Chapter 21 Mercy
MERCY
The thrashing wakes me first. Then the low, desperate sound that’s almost a whimper. Cash is twisted in the sheets beside me, his face contorted in the pale light.
“No. Please. I don’t—” His voice is small, scared. Nothing like the confident man who held me in the bathtub hours ago.
“Cash.” I touch his shoulder gently. “Baby, wake up.”
He jerks away from my touch, still caught in whatever nightmare has him. “I said no. I don’t want—”
I suck in a breath. I know that tone, that kind of pleading.
I’ve even heard myself make sounds like that.
From nightmares where Gabriel’s standing over me and I’m trying to explain, trying to defend, knowing it won’t matter because he’s already decided what the truth is.
But I never thought I’d hear Cash sound like that—this big, protective man who makes me feel invincible reduced to a scared kid begging someone to stop. My heart breaks for him.
“Cash, it’s me. It’s Mercy. You’re safe.” I keep my voice soft but firm. “You’re in the clubhouse. You’re safe.”
His eyes snap open, wild and disoriented.
For a moment he doesn’t seem to recognize me, his whole body coiled to fight or run.
His fists are crammed into his eyes like he’s trying to claw the dream away.
I don’t touch him again—not yet. I know from ugly experience how direct contact can make waking even crueler.
Instead, I shift, so he can see me as he comes back to himself.
The muscles in his jaw tic hard, his breath heaving through clenched teeth.
For a second, it looks like he’d rather die than look at me.
“Mercy?” His voice cracks.
“Yeah, baby. Just a nightmare.”
He scrubs his hands over his face, breathing hard. “Fuck. Sorry. I didn’t mean to—” He freezes. The tent of the sheets is blatant, and when he glances down and realizes it, his whole body recoils as if shame is a radius of self-loathing. “I’m fine. Go back to sleep.”
I don’t. Instead, I draw my knees up, creating distance so he can’t mistake this for pity or revulsion. “You don’t ever have to be sorry with me,” I say, the words gentle but leaving no room for argument.
His breath won’t settle. He can’t even look in my direction.
The sheets are kicked down and his skin glistens, the tattoo on his shoulder flexing as he tries to get a grip on himself.
There’s a strange kind of violence in how hard he’s shaking.
I understand it more than I want to—the body turning on itself, making you live through something again and again until you’re nothing but a raw nerve in human shape.
“Want to talk?” I offer.
“No,” he mutters, voice strangled. “Just—fuck.”
I watch him, see how rigid his muscles go beneath the shame. It’s not the nightmare that rattles him, but the vulnerability after, the way he can’t hide what triggered him. He tries to roll away. I block him before he can escape, palm flat to his chest, not pushing but grounding.
“Cash.” I make my voice a tether, real and calm. “You know I don’t scare easy, right?”
He says nothing, jaw tight, staring at a spot on the ceiling like it might swallow him whole.
“Whatever happened, whatever that dream was—I don’t care. I’m not going anywhere. Least of all because you had a bad night.”
He doesn’t answer, and for a while that’s fine.
Maybe all he needs is for me to bear witness and not try to fix it—I’m not the only one who needs protecting.
Cash has spent months being my fortress, my shield, the wall between me and Gabriel.
But right now? He needs me to be his. So I sit in the quiet with him.
I hold space. But then his breathing gets weird, and I realize it’s the other thing that’s bothering him.
The obvious, insistent tent of the sheet, the aftermath of the dream still pulsing through his body.
I don’t tease him or make a joke, not this time. I just reach for his wrist and pull his hand to my chest, over my heartbeat, holding it there so he has proof I’m steady and real and absolutely not afraid.
His breath stutters. Then he launches up, clutching my jaw with both hands, kissing me the way you’d drink water after a week in the wasteland—desperate, brutal, like the only thing keeping him alive is drowning in me.
I don’t pull back. I take it, every bruising second, every scrape of his teeth, every salt tang of tears.
His hands are shaking so hard I feel the tremors through my skull.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbles, but the words are all broken up, smashed against my mouth. “God, Mercy, I’m so fucking sorry.”
I kiss him harder, refusing to let him apologize for something he can’t control.
I want to claw the shame right out of his skin, strip him down to nothing but nerve endings and need.
The taste of him is salt and sweat, and it fills my mouth with a hunger that’s not even sexual anymore, just elemental.
