by Ace Gray
My head started to hurt, a thump behind my temples had me lying back and rubbing my forehead. Over and over and over just like the memories. The memories that lulled me into a deep and restless sleep.
“Merce!” My yell cut through the bass whomping through the house and shaking the picture frames as I saw her roll her ankle. The full weight of her small body conspired against her as she teetered on the single step that lead from the kitchen down to the sunken living room.
I ran for her, shoving the people in front of me aside as if they were nothing. Anything to get to her.
“Are you okay?” I asked as she yelped, “Ouch! Ouch, ouch, ouch.”
She hopped on one foot around the kitchen island and I followed after, my worry shifting to a smirk as she carried on.
“Mercy,” I stepped in front of her haphazard path and looked down on her with the smile I saved only for her. “Come here.” I opened my arms and waited for her.
She flushed my favorite shade as she snuggled into me. I automatically lifted her up and carried her to our bedroom.
“Get the fuck out of here!” I yelled when I found two kids rolling on each other. And likely on ecstasy.
They scrambled out and I set Mercy down long enough to throw the comforter back over the sullied sheets. She stood patiently until I picked her up and placed her just so. I slid underneath her ankles to sit and lifted the wounded one.
“Tell me where it hurts,” I commanded softly.
She smiled then leaned forward and pointed to her ankle. I bent to kiss it. She pointed a little higher on the outside of her calf. I let my lips drag along her skin up to the spot her fingerprint had grazed.
“Better?” I asked, my lips still stuck against her skin. She nodded as she captured her lip between her teeth. “Anywhere else hurt?”
She pointed to the inside of her thigh. I shot my eyebrows up at her then ducked to kiss her skin all the same.
“And here.” She slid beneath her skirt and pressed her finger to the apex of her thighs.
All too willingly, I lifted her skirt and dove underneath. I let my lips graze her thighs, relishing the salty, sweet taste of her. When I licked her, my nostrils flared and the full scent of her, of her arousal, assaulted me. I growled for no other reason than that I wanted to devour her whole. She moaned, accepting her fate loud enough for all the heavens to hear…if it weren’t for the bass.
My tongue darted into her then my lips folded around her. I slid the nub of her clit back and forth and back again as her body jerked in time with my movements.
“Tey,” she cried, digging her fingers into my hair and pulling me hard against her.
I did everything in my power to live up to the desperation that dripped from those beautiful pink fucking lips. Gentle full licks, deep exploring flicks, finding a rhythm that had her gasping, groaning, and grinding on my face until I couldn’t take it anymore.
The ache to be inside her, to breathe the same air was more than a physical pain. I slid from between her legs, needing the pressure inside me to unwind, the pain to dissipate. I took her lips and she sucked on mine, greedy as she kissed the salt of her off me. She melded around me, her arms becoming my necklace, her legs my new waistband. I was about to slide into her when her yelp froze me cold.
“What’s wrong? What did I do?”
“Nothing,” she gasped. “It’s nothing.”
I shoved up onto extended arms so I could look her full in the face. “It’s not nothing. What hurt?”
“My ankle,” she answered sheepishly.
“Merce,” I chided with a smile to hide the painful boner I needed to shove back into my shorts. “Let me take care of you. Ice? Ibuprofen?”
Her eyes darted to my crotch then to my eyes and back again. “What about that?” Just the way she smirked told me what eight inches “that” referred to.
“Just tell me what you need. We can pick up where we left off the moment you can throw your ankles behind your head. Or my head. Or anywhere else you please.”
She flushed that beautiful color again, and her eyelashes dusted her smiling cheeks. “Both, please.”
I nodded then slid out from between her thighs and tucked my cock—and its pulsing throb—away. The hallway was dotted with drugged kids, and fondling couples. I wove in between them to the keg and scooped ice from beside the shell, and threw it into a towel I picked up off the counter. With ice in hand, I waited in line for my own bathroom only to raid a completely empty medicine cabinet.
“Merce, I found ice, but I’ve gotta go get you ibuprofen.”
“Stay with me.”
“Always and forever.” I smiled and turned anyway; she wanted ibuprofen, she was getting it.
I left the house, thumping with its wild bass and blinding lights, behind me. The sharp gravel dug into my feet, and I winced but with a smile on my face. Walk on broken glass they said, though who they were, I had no idea. Happily I answered to no one in particular as I started slinking down the street to the convenience store.
After all, Mercy was worth every single drop of my blood.
I left.
I had left and Mercy had never said anything. Danger, Diego and Rousse hadn’t known.
My eyes shot open, and I searched the concrete ceiling of my cell for… well, something. It wasn’t an alibi or an answer, it was just more. More was something that I’d given up on ever having, ever even wanting again. But this more…
I craved it. More of the memory. More of the story. More time to comb over it.
