and pain all too well, so I reach for him like someone reaching for a cornered, injured animal, and I cup his stubble-strewn cheek with my palm. “I’m not going anywhere,” I promise. “I won’t disappear on you again.”
He slaps my hand away, scowling down at me with a thunderous expression. “That’s not what I care about. I care about her, just like you did. More than you. I loved her, Mercy. But I won’t throw away my life on something I can’t change.”
“Then nothing will change,” I say. “And maybe for you, that’s okay. Maybe that’s good. You shouldn’t have to throw away your life. You have a life worth saving. Not everyone does.”
We stare at each other a second before he finally pushes off the railing and steps back, to the wall on the far side of the stairs. “What the hell does that mean?”
“It means you have a good life, Saint,” I say quietly, evenly.
He regards me with suspicion. “How so?”
“In every way,” I say, gesturing at him. “You have parents who love you, even if they’re tough on you. They want what’s best for you. They want you. They have expectations about your future, and they support you. You’ll be graduating next year, and you’ll probably go to an Ivy League grad school, because you can. You have football and the team and the Hellhounds. You have friends who really know you, and love you, and want you to be happy. Probably girlfriends.”
I break off, an unexpected stab of anguish sliding into me at the thought. My brother is a good-looking guy. He always was, even if I didn’t notice when we were kids, and he was just the brother who left his sweaty socks on the living room floor and wore the same shirt for three days in a row and put ranch on things that had no business being defiled that way. Now he’s gorgeous, and popular, and all the things that normal girls like Ronique want. Of course he wants them back.
“And let me guess,” he says. “Poor little Mercy has nothing, and I’m supposed to feel sorry for her.”
I draw back. “I’m not feeling sorry for myself. I’m stating facts. You have a lot to lose. I don’t.”
“Bullshit,” he growls. “You have your whole life to lose.”
I shrug. “If you don’t want to risk getting involved, I understand why. I don’t blame you or think less of you. But I have more reasons to push ahead than go back, even after what you told me tonight. And you have to understand that.”
“I don’t.”
“Then tell me one thing, besides my life itself, that I stand to lose. Because I don’t see it.”
“Your innocence.”
We stare at each other a long moment. “Then take it,” I say quietly.
“That’s what this is all about?” he asks with an incredulous laugh. “You’d go to these lengths to get some dick? I’d be impressed if I didn’t know the reason you have to go this far is because it’s your own fucking brother you’re trying to seduce.”
“I’m not,” I grit out. “I don’t even see how I still have my innocence, according to you. Because I don’t think I do. I think you’ve already taken it, brother or not.”
He swallows hard, and I see something flicker in the depths of those eyes, like a creature lurking far below the surface of a lake of fire. But then he smiles cruelly again. “Do you realize how pathetic you sound, saying your life isn’t worth living if you’re not my girlfriend.”
“That’s not what I said.”
“No, but you’re jealous that I have girlfriends. I could see it all over your face the moment you said the word. You don’t like that I fuck other girls, but no guy will fuck you.”
“Angel would,” I mutter, my cheeks burning with shame as I stare at the stone steps between us.
Saint laughs. “No, he wouldn’t. Heath might, but he’d rip you to shreds and probably kill you if we let him. Is your greedy little pussy that desperate for dick?”
He prowls forward, this time moving in a sultry sway as he pins me to the railing again. I suck in a breath, preparing for the onslaught of desire and confusion when he pushes his thigh between mine like he did in the hallway that day. But he pulls back instead, letting out a silent breath of a laugh. “You think you can convince me to fuck my own sister by telling me you’ll kill yourself if I won’t fuck you? Because that’s what you’re doing if you keep digging.”
“And you don’t think it’s suspicious that it would cost another life to find the truth?” I demand, bending my head back to look up at him. “You don’t think that in itself makes it worth finding?”
“What’s the truth ever done for me?” he asks. “Or for you, for that matter?”
I open my mouth to answer, but then I close it again. If I hadn’t told the truth at the trial, I would have all the things I listed that make his life worth more than mine is now—friends, parents, activities that my parents funded until I found my passion, without the fear of leaving the house that kept me trapped in isolation at Aunt Lucy’s for all those years.
And yes, maybe I’d have a boyfriend. Is wanting that so terrible?
“Lying is wrong,” I mumble at last. “It’s in the Bible.”
Saint chuckles, then reaches out and lifts my chin, forcing my gaze to his. “Then go home and fuck your Bible.”
I pull away. “It’s not about that. I don’t care about that, and I don’t care about this illusion of innocence you think I still have, even though you saw what happened every single time. You know it’s gone. Why pretend?”
“Oh, you poor, dumb little lamb,” he says. “If you think that’s all we can do to you, you’re even more innocent than I thought.”
“Then take it, or don’t complain when someone else does. I’m not going to stop until I find out what happened to her, and why, and where she is, dead or alive. So, if there’s anything else you want to tell me before I keep digging, or anything you want from me you haven’t already taken, now’s your chance.”
He stares at me a long second, and then he slides his hand behind my neck. His body sways to meet mine at last, and fireworks explode from the point of contact, bursting through my entire body. He rolls his hips in one slow, hard grind, making my knees buckle and my fingers curl into his shirt to support myself.
“Promise me something,” he says, his eyes fluttering halfway closed, his nose brushing against mine.
“What?” I gasp out.
“Don’t talk to Nate Swift about this,” he says.
“Why?” I manage, though my thoughts are flooding from my head like the roaring through a broken dam. I can feel the hard ridge of my brother’s desire building against my center, and I think I might faint. I’ve never been sure that he wants me back. He’s told me it was all in my head, all one-sided. But that doesn’t happen if a man doesn’t want you.
Does it?
“I know of someone else who can get us the information we need,” he says, holding me pinned with his hips. “He’s still in high school, but he’s just as good as Nate, and he doesn’t have ties to the same people. If you go to Nate, the people who took Eternity will know within the hour that you’re looking, and that will be the end of it.”
“What?” My chest heaves as I struggle for air, my nipples like spikes inside my bra as my breasts skim against my brother’s chest with each ragged breath.
“If I can’t stop you from looking, at least I can stop you from doing it alone,” he says, his lower lip skimming mine as softly as a feather, making my mind go entirely blank. “You’ll get yourself killed that way. And I loved her too. So, let’s find her together.”