“Don’t be sorry,” I say, biting his lower lip, dragging it until he gasps. “You hear me? Never apologize for surviving. Not to me.”
He grabs my face like he needs proof I’m real, and for the first time since I’ve known him, Cash’s mask is gone.
Every defense. Every wall he’s ever built to keep the world from seeing what’s underneath.
Now it’s just us, both of us ruined and awake, clinging to each other like if we let go we’ll die.
I push him back, crawling into his lap, straddling him and bracing myself with hands on either side of his face.
He keeps trying to say something, but I cut it off with another kiss, swallowing every protest. His cock is steel-hard against me, straining, angry, like it’s the only part of him that survived the dream intact.
I grind down, slow, shifting until the friction is unbearable.
He shudders, hands gripping my waist so tight I know there’ll be bruises tomorrow.
“Fuck, Mercy,” he says, and now his voice is more animal than human. “That feels so good. But you don’t have to—”
“I want to,” I cut him off. “Let me chase the demons away. Let me be the one you reach for.”
Because this is what love looks like when you’ve survived.
Not grand gestures or pretty words, but this—being present when someone’s falling apart.
Holding space for their trauma without trying to fix it.
Offering pleasure as an antidote to pain, not because you have to, but because you want them to remember they’re more than what was done to them.
“Can I do that for you?” I whisper, and he nods, grinding up into me and letting out a groan.
I kiss down his jaw, the salt of our tears mixing as I trail my tongue to his throat, his collarbone, the tattoo that reads DEAD INSIDE in an arc over his heart.
I bite that, sucking until there’s a mark, and his whole body arches.
His hands find my hair, anchoring himself as I work down his chest, pressing open-mouthed kisses to every scar, every bruise, every memory his brain tried to torture him with in the dark.
I keep my eyes on his face as I move lower. “Is this OK?”
“Mercy. Fuck. I—”
“It’s OK if you want to say no. I just thought you might want to think of me instead of…”
“I do.” His hands fist in the sheet, then in my hair. “It’s all I want. Only thing I want.”
So I show him what it means to come back to yourself, to be reshaped by a different kind of hunger.
I take my time, kissing my way farther down his tattooed chest and letting my nails drag lightly through the fine trail of hair to his navel.
He’s shaking and silent, his whole body strung so tight I’m afraid he’ll break if I move too fast—and also if I go too slow.
When I finally slide the sheets away, exposing his cock, he jolts like my touch is the first thing that’s ever felt good.
I don’t tease. I don’t take the scenic route.
I just wrap my hand around him and lean in, licking up the length and then taking him as deep into my mouth as I can.
Cash makes a sound I’ve never heard before, a shattered, pitchless whine that’s pure animal.
His hands scrabble at my shoulders, gripping too hard, like he doesn’t trust himself to let go.
I don’t care if he bruises me. I want him to.
I want to be proof, etched into the cells of his body, that nothing from his past can touch him when he’s with me.
“Fuck, angel,” he rasps, voice gone so low it’s almost infrasound. “You don’t—oh, fuck, that’s amazing—”
I hum around him, slow and steady, and he keens like maybe he’s dying. I want to be as good at this as he is at wrecking me. I want to erase every fucked-up memory with the heat of my mouth alone.
He comes undone fast. Faster than I expected. Maybe it’s the dream, maybe it’s the exhaustion, but he barely lasts a minute before his body locks up, hands digging into the back of my skull as he gasps a single, broken, “Jesus,” and spills in hot, salt-slick pulses over my tongue.
I swallow, not taking my eyes off his face. He looks like he’s in pain, or maybe just shock. I don’t know how else to help him, so I crawl back up beside him and tuck myself into his side, fingers resting lightly over his racing heart.
For a long time, he doesn’t say anything. Just lies there, breathing, processing.
I stay quiet, pressed against him, letting my hand rise and fall with the rhythm of his chest. I don’t force conversation. I don’t ask questions.
Eventually, he moves. Not to leave, but to pull me closer, tangle our legs together and bury his face in my hair. He’s still trembling. It’s not the good kind, but it’s honest, and I’ll take honesty every fucking time.
“I love you,” he whispers, lips against my scalp.
I freeze, the words landing in my chest like a grenade with the pin already pulled. My breath catches, heart stuttering against my ribs. He just said—he actually just said—
“Cash.” My voice comes out strangled, barely above a whisper.