Chapter 35 Mercy
Mercy
A flickering light at the bottom of the stairs sends shivers down my spine.
When we were children, Malachi and I used to lock each other in dark rooms and closets, cackling as the other would get scared and cry.
It was mainly me doing the crying; Malachi never minded the dark, and he’d often sit in silence with the shed door unlocked while I picked dandelions among the graves.
This feels different. We’re not picking on each other, and he didn’t tell me he was going to the cellar, he just… Left.
On his own.
I haven’t seen him in at least a year—maybe two, even—and spoken to him very little since. I don’t know what’s rumbling inside his head: his own voice, or the ones that tell him to fight demons no one else can see?
Cobwebs stick to my arms as I descend, and it’s like I’m stepping into the past, my buckled shoes and frilled socks pitter-pattering down the stone steps as I catch my brother playing where he shouldn’t.
But then I hear Zane’s footfalls behind me, and my nerves settle as I feel the length of my limbs, the brush of my hair against my elbows, and the heavy beat of my heart pounding inside my ribcage. I’m not a child anymore, and I’m not afraid of the dark.
Nor am I alone. Zane is right behind me, trudging down the stairs at a slower pace, and a twinge of guilt nearly makes me stop and beg him to turn around. He doesn’t have to follow me into a dark, dank cellar to save my brother; he can wait at the top of the stairs where it’s safe.
“Zane—“
“Keep moving, Mercy.” He places a gentle hand on my lower back. “I won’t let anything happen to you.” He keeps his touch light as we descend together, popping out at the bottom to find ourselves at the only exit for a crowded, musky room.
It’s smaller than I remember.
That could be the four grown men standing around glaring at each other, or it could be that the ceiling nearly touches the top of Sam’s head, dusty cobwebs sticking to his hair like lint.
Our eyes meet, and he takes a shallow breath. “What are you doing here, Mercy?” Stepping over to me, he places his hand on my elbow and leads me to the corner of the room, away from the makeshift gentleman’s club. Touching my face, he scans my body like he’s checking for injuries. “Are you hurt?”
I roll my eyes despite the way my heart trembles beneath his touch. “I’m fine, but you guys can’t be in here. It’s not safe.”
His jaw clenches. “That’s why you shouldn’t be here.”
“Why are you the exception?” I poke his chest. “What are you even doing down here? Where’s—” I glance over his shoulder to find my brother holding a lit taper candle, the wax dripping onto his hand.
“What’s going on?” I listen close as Zane and Kane talk in hushed whispers, the two of them quickly glancing back at me.
Oh, please.
Pushing Sam away from me, I walk over to them. “What the hell are you two plotting—” I step in something wet and slide on the damp floor, gasping as I bump into Kane. He grabs me and holds me steady. “Shit, guys, there’s gotta be mold down here—”
“Shhh,” Kane murmurs, pressing a finger to my lips. “You’ll interrupt the show.”
“What show?”
While Zane turns my head, Kane bands an arm around my waist and holds me in place. “Let your brother work in silence, Siren. He’s thinking.”
“Too much,” Sam scoffs, stepping up beside me. “I don’t want to be down here forever.”
“No final words for your dad, Sam?” Kane shakes his head. “What a pity. He loves you so much.”
“Shut up.”
Malachi tilts the candle towards the oldest man in the room, and the flame flickers as Samuel exhales harshly through his nose, his mouth stuffed with what looks like a white rag.
His hands are bound behind his back, but his feet are free.
Rather than run, because I assume he’s outnumbered and he knows it, he stares down the bridge of his nose as the flame brushes his cheek.
An agitated garble of sounds catches on the gag in his mouth. He flinches back and slams his head into the brick wall, but the smell of burnt flesh fills the air.
My brother is torturing a man, and everyone is letting it happen.
“Are you—” I hold my tongue as the word crazy threatens to slip past. “Malachi, look at me. What are you doing?” In the past, he’s had trouble controlling his anger, but that’s why he was sent to a strict boarding school; he was supposed to learn coping mechanisms so that these kind of incidents didn’t keep happening. “Stop!”