Max’s voice came back to me, demanding I tell the story, forcing me to remember. I concentrated on seeing her brown eyes framed by those thick glasses, her bangs betraying the looks she’d punctuate with hidden eyebrows. She’d pulled it out of me.
For hours, I replayed the memory, complete with Max, pulling teeth. Over and over and over until the sun cast new shadows on my ceiling.
“You done being a cunt, kid?” Priest’s voice echoed in the early morning silence.
“How’d you know I was up?”
“You’ve been breathing hard since somewhere around four.”
“I remembered.” It was all the answer he’d need.
His bed creaked and soft footfalls echoed as he took up his favorite position, arms through bars, foot propped on the bottom rung. “Does it clear you?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so,” I said. “Not yet anyway.”
“Not yet?”
“It’s not all there.” I tried not to snarl. “There are still holes.”
“No memory of who…?”
The answer was no. A giant fucking middle finger of a no. Nothing in any of the memories was even a hint at who it could have been. But there was something in the memory that I clung to.
Hope.
Only it wasn’t the bright sunshine that it used to be. I’d hardened here. My hope had warped and blackened to something closer to smoldering embers.
“No, I don’t remember,” I answered honestly, “but I think I will. And I think I’d like to learn a little more about revenge.”
Amputees describe the sensation of a phantom limb. The leg or arm or even finger is gone forever but they find themselves still sensing it there, still trying to use it.
After two years, that was Dantè.
I had cried so hard for so. damn. long. For someone lost to me. I hadn’t taken a real breath for the first eight months he was gone. I hadn’t slept well for a year.
But here we were, two years later, and Mackenzie Relle had finally gone to see Dantè. I’d sold my soul to make sure she went, and her simple text I’m in let me take a deep breath. Two years and something was finally going to happen. I felt it in my bones.
I unlocked my phone and felt my fingers as steady as they’d been in years as I pulled up her message. Four letters. That was all it took to build me back up a little. I even smiled at the screen.
“You look beautiful when you smile.”
I looked up to find Danger watchi
ng me as if he were a hawk and I was his prey. My smile faltered but when he crooked his head and narrowed his gaze, making chills run down my spine, my smile snapped back into place. He righted his head then let his smile spread to match. Everything in me tensed.
“What made you smile.” He stepped closer to me, and I stepped back automatically.
The small voice tucked deep inside me, the one that sounded an awful lot like Dantè, told me to lie. “Just Facebook.” I shrugged.
“That was a Dantè Rogue smile.”
My smile faltered again and I had to swallow the knot in my throat. “He’s gone,” I croaked.
“And he better stay that way, Mercy. He’s dangerous.”
I watched Danger for a moment, then nodded my agreement because I didn’t know what else to do. He was the dangerous one. The way it radiated off him had become more pronounced over the years. He didn’t talk about Dantè—none of them did—unless I started it. And even then, it was to snap at me. To warn me. It made me sick. When he put on a suit and went to Dantè’s job—the one he’d stolen the second Dantè was gone—the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end and my stomach queezed. My body was trying to tell me something. I ignored it for Dantè.
“Don’t forget that,” Danger continued. “Don’t forget about the amount of blood that we found on the forest floor. Don’t forget the way Leo Villeres looked.”
The memories came back as if he’d reached in and pulled them from the place I’d locked them. How I’d found Dantè curled over that body, how darkly dyed in crimson his hands were. He’d been terrified, and shockingly, the man dead below him wasn’t.
“Not smiling now are you?”
“You’re an asshole, Danger.” My voice quaked. “I didn’t need to relive any of that.” I stood from the couch and walked away from him.
The kitchen wasn’t far but was my domain, and I prayed Danger wouldn’t follow me. I bent over the sink and sucked in a deep breath. How dare he say those things? How cruel could he be? The fall of his footsteps clipped against the kitchen tile, and I tensed just before he set his hand on my shoulder.
“He left you Merce. After all his promises, he left. He fucking left you.” His words were so sharp they poked at the very depths of my soul, at that very wound that just wouldn’t heal inside me. “He wanted blood more than he wanted you.”
That last statement took it out of me. Where I’d been strong before, where I’d felt something closer to hope than anything I’d known in the past few months, now I felt hollow. And the tears started to whip through me.
“Ah Merce, come here.” He pulled me into his chest and held me in a tight hug. “I just had to remind you of the reality. It’s the only way I can keep you safe. It’s the only way I can keep you from that loneliness that lingers on your shoulders.”
I let him hold me as I mulled over the words. He thought he was keeping me sane by keeping Dantè away but it was slowly driving me to madness. The boys tried to fill Dantè’s absence but they only made it all the more noticeable. They weren’t him. They didn’t realize that being with them wasn’t right without him. That I did it for the money.
And maybe just the smallest bit because I was scared.
Danger dropped his hold and stepped back. His arms were gone but his words weren’t. They started spinning inside me.
