Chapter 21 ARTEMIS
We got back to Sanctum, and after going through security check points, we were separated.
I got into the elevator first with Finley and his chipper voice, telling me how much of an impact the article was having online.
And at the bottom—or top, I didn’t know anything the moment I was in that elevator, Mercy was waiting for me.
“What do you think will happen to Margaret?” I asked Finley, getting one final question in.
He shrugged. “People think she’ll open up a charity, claim not to know, and get away with it,” he said. “Other people think she’ll do a Martha Stewart and be in one of those minimal security things—or house arrest.”
“I’ll take it from here,” Mercy said, all dressed up in a hot pink power suit. She was always so outwardly colorful, it was disarming, even though I knew she had the power to snap her fingers and—have someone kill me. “You need debriefing,” she said.
“Do you need me?” Finley asked.
Mercy waved him away with a word, and I followed her to an office—not the same one I’d been in before but a room with a long table and several swivel chairs. It was warm from the air conditioning unit pumping in air.
“Take a seat,” she said, leading me to the table head. She offered it up to me, and I should’ve offered it back to her, but I also didn’t want to be rude. “So, you’ve done a delivery job, protection detail, and an off-the-books hit,” she said, recalling the first job she had me doing—unofficially.
“Yeah,” I said, softer. “Do you think I’ve done a good job?”
She nodded. “I do, you’ve got a different approach to many other people,” she said.
“But it’s no secret Donovan doesn’t want you here, working this job.
He wants you at home, probably raising children on a parcel of land nobody even knows exist.” She spoke with such a straight face that I could only smile back at her.
“I can’t have—” I laughed. “It doesn’t work like that.”
Unamused, she rolled her eyes and I sank in the office chair, feeling like I was two-feet tall. “I know how human reproduction works,” she said. “This isn’t about that. I need you to decide what you want.”
“You’re giving me an out?” I asked.
She shrugged. “I’m giving you an option,” she said. “You can keep working here, make good money, but maybe not out killing people. You can work here and carry out hits, making millions. Or you can leave with the money you’ve made, and see how life treats you.”
“Why are you giving me the option?” There had to be a catch, and I didn’t want to be caught out. Donovan had all but told me she owned me, and the last thing I wanted was her to own me—I didn’t mind if Donovan did, but that was very much consensual.
“Because I don’t want to compromise future work,” she said. “You two are clearly a pair. I knew this before accepting you, and I was reminded that love can do strange things to a person.”
A knock came at the frosted glass door, followed by a tall woman in a thick winter coat with long wavy brunette hair. “I’ve been looking for you everything,” she said, removing the pink-red sunglasses from her face.
“Marzia,” Mercy said, standing.
“Wait,” I mumbled. “You’re Marzia Bainbridge.”
“The one and only,” she said.
Mercy stood and kissed her on the lips. “I thought the two of you deserved to meet,” she said. “Since—”
“Well, since I told her that being in a couple isn’t a death sentence,” she said.
“I worked a lot of jobs, while Mercy was my woman on the inside. She’s the voice of reason, sometimes, but not always.
She can be the Devil on my shoulder too.
” She pressed her read lips to Mercy’s cheek, leaving a stain on her. “But I love her.”
I understood it now. Marzia was Donovan, working, and Mercy was—me? Except I was out there in the thick of the action. “It’s nice to meet you.” I said. “So, is this place backed by the Bainbridge fund?”
They both laughed. I’d heard about the Bainbridge family from Whitespire. Maybe the reason they were mentioned it wasn’t because they wanted me to go there, but as a sign that they knew I’d been there.
“No,” Marzia said. “My family has wealth, but they’re the ones actually backed by Sanctum.” She took the seat Mercy had been in. “You don’t need to know the ins and outs of everything. I like that you’re curious.”
Mercy stood behind Marzia in the chair. “I started this agency on a hope and a dream, almost, and with—a lot of money.”
“We,” Marzia said. “We started it. Mercy sorted the hits, I carried them out. The money came in, we expanded. Right now though, I’m more taking care of our kids than I am going out to kill people.”
I stared at them, their happy faces. I wanted that for me and Donovan, and they could probably see that in my thoughts—somehow reading my mind—or the expressions on my face I was unable to control.
“Anyway, you can leave,” Mercy said. “But I’ll wipe out any debt with the money you’ve made. Alternatively, keep working, but you can’t work with Donovan. You’re both too emotionally attached.”