He ignores me and relights the candle as it goes out.
“During the witch trials, people often died of smoke inhalation before the fire burned them alive.” Waving the candle in front of Samuel’s face, he hums to himself.
“But those fires often started at their feet and worked their way up. If we start here—” He holds the flame beneath Samuel’s chin.
“How long do you think it will take for someone to die? An hour? Ten?”
Tears pool in the corner of Samuel’s eyes, but he finally fights back. Kicking Malachi in the shin, he makes a run for the stairwell.
Sam punches him in the face before he even gets close and knocks Samuel to the ground.
“You don’t get to run,” he hisses, hauling him up by his shirt collar.
The expensive suit jacket I’d spotted earlier has disappeared, along with the top few buttons of Samuel’s shirt.
Jagged cuts, mostly shallow, line his chest like tally marks, including the diagonal slash for counting fives.
Blood pools along the deepest ones, staining his dress shirt.
“I thought Samuel was crazy, but your brother?” Kane whistles. “He’s on a whole nother level.”
“Don’t call him that.” I stare at my brother’s back as he fiddles with something in his dominant hand. Something catches the light and shines in my eyes. A coin? A compact mirror? Only when he lifts his hand to wipe blood from his wrist do I recognize what I’m looking at.
It’s a shard of glass, like the ones we found on the floor upstairs.
“I thought you were going to make this quick,” Zane sighs, rubbing the back of his neck. “Someone will notice he’s gone.”
Kane grunts noncommittally. “So is Sam. It’s fine. They came together, they left together.”
“You’ve been planning this?” I stare at Zane in disbelief. “And you didn’t bother to tell me?”
Zane keeps his face neutral but can’t hide the twitch of his brow.
“We didn’t want you to worry,” Kane says, “like you’re doing now.” He nuzzles my cheek. “Everything’s under control.”
“Anyone could come down those stairs. Someone could have seen you. My grandmother knew you were down here! Seriously, guys? This is your big plan?” A laugh bubbles up inside my chest. Unbelievable. Three brains, and they couldn’t come up with a better plan.
“Well, this part is a little unplanned.”
“No shit,” Sam snaps, dragging his dad deeper into the room. He tosses him against the far wall and crosses his arms. “I told you guys that I’d handle it so that no one was any wiser, but you just had to start shit, didn’t you?”
“He started it,” Kane grumbles.
“You’re not supposed to take the bait, dumbass.”
A growl rumbles through the air. “Shut up!” Malachi drops to his knees in front of Samuel, the thud of bone on stone making me flinch.
“He’s going to rot here.” Dropping the candle, my brother strokes the shard of glass against Samuel’s burnt flesh, dangerously close to the man’s eye.
“In this prison cell. Where he’ll choke on mold and smell his own rotting flesh for eternity.
All alone, where no one will ever come looking for him.
” He laughs darkly and punches forward, piercing Samuel’s flesh.
I look away before I gag.
“How does it feel, Samuel? To know that your family has abandoned you? Isn’t that what you told me, hm, all those times you came to visit? I wasn’t—fucking—listening.”
Taking a shaky breath, I focus on Sam’s pinched expression.
“Did you know?” I flinch at a wet, fleshy sound.
“That your dad was visiting my brother?” The school told us that he wasn’t allowed visitors as a disciplinary measure, but the ban never lifted, and every appeal we had was denied.
Trips home for the holidays became less and less frequent as time passed.
Phone calls, even, were scarce. I’d gotten a letter in the mail once, but it didn’t sound like my brother, and it was typed.
I’d doubted it was him when I first received it, and I still doubt it to this day.
Sam’s lips press together in a fine line. “No. I had no idea.”
“Must have been bad,” Kane muses softly. “For him to be this aggravated.”
“He’s upset.” I sniff and instantly regret it. A copper tang in the air makes my stomach churn. “I would be, too.”
“It’s not your fault, Siren.”
