Chapter 9 Emery
EMERY
The air is frigid and thick with mist from where I’m standing in front of an estate that reeks of old money.
The walls are grayed and edged with moss, vines climb high up to the second-story windows.
The fence around the mansion is ten feet tall, black with arrowheads at the tips.
Lantern posts are stationed every fifteen feet along the driveway, and the house staff stands by while one escorts me down the stairs to greet my mother.
She is a tall woman, slim and wearing a tight black dress that ends at her ankles. She looks like she’s just returned from a funeral.
“Mother.” I dip my head respectfully to her as she passes me without a word. “How was the trade? Was a truce formed?” I ask.
God, I hope so. My father is going to have me on another assignment if the truce doesn’t hold up like it was supposed to.
My mother stops beneath the large marble frame of the entry doors and glances over her shoulder at me callously. “You’d better get ready to go.”
I don’t let my shoulders drop until she walks away.
She never had any objections to the role I played in the family, but she stopped loving me the day I started killing for the business.
This isn’t me, I think as I cut a clean line down the Larsen’s head guard’s spine. Reed was right, it does make me feel a little better if I put some craft into it. I guess that’s why he was always my mentor. His sinister advice always held up.
I like leaving them in ways that leave somber ideas lingering long after.
I let the scalpel glide over the skin through the back of his ribs, pulling away a ribbon of muscle so that it looks like a butterfly wing.
I’ve been piecing them together like a picture book.
The first of this particular piece, I left his back hardly split open.
Then the next had his entire back arched into the air, like a caterpillar freeing itself from the cocoon.
I cut the corner of the man’s lips so it looks like he’s smiling. Maybe he’s found freedom in death. I hope so.
I long to be free.
I wake up to warmth at my back. The sensation is soft and easy to lean into. At first I still think I’m dreaming, then I recall where I am and what I had just done.
Those two soldiers are dead. I killed them without so much as a second thought.
The scent of iron in the air still stings the back of my tongue and makes the hair on the back of my neck rise. It felt like I was a passenger in my own head, observing the heinous things my hands were doing.
My body tenses and I take a sharp breath. It was like I had snapped and everything after flowed like water. And that dream… It was the realest one I’ve had yet. A cold shudder moves down my spine.
“Shh. You’re all right.” A thick accent warms my ear and I come into myself, feeling the comfort of the bed beneath me and the familiar scent of birch.
Is that Mori? My stomach flips and I become hyperaware of the places his body is touching mine and where his hands are.
He draws languid circles on my forearm with one.
I realize my head isn’t on a pillow—it’s actually his biceps.
His arm is crooked and teasing a strand of my hair around his finger.
“Mori?” I whisper, shutting my eyes and trying to decide if this, too, is a dream. But it wasn’t just a dream, was it? I focus harder. I know those were my parents. It was too real. Too vivid to be only a dream. And if that’s true, it means so are the horrible things I did in it.
“Who else?” he says softly, there’s a weariness in his tone. I wonder how long he’s been awake and has stayed by my side like this.
“What time is it? How did I get—” I stop talking, trying to press my mind for anything that happened after I killed those assholes. I come up blank.
He takes a deep breath and slowly unweaves himself from me. My heart all but stops as he does. My body is already reminiscing the way his chest felt at my back. I firm my lips so he won’t see the disappointment on my face.
Mori leans up on his side and stares down at me. His sage eyes aren’t filled with callous indifference like they usually are, they’re kind. Soft. His pale blond hair tousled and splayed over his forehead.
“Do you remember anything?” He thumbs my cheek, wiping a drop of drool away, I think. A cheeky grin grows on his lips and semi-confirms that it was.
My face flushes and my heart flips.
“I remember them attacking me and then…it was darker outside and they were beaten to a pulp. I can’t account for a lot of that time.
” It sounds so innocent when I say it like that.
It sounds like there weren’t teeth strewn over the asphalt, and blood and flesh weren’t caked into the pores of the cinder block walls.
“By ‘beaten to a pulp’ you mean that you ground their faces into mush and cartilage against the cement, right?” he remarks flatly.
I sit straight up and give him a reluctant stare. “It was that bad, wasn’t it?”
He smiles grimly and flicks my forehead. “It was.”
