Have Mercy

by N. E. Henderson

  I push Jules off, shoving her back to the bed.

  “Jamie,” Cole calls out again.

  Elise’s hands go to her ears, covering them as she casts her eyes to the floor. “Stop saying his name,” she pleads, her body starting to rock back and forth, pain etched on her tear-soaked face.

  Elise was never the crying type. In the year’s I’ve known her, I can count the times I’ve witness her tear up on one hand. She comes off strong and she is. That was just one of the numerous things I loved about her. She wasn’t sensitive like so many other girls. No one messed with her, except Cole. They knew not to. They knew she’d beat their ass and they knew I’d beat their ass right after she did.

  I step toward her, squatting down directly in front of her, and pull her hands away from her ears. The spark that’s always ignited every time we touch electrifies my whole body, but I fight it, not wanting it.

  “She fucks better than you too,” I lie, right to her beautiful face, hating myself instantly and not understanding why. She deserves this. She deserves worse. “Go back to wherever you came from. I don’t want you. I never want to see you again.”

  I stand and then step right over her, shoving past my best friend in the process, saying, “Get her out of my house.” It’s my parents’ house, but whatever.

  “Wait.” The word sounds like a plea and so very wrong coming from Elise’s mouth. She’s never had to beg me for a damn thing. Until now, I’ve always been more than willing to give her anything she’s ever asked for or in most cases demanded.

  “Fuck. You,” I say, throwing up both middle fingers and not knowing if she can see me just before I take the stairs, needing to get out of this house. I can’t breathe with her this close again. I pick up my pace, the front door in my line of sight. If I don’t get away from here now, I’m not so sure I’ll have the strength to avoid going back in and begging her myself to take me back, make us right again.

  She did this to us.

  I won’t be the one that gives her a second chance, not when she’s the one that pissed all over us in the first place.

  I won’t have mercy.

  It’ll be a cold day in Hell before I forgive her for the things she’s done.

  6

  — Jenna —

  Eighteen years ago

  It took Josh seven weeks to break me. He thought it would take another seven to put me back together, mend what he had broken, and mold me into who he wanted me to become. He underestimated me from the very beginning. What took him weeks to achieve only took me seven days to do to him.

  “Are you sure this is what you want?” His voice is hard, unforgiving in the manner in which he speaks. That isn’t something that has changed from the time I first met Josh to right now where I sit in the passenger side of his pickup truck, staring at the house of the boy I’ve longed to see again. It’s been nearly twelve weeks since I’ve been gone; eighty-nine days since I’ve seen him or anyone else other than the man that took me captive with the intent to sell me to the highest bidder.

  “I wouldn’t have requested it had I not been sure.”

  “It’s not a good idea. You shouldn’t be here, Cat.” He rarely calls me ‘Wild Cat’ anymore, preferring to shorten the nickname or call me by my first name, Jenna instead. I prefer either over Elise now. Since I’ve recovered, hearing my middle name on his lips makes my stomach roll. It brings back memories I’d rather forget ever happened.

  I’m not suffering from Stockholm syndrome. I don’t fully trust the man sitting to my left but don’t distrust him either. We’ve found common ground so to speak. There isn’t that much difference between him and I. He was born into this business. He was raised in it the same as his parents before him.

  You learn a lot when you bring a man to his knees, strip him bare. At first, that hadn’t exactly been my goal, but a few days after my beating, when I finally opened my eyes and saw what my condition was doing to him, an idea sparked.

  It saved my life. It’s why I’m sitting beside him now, unchained, no longer his captive like I was back inside that windowless bare room—my former cell.

  It was a warehouse like I had thought it might be. A large space in a crime-ridden shitty city five hours from where I grew up. Just one state over, close to the Gulf of Mexico. In hindsight, I think it would have been easy for him to get rid of me, make me disappear to never be seen again had his original plan worked out. Had I not been pregnant. The thing I knew from the moment I read that stick changed everything. Just not in the way I had first thought it would.

  “This is exactly where I should be. I need him. I know you don’t understand that, and I don’t know how to make you, but it is what it is. I’ve always loved him, and in spite of everything, I still love him. I still want him. There is no way I’d be able to stay away from him, Josh.”

  Yet, even I have to admit there is something that’s holding me from catapulting out of this truck and into that house to find him. It’s not that I don’t want to, because I do. It’s that I’m scared of what I’ll find when I lay eyes on him again. Those pictures still haunt me. I can’t get the images out of my head, and every time I close my eyes, it’s the only thing I see. Sleep is futile most of the time.

  This is a different kind of fear. This is something inside my gut telling me walking inside that house isn’t going to be the welcoming I expect it to be. Like a premonition, knowing I have to walk through it no matter the outcome.

  I have to have faith though, don’t I? Trust in what Jamie and I have. After all, love is supposed to outlast everything, stand the test of time. With love, you’re supposed to be able to get past all the bad. We may be teenagers, but I know what love is.

  “If you’re sure about this, then you need to let me take care of her.”

  Julia.

  I never would have thought she be capable of such things. I knew she was rich, her parents wealthy. I didn’t compute that to mean she had the means to hire someone to kidnap me, get me out of the picture so that she could have Jamie for herself.