I shrug and feign indifference. “What’s done is done. We can only move forward.”
Kane suddenly slides me beneath Zane’s good arm and steps in front of us, grasping my hands in his as he stares into my eyes. “I am more than ready for that future, Mercy, but there’s a promise I’ve got to keep first, and you might want to leave for this part.”
A wave of anxiety makes my body shake. “What, um, what promise is that?”
Zane slips a long, heavy switchblade into our joined hands and wraps Kane’s fingers around it. “Make the fucker bleed.”
I inhale sharply. “Here? But it’s—it’s Christmas!”
“A lot of accidents happen during the holidays.” Zane takes careful steps backwards and pulls me along with him. “Do you want to stay or go for this, Mercy?”
My heart hammers as I look between all three of my men, each one as determined as the last. None of them are leaving, not even Sam, so I won’t, either. “I’m staying.” I hold Zane’s arm tightly around my middle. “But please don’t let go. I might—” I swallow hard. “Pass out?”
“I’ll catch you,” Sam vows, following us to the other side of the room. “I promise.”
Samuel finally speaks, his breaths rattling and wet and grotesque. “You can’t kill me. I own you, Samson, you and your whore and this whole goddamn cesspool. Even you, Malachi. You’ll never escape my purview. I am everywhere and everything in this fucking city. Do you hear me? I am—”
“Dead,” Malachi snarls, slamming Samuel’s head against the ground. “Dead, dead, dead, and no one will mourn you, Samuel, not even your fucking son.”
Mr. Wright’s eyes latch onto mine, and the hatred burning in their depths makes me nauseous.
Bile rises to the back of my throat as he chokes on his fury, blood pouring from his mouth and staining the floor.
He says something that I can’t hear, but my brother flinches hard enough that he slams his fist into Samuel’s skull.
Sam must hear it, because he flinches, too.
I tug on his arm. “What did he say?”
“I don’t want to repeat it.” Hooking his fingers through mine, he takes a deep breath. “But I think he hates your family more than I realized, Mercy.”
If my body weren’t running so cold, I’m sure that I would flush with embarrassment. “I don’t know why,” I murmur, squeezing Sam’s fingers. “We’ve never done anything to him.”
Zane sighs in my ear. “Yeah, you did, baby. You stole his son from him.”
Silence falls over us as Kane takes slow, steady steps towards his target.
The cadence of his footfalls is like a metronome counting the final seconds of Samuel’s life.
The closer he gets, the louder Samuel’s screeching becomes, filling the room with a panic greater than any I’ve ever felt before.
My entire body is on edge, the hairs on my arms and neck standing up as shivers course through me over and over again.
Zane holds on tight and rests his chin on my shoulder.
“You can close your eyes,” he murmurs, staring straight ahead as Kane kneels beside Malachi. “I won’t tell him.”
“He’ll know,” I whisper, as sure of it as I am of death. The scent of it is familiar, and I’ll recognize it when it arrives, but for now, Kane is taking his time. Cutting away Samuel’s clothes, leaving him naked and afraid as the dull edge of the knife drags down his body like a lover’s caress.
The funny thing is that Samuel suddenly goes eerily quiet.
For all his barking, he doesn’t put up much of a fight.
I think he’s waiting for Sam to jump in and save him, but Sam isn’t watching his father’s final moments, he’s carefully studying my face.
Trailing his fingertips up and down my arms, stepping closer as Kane makes the first cut, exhaling into the curve of my neck as he hovers, not impeding my view but shielding my body from the violence.
He draws a shaky breath and leans into me, pressing my body firmly against both his and Zane’s.
Tilting my head, I press a gentle kiss to his cheek, and he collapses, forcing Zane to hold both of us up as my knees buckle.
“Shhh, shh, shh, it’s okay. I’ve got you.”
A sob wracks his chest, and he buries his face in my hair. We don’t speak. We don’t kiss. We hold onto each other as part of his world collapses, seeping through the cracks and soaking into the earth, where it will be forsaken and forgotten.