Chapter 17
seventeen
The Salvation
We’re all elbows deep in files when Heath suddenly shoots to his feet and bolts out the door without a word.
“That was weird,” Mercy says, crawling toward the file he left open.
For a moment, I’m too distracted by the sight of her round, plump ass raised toward me to register anything else.
I can feel the softness of her hips in my hands even now, the trembling surrender in her body, the agonizing tightness of her heavenly cunt stretched around my cock to its furthest limit.
“Oh my god,” she gasps, snapping me back to our predicament.
“What?” Angel asks.
“Oh my god,” she says again, sinking onto her heels with a paper pinched between her fingers. “He found her. She’s really here.”
“She was here,” I say, after stepping over the folders strewn across the office floor to look over Mercy’s shoulder. “It would appear that’s no longer the case.”
“Fuck,” Saint says, turning on his heel. “I’ll go after him.”
“He won’t hurt anyone,” I say gently. “Let him get it out.”
“I’m not worried about him hurting anyone else,” Saint snaps. “Look what happened last time we left him alone. And that was before—” He gestures to the papers, unable to bring himself to speak the words, and stares at the rain-streaked windowpane instead of the files.
“I’ll go with,” Angel says. “No use staying here if we already know.”
I nod, and they leave the office. Mercy’s still sitting on the floor, staring at the paper as if unable to comprehend.
I’ve never met the girl they’ve gone to all this trouble for, but she was enough to make them all fall in love with her, each in their own way.
That alone tells me she was special, even if I can’t share in their grief.
I’ve grieved my own losses, though, so even though I can never truly understand the anguish they feel in this moment, I understand enough.
I feel for them, hurt for each of them, even if I can’t join them in the hurt.
What I can do is be there to hold them together in this trying time.
I sink onto the floor on my knees beside Mercy.
It seems fitting for the gravity of the situation, both an honoring of the girl who is gone and an acknowledgement of the insurmountable pain of the one who remains.
She kneels there, as if in supplication to the indifferent God who caused so much suffering for so long, letting them keep the cruelest of all torments for four years. Hope.
“She can’t be gone,” Mercy whispers, talking to herself more than to me. “This can’t be the end. After all this time…”
“I’m sorry,” I say simply, my chest aching with her pain, with the pain of what’s to come for each member of the group.
“No,” she says fiercely. “Don’t say you’re sorry. Don’t say she’s gone. It doesn’t say that. It doesn’t say she’s dead. Maybe—Maybe—”
Her voice breaks off in a sob, and I pull her to me, gently cradling her head to my chest. Only a minute later, the door swings open, and I look up, expecting to see my Hellhounds coming back. But the face that blinks in at us is unfamiliar.
Mercy bolts to her feet. “What did you do to her?” she demands, her fists clenching at her sides.
“I have no idea who you mean,” he says.
She takes two steps towards him, and he turns as if to bolt. I’m up and across the floor in seconds. I reach for him, my fingers closing around the back of his neck. He yells out as I drag him backwards into the office. I slam the door shut and stand in front of it, then shake him at Mercy.
“Answer her question,” I order.
“You haven’t even given me a name!” he says, sounding huffy and self-righteous.
My fingers itch to wrap around his throat, to watch the tips of his ears turn red and then purple. No one should speak to my lamb that way, and knowing he’s been in charge of whatever traumas have ensued while she was here makes my blood boil.
“Eternity Stone,” Mercy grits out, stepping in front of him. Her eyes are bright and fierce, boring into his, her whole body trembling with rage.
“You expect me to know every patient who’s ever been here?” he whines.
Without warning, Mercy slams her fist into his face.
His glasses go flying, and he stumbles back against me.
The heavy warmth of his body repulses me, and I hurl him away from me, sending him sliding on the loose papers underfoot.
He crashes into the heavy wooden desk, and when I see the way Mercy’s eyes blaze at the sight of such violence, it sets loose something dangerous that’s been lurking inside me for a thousand years, an instinct from the primordial depths of my soul.
I step toward him, then meet her eyes. Forks of blinding white lightning flash outside, bathing the room in otherworldly luminescence.
Mercy stands with feet planted wide, wild strands of her hair turning silvery in the momentary illumination.
Her cheeks are flushed, her lips parted, and she looks both fearsome and ethereal, a goddess of wrath and mercy.