  Had I not seen the proof with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have believed Josh when he told me everything. He had pictures of them meeting together, a recording of their conversation, his insurance policy had she tried anything or gone to the police.

  She’s sixteen for Christ’s sake, five months younger than me. She’ll turn seventeen two weeks from now. What teenager thinks something like this up? What person plans this sort of thing out and then goes through with it? One that’s even more devious than the man I’m sharing air with.

  “No,” I force out, turning my head to survey the side of his. He’s still beautiful. He’s still hard too. I don’t have an ounce of sexual attraction for him. Some might think it’s because of everything he’s done to me, but I know it’s simpler than that. I’ve only ever had eyes for James Hart. Jamie has been it since the beginning. He’ll always be the one. “We talked about this. You can’t do that ever again. You’ve changed, Josh. You can’t go back to that life. You swore that you would go the opposite way.”

  Josh isn’t evil. He has evil ways, but deep down he isn’t evil to the core. Had he been, he never would have felt remorse for what he did to me. He never would have taken care of me, cleaned me, helped me to heal as properly as he could without taking me to a hospital.

  I have a nasty, ugly, angry scar across my back where his bat splintered and dug into my skin as he hit me over and over with it. He thinks I had two broken ribs, and ninety percent of my body was covered in bruises. The bruises are gone, but the markings inside and out still remain.

  He asked me for my forgiveness. I haven’t given it to him yet, but I want to. I just don’t know when that’ll be, or if I’ll ever be able to say it out loud.

  “What’s one more time?” His head rolls to face me. “You can’t sit there and say she doesn’t deserve it.”

  I turn my head, gazing out of the window, back to the house. There’s a party going on inside if all the cars and the lights are
any indication. Jamie’s parents must be out of town.

  “I wouldn’t put my worst enemy through a minute of what I went through. So, don’t. I said, no. Leave it at that. You promised, Josh,” I remind him.

  “And I won’t touch a hair on her blonde head until you give me the go ahead.”

  “That day will never come.”

  “Never say never, sweetheart.”

  “As long as you keep your word by never kidnapping or harming an innocent person again, and rescue those that you can, I’ll never tell anyone your identity.”

  “I didn’t ask you to do that, Jenna,” he whispers, finally calling me by the name I’ve requested him to use. I can’t stomach my middle name anymore, associating it with all the things that happened while I was held against my will.

  “You didn’t have to. You want my forgiveness, right? Then I need you to do what you’ve promised. It’s the only way you’ll ever get it.” I glance back to him, his eyes still on me. “Thanks for bringing me home. Thanks for letting me go.”

  Present

  A door inside my house slams, pulling me out of a memory I haven’t thought of in years. There’s no doubt that this morning’s encounter is having an ill effect on me. That wasn’t the only thing I thought of today. In fact, too many things from all those years ago have clouded my head.

  It’s why I had to bow out of work early. I wasn’t making progress, so it was pointless being there. It’s Saturday anyway, it’s not like I can’t catch up come Monday. Still, we have a case to solve and there is always someone that needs saving, but my lack of focus wasn’t helping.

  Josh knew it. Malachi knew it. Hell, even Kelly, our newest agent on our task force knew something was wrong. I wasn’t acting like myself. When I’m on the job, I’m always focused and able to stay on point. I don’t get distracted. Being a federal agent, I can’t afford to let my personal life affect my work life. Other peoples’ lives depend on my skill in locating and dismantling human trafficking rings in and around the Los Angeles County area.

  Being a survivor of human trafficking drove me down this career path. I know what goes through a captive’s psyche. I know their fears, their hopes, their pain.

  After I returned home, I finished my senior year of high school being home-schooled. I did two years of junior college while working a full-time job. Then, one day out of the blue, Josh showed up, taking me by surprise and scaring the hell out of me. It had been three years since I’d last seen him, but there hadn’t been a day that had gone by in those three years that I hadn’t see his face in my dreams.

  At first I thought and feared, he’d returned to take me all over again. To finish a job he’d left unfinished.

  I was wrong. He was there to recruit me, and nearly fourteen years later, here I am, an FBI agent who works alongside the man that kidnapped her eighteen years ago. Even now it sometimes seems surreal.

  Laughter and joking pulls my eyes toward the small opening that peers into my small kitchen. The boys are home. My heart always skips a beat when one of them walks into a room.

  “You have something you want to tell me, Brandon?” I ask, forcing my voice to harden into the stern tone both of them know not to test. It always works. They both stop in their trek to the stairs, turn, and face me.

  Daniel’s expression drops, annoyance marring his beautiful features. It makes him look older than his teenage years—and I hate it. His dark blue eyes stand out against his tan skin and jet-black hair.

  “Whatever it is, can’t you let it go until tomorrow?” he asks but doesn’t stop to let me answer. “We both need to shower and get ready for tonight.”

  “Stay out of this, Danny. This is between me and your brother. Go practice or study for next week’s test. Go do something,” I order. “It’s hours before either of you need to be there. The band doesn’t start playing until nine.”