Marzia nodded. “Agreed. They’ll get themselves killed, or worse, have Sanctum exposed.”
Shrinking even further into the seat, I didn’t like the feeling of all my choices being taken away.
I didn’t like the illusion of making a decision they were presenting to me.
I shook my head. “I want the truth,” I said.
“About the guy I killed. He wasn’t the main runner, he was just some random person you wanted dead. ”
They looked at each other. I couldn’t read a single thing on their faces.
“I’ll take this,” Marzia said. She pressed her hands across the table, all manicured and tinted with a glossy pink polish.
“Kill every bad person wouldn’t make the world better.
It would just make more bad people, opportunists coming into power.
You severed one trafficker, and cut off one supply chain. ”
“I want to get rid of evil people, I want to see your list, and I want to make sure what happened to the people on Maya’s list, and from my experience, I want them to know someone is out there protecting them,” I said.
“You want to be a vigilante,” Mercy said. “That’s not someone who can work with us, that’s someone who is—well, in Miami, breaking beds, and leaving lazy paper trail for the police to find.”
Now I was deflated, the. air punched right out of me, aa flaccid latex balloon. That was an exact description of who me and Donovan were. “It helped people,” I mustered. “It helped people,” I said, louder. “It did.”
Marzia and Mercy smiled to each other. “Donovan did the hits and got paid,” Mercy said. “And as for my list, you can’t take someone on from it. The people there are underground, guarded, and might have even already died from natural causes.”
Marzia giggled. “Show him,” she said. “But I know what Mercy’s offer was, and for what it’s worth, I also heard some of the things you said to Maya. Those drones have great audio capture.”
I shouldn’t have trusted anything, my guard should’ve bene up as high as it could get, and yet, they knew and heard everything we’d said—even without the comms in. They didn’t need me here to debrief, they needed me in here to test me. It was all just one big fucking test.
“So, what do you know?” I asked.
“Everything,” Mercy said. “And for what it’s worth, the list will end up getting you killed.”
“I want to see,” I said through weakly gritted teeth.
Marzia pressed something under the table, the wood panel in the center of it dipped and a glowing tablet screen appeared. “These are people who—can I tell him?”
“What do you want to tell him?” she asked.
“The government,” she said, waiting for Mercy to nod. “We take a lot of contracts from the government. Not just ours, but globally. The list represented people they want dead, or in cuffs, or intel on.”
As the table turned on, Mercy grabbed it and held it in front of her face. I didn’t see, but I assumed it was scanning her. “You might see some familiar names.”
My fear was seeing Donovan’s name more than anything. She passed the tablet down the table, the sharp white light forcing my eyes into a squint.
“There are three colors,” Marzia said. “Red is kill, black is cuffs, blue is intel. You can tap their names and current information will appear.”
The first name on the list in red was simple, The Chemist, the second one, Valentina “Saint” Ricci. I scanned, looking for familiar names, and one of them caught my eye.
“Nathaniel Blackwell the third,” I said, tapping his name. “He owns the Equinox Antiques, that’s the company that tried to traffick me. I thought they were the people I’d killed.” Either I’d been lied to, or this information was outdated.
“Equinox Antiques is a real company,” Mercy said, inserting herself in the space between me and Marzia. “I wasn’t going to have you kill Nathaniel. He’s in blue, he’s for intel. The Blackwell family.”
“I know that name,” I grumbled. “Blackwell, they’re—they’re part of The Board at Whitespire.”
“And they’re also not to be killed,” Mercy said. “We’re not here to create economical collapse or downfall, we’re here to make sure people in power, like Nathaniel, know they can be killed at any time. It’s a much better motivator than a gun to the head.”
“That’s why I think you should come to the intel side of things,” Marzia said. “Leave killing to Donovan and those others who like to fight.”
The idea of taking a punch and feeling pain often made me flinch, so she had a point. “I don’t wanna be one of the fairies,” I let out to their laughter.
“Oh no, they’re just assistants,” Mercy said. “Intel workers know everything. And they gather everything. You can take some time to think about it, but it would make you and Donovan a much stronger team.”
My dream of being out in the world was no squished into nothing, they wanted me behind a desk, a computer, and having to read so much I might as well have gone back to college. “This is another test,” I mumbled to seeing their big eyes staring at me like I was lunch.