“It was so odd, it was like I didn’t have an ounce of control.” My words are so quiet I’m not sure he heard me. I study my hands. They’re so small and seem unlikely to cause such chaos, but I cannot defy the truth of what happened.
Worry blooms inside me. What if it had been someone else? What if it was one of my squad mates or Mori? The thought of attacking him like that makes me feel sick.
Is this how he feels constantly? He’s killed his own partners. How does he live with himself? There’s hardly a shred of emotion that he lets slip through. Does he burn inside? Does he feel anything at all or has he grown cold and dead to the act? He might even kill me.
If I keep this up, Lieutenant Erik might have Mori do it, or even send the Ri?t Squad after me.
Mori’s eyes warm with empathy. Admittedly, something I was certain he didn’t have.
“Come with me.” He slides off my bed and slips his casual shoes on.
I follow him, tiptoeing as quietly as I can through our room filled with the heavy snores of our comrades.
When we get into the lit hallway, I look down at my attire. I’m draped in the gray hoodie Mori was wearing earlier today. It goes down past my knees. Holy shit, he’s so much bigger than he looks. I bring the collar of the fabric to my nose and breath in his scent, letting it comfort me.
He stops down the hall and waits for me to catch up, eyeing the way I’m holding his hoodie up to my face. I immediately drop it.
“Do you trust me, Emery?” he says with a tone that suggests that perhaps I shouldn’t.
“Not usually, but considering the day I’m having…” I offer him a wry grin.
He winks at me. “Good. After you then.” Mori looks down both ways of the hall before popping open a vent that is halfway from the showers on one side and the gym on the other.
“Wait, you want me to go in there?” I whisper shout.
He nods without missing a beat. Damn his otherworldly charm, but he did save me back there, the least I can do is indulge whatever this is.
I crawl in first. It’s spacious in here, enough even for him to fit comfortably. Mori clamps the vent door back down behind us and pinches the back of my thigh to get me moving.
“Ow!” I smack his shoulder. He chuckles in response. My chest lightens as I take him in. He seems so unlike himself right now. Like a completely different person than the grumpy, quiet soldier I’ve come to know him to be.
We round a few corners before a large room comes into view.
It reminds me of a sewer tank, the boxy ones that are a junction point for the tunnels to merge into, but it’s dry, only some crisp leaves and spiderwebs litter the bottom.
A tall ladder extends to the ceiling where a square hole leads up.
There are bars blocking access to it, but Mori walks up to a keypad against the far wall, clearly very familiar with this place.
“Why is this here?” I raise a brow as he types in a long code. I don’t bother trying to see or remember the numbers. It’s not like I’m trying to escape the Dark Forces. I mean, where would someone like me even run to?
The lock clicks and the barred door swings open from the hole above.
I climb up first and he trails right behind me.
“In case of a raid, or if an earthquake collapses the base and the stairs are inaccessible. These tunnels are reinforced and won’t break under the pressure like the main section of the building would.” He makes it sound so convenient.
“Then why are we using it right now? Where exactly are you taking me?” I say suspiciously as we near the top. A breeze drafts in from the vent above, moonlight drips down and illuminates the area.
“No more questions. Just keep going and don’t look down,” Mori mutters with amusement. Of course, I look down after he mentions it.
We’re already so high up that the bottom is almost out of view. It looks like a dark pit. My hands instantly get sweaty and I secure them to the metal steps with a vise grip.
He snorts, trying to keep his laughter in.
“You did that on purpose.” I force myself to keep moving, only breathing a sigh of relief when we finally get to the top and I’m back on the ground.
Mori carefully places the grate back in place and stands, offering me his hand. I narrow my eyes but take his offer. He pulls me up and I survey the area.
We’re on the outer edge of the base. The beach and ocean are a little over a hundred feet away from us. The evening air is brisk but fresh with the scent of salt and mist on its wind. The sound of the waves crashing into themselves drown out all other sound.
“Okay, so you brought me to the ocean?” I smile arrogantly, actually kind of appreciating the night adventure to take my mind off the heinous things I did today and remembered doing in my past. The fresh tattoo on my back feels like a warm trail of liquid down my spine.
He steps down from the small mound of rocks we’re up on and I follow.
When he doesn’t reply I press him. “Mori?”