The crack of thunder shakes the asylum, booming and rumbling as it ripples out from the island. In the silence, the man on the desk grunts. Suddenly he shoves off, lunging for Mercy in the same motion.
“Goddamn bitch,” he howls. He whips a gun from behind his back and squeezes the trigger.
Mercy screams and drops into a crouch, holding her head.
I lunge for him, fear and fury blinding me as I hurl him backwards.
He crashes into the desk and starts to fall sideways, but I grab his hair, my fingers curling into the short, bristly strands.
I slam him face down on the surface, and the gun goes off again, the bullet lodging in the wall.
I rip the gun from his hand and slam it down on the back of his head.
“What did you do to her?” I snarl, the voice coming from me belonging to another man, one as brutal and savage as the father I never truly understood until this moment, when the urge to destroy something weak overcomes me.
I’ve always protected the weak, but the evil this man has done with his power makes me sick, makes me want to stamp out his life, erase his very existence the way he erased the girl in that photo with the callous word stamped on her face, as if she were a damaged library book and not a human being who was loved by so many.
Loved by my lamb, who is hurting so much at her loss.
“I’m a doctor,” the man cries.
I lift his head and slam it down on the wooden surface this time.
“Then it’s even more vile that you’d hurt someone,” I growl.
“Help,” he cries, one arm flailing toward Mercy. “Help me!”
“Then answer the question,” she says, her sweet voice cold now. I didn’t even notice her rising, but she’s beside me, standing sentinel over us. “What did you do with Eternity?”
“Nothing,” he cries.
I slam his face down again. I feel a sickeningly satisfying crunch. “What did you do?”
“You broke my nose,” he howls.
He tries to rise, but Mercy slams a fist into his lower back, and he flops forward again. This time, a pool of blood remains when I lift his head. I hurl his head down, my fingers slipping from the short, thin hair. His face smacks into the surface so hard it rebounds, bouncing up.
“Where is she?” Mercy demands.
“She’s where she belongs,” he snarls back, flailing. “And you’ll be there too if I have anything to do with it.”
All sense leaves me when I hear him threaten my angel.
After what he did, he doesn’t deserve to live.
I grab his head with both hands and slam it down again and again, lost in a blind fury at his defiance, his callousness, his hypocrisy at taking an oath to help and then using the trust to sell girls into the horrors of their worst nightmare.
“Father.”
Forgive me.
“Father!”
Forgive me.
“Father!”
Forgive me.
The hollowness is a gift, a holy ground where no evil can reach me. The place I’ve found inside my mind, one I never let myself go, is bathed in divinity. Now I’m there, and all is calm and still.
I’m sitting in a car parked on the street at night, watching a man walk toward me, illuminated by the glow of the streetlights.
He’s a dark silhouette, growing larger and larger, until he’s the whole sky, this darkness shadowing our lives, foreboding as death.
My hands clench on the wheel, but my mind is calm and clear.
I stare at the face that appears in the lights, the angles of the cheekbones, the crooked nose.
The hollow blackness of the eyes as he looms in front of me, demanding answers, obedience. Always obedience.
Always silence.
Always creeping around the house, fear thrumming in my veins like poison, killing me but feeding the seed of rage he planted in my heart with the seed of my life he planted in my mother, his battered victim and strident defender.
I feel my hand close around the gear shift, my foot move from one pedal to the other.
The pressure as I bear down, the roar of the engine thrumming through the car and my body, the hum of electricity in my veins, the transcendent clarity and conviction.
The decision afterwards: Never again.
Then Mercy is yanking at me, and at last, I come out of my fugue state and see her staring at me with wide eyes. The man’s body is limp, and blood is splattered over the dark, polished surface in gory droplets like the rain running down the outside of the windowpane.
“Father?” Mercy whispers.
I stumble back, my breath hitching, my heart thudding, bile rising in my throat.
What have I done?
I lost myself in some other place, some place I always knew existed, even when I never let myself go there. I felt like I was next to God, not dancing with the devil.
“Lamb,” I say, my voice unsteady. “You’re okay?”
“Fine,” she says. “Are you?”
“He shot at you,” I say, checking her over. I was so lost in rage I didn’t even check with her.
She nods, looking sheepish. “The bullet hit the wall. I ducked. It was instinct.”