  Ten Seven is a small dive bar that I own jointly with Malachi. We don’t run it, as we don’t have the spare time, but it’s something we enjoy as a side business that’s separate from our law enforcement career. It’s not far from a precinct down the block. There are always more badges in there at any given hour than there are civilians.

  Amateur bands play nightly. Confessions, my boys’ alternative rock band, plays there every few weeks, depending on if one of them is grounded.

  I mock a fake laugh, turning on the couch to face them. “That is if you both make it there to play in the first place. So . . .”

  I know what he did, and although I’m not mad at him, he still got into trouble yet again at school yesterday. This has to stop. I’m tired of having the same conversation with him over and over.

  Danny grabs the rail at the bottom of the stairs. “You’re on your own, bro.” Then he ascends, taking the steps two at a time, leaving his younger brother down here with me to face the music of his actions.

  He blows out a breath of air before stepping toward me, his platinum-blond hair and fair features a stark contrast next to his brother’s polar opposite looks.

  Damn kids think they know everything. Think they’re smarter than everyone else too. In their defense, they’re both too smart for their own good. It gets them in more trouble than not.

  This is the part of parenting that I hate. I don’t like reprimanding either of them, but someone has to teach them to grow up to be good, hard-working men that I hope they’ll turn into one day.

  “Take a seat.” I flick my eyes, telling him where to go, my voice firm when on the inside I am anything but. Here we go again.

  7

  — Jamie —

  Present

  That video gutted me.

  Realizing I’ve been wrong about everything this whole time shredded me. Ripped me apart from the inside out. Leaving every pore on my skin open and bleeding. We could have been together this whole time.

  I haven’t felt the burning sensation that lives just below the surface of my skin in years—but it’s back with a vengeance. When I was mad or upset as a kid, it felt like I was burning alive inside my own body. It was painful. I couldn’t control it. My parents took me to doctors, specialists, psychiatrists, they all said it was in my head. It wasn’t really there.

  Bullshit.

  I felt it. They didn’t. It was real. I can’t explain it. I still don’t understand it myself, but I did learn the signs. I started to recognize when it was about to happen. I could walk away from the situation to avoid it happening, or I could forge through it. Force it out of my mind, which is what I did most of the time.

  Over the years, it’s lessened so much that I thought it’d just stopped, went away for good. I was wrong. My skin is hot to the touch, like my blood is boiling underneath. Sweat begins rolling off my body like it’s the middle of July in Mississippi instead of the cool mid-January Southern California breezes.

  I don’t miss those days. I haven’t been back home in years. I don’t miss that place either. It was a reminder of what I lost. Only now, I know I was wrong; so wrong that I don’t even know where to start or how I got here. I haven’t had time to fully process it or figure out where I got off track. I don’t even remember when I stopped thinking something bad had happened to Elise and started to believe she ditched me. That she didn’t love me as much as I loved her.

  This is messed up.

  She was pregnant with my baby when she was kidnapped. She was beaten until she lost him, or her. The thought that she had to deal with all of that alone sends a cold shiver down my spine. Only it doesn’t cool me off. The heat, if anything, is a cold burn that hurts far worse.

  “We’re here,” Seth says, pulling to a stop alongside a curb and parking his Range Rover across the street from what appears to be a small dive bar. Ten Seven the sign above the entrance displays. It’s neon, in a bright blue color. Makes me think of the code for when officers go off duty. I have a buddy that works for Santa Clarita PD. We met when he would do security side jobs for the band when we used to do smaller shows back in the day. Now tha
t we’re a lot bigger, he’s just a friend of the band. “Did you check his phone location to make sure he’s still showing in this area?”

  After spending time puking my guts up, then smashing a lot of things in Cole’s house after he wouldn’t answer his phone, it finally dawned on me that I knew the password to his account. That gave me access to the GPS on his cell phone, locating him. He’s been at this location damn near all day, but the guys wouldn’t let me come hours ago. They wanted me to cool off so I wouldn’t do something stupid that I’d later regret.

  I haven’t. Not one damn degree have I chilled. I have since calmed down, though. I’m not hysterical like I was this morning after watching that brutal, sickening video.

  What kind of sick fuck records that kind of shit? He better pray to God I never find him, because if I do, I won’t stop at the same beating he gave Elise. I’ll end his miserable life. He took Elise from me. He hurt her beyond comprehension. He murdered our child.

  I honestly don’t know how she survived what she went through. And I won’t have those answers until I find Cole and then her. I can’t lie to myself, I’m scared. I’m scared of seeing her again, knowing I let her down, let us down. She didn’t do anything wrong. I did. And for that, I’m not sure if I can ever forgive myself.

  Had I handled things differently, I would never have been in a loveless marriage. I would have been with the girl I fell in love with twenty-five years ago. Elise would have been my partner, my friend, my wife.

  It feels like my heart is being crushed all over again. Maybe because it is.

  “He’s still here,” I tell them, looking down at the lit-up screen in my lap that shows Cole is inside that bar across from us. From inside Seth’s vehicle, I hear music, a live band, but I can’t bring myself to reach for the door handle.