The blood on the forest floor.
I tried to shove them back. I tried lock them back up. Dantè was innocent.
He was dangerous.
They didn’t listen. They didn’t search for the real truth. They took him. All of them.
He left you.
I wrapped my arms around myself as I lived in those three words. He hadn’t meant to go, he hadn’t meant to break that promise, but he had. He had and he’d left me alone. Tears puddled in the corners of my eyes, as I realized how very lonely I was. How banged up and broken because of it too.
My cell phone buzzed, and the hope I’d felt flare in my chest from Mackenzie Relle fought against the damper Danger had put on my insides. I scrambled for where I’d discarded it on a countertop, only to find a random number calling. I answered it just in case.
“Hello, did you know one in four senior citizens will fall unattended in their home this year? Purchasing Life Alert is the only way to guarantee your loved ones can maintain their independence and safety.”
I hung up on the automated voice, feeling that each time the tattered pieces of my hope gathered and rose, they plummeted and scattered that much further. The tears started to fall whether I wanted them to or not. And when one dotted my screen, I decided to message Mackenzie.
did you see him? how did it go?
I waited, praying she would answer, and when three dots popped up, I gathered up all those stupid pieces and held them along with my breath.
he’s not what I expected and this isn’t going to be easy. it’s going to take some time.
he’s angry.
My heart broke. For Dantè sure but for me too. For the never-ending barrage of hurt that I had to face. For the loneliness. For the tiny pieces of my heart and my life that were scattered across the floor, that I just didn’t have the strength to keep picking up some days.
“Why are you crying?” Diego’s voice was behind me a moment before he turned me and pressed his palm to my cheek to wipe away my tears.
I tried to say it was nothing but the words wouldn’t come, so I settled for shaking my head.
“Pretty girls shouldn’t cry.”
My gaze slid up to his, and what should have been a comforting look of a brother, was…off. It seemed unfocused, as his grip got tighter on my hips. Whatever was behind his eyes appeared to burn and his pupils grew in size. I couldn’t quite place the why, but it was unsettling. He traveled frequently for work but each time I saw him between, things were different.
“What do you want Diego?” I asked softly.
“I don’t want you to cry.” His words were sweet but the undertone was…rotten was the only word that came to mind. “Tell me why you’re crying and I’ll fix it.”
He pressed himself closer, and the sinew of his muscles felt like a trap, even though he was a golden god with a megawatt smile. My heart started to race but not in a pleasant way, my hands felt a little clammy against the countertop. My instincts told me to slip out now while there was still space between us. “I’m just lonely.”
“I can fix that.” He stepped closer.
I started to shake my head, but he brought his hand back to my cheek and stilled me.
“Don’t touch me, Diego,” I said, albeit weakly.
“Danger gets to hug you. Rousse too.” The fire in his eyes calmed a little, replaced by hurt. I didn’t know how to tell him that I didn’t trust his motives. I couldn’t even finger the concrete reason I felt that way.
I’d caught Diego looking at me from time to time since we met, but he’d always look away the moment I became aware of it. Not this time. And what I saw in his eyes unsettled me. How close he stood. Those words…
“Diego…” I almost choked. “Please.” I tried to back away but felt the edge of the counter dig into my backside.
He hung his head and, for a moment, he was the boy that had waited at the breakfast bar for my burritos and tried to beat me when we played video games. He seemed kind and caring and…innocent. I reached up to shove my hand through his hair like I used to only to see his gaze fixed on my chest and realize I’d been very, very wrong.
Those fucking tits. So perfect. So delicious. Plump. Ripe. Ready for my lips. My dick. And on display. Ughhhhhhhhh.
I couldn’t look away.
I wanted to—I think—but I couldn’t. Her body was my siren song. I would crash upon the rocks over and over and over again for her. I mean, I still wanted her to say yes, to say be with me, Diego but I was also running out of patience. I let my body lean toward her as I sucked in a deep breath, relishing her fresh tropical scent. My eyes fluttered shut, but I could still see her, cornered as she was,
as she was beneath me.
My hands itched to reach out. To take her. I mean, she couldn’t really protest if I touched her. Not if we were meant to be. Not since Dantè was long gone. My hand flexed, ready to grab her.
“Well, well, well, what do we have here?” Danger asked from behind me. I blew out a deep breath and let my hand relax.
“I was just consoling Mercy,” I said with a shrug as I slid to her side; I tried not to notice how she sighed with relief.
“What on earth is wrong? Merce?” Danger asked her but he looked at me.
“She’s lonely,” I answered for her, watching as she swallowed a lump in her throat.
“Understandable,” Danger said as he slid in between us and wrapped his arm around her slight shoulders. “But you always have us.”
It took everything in me not to growl at him. He shot me a look. And then she looked up at him with a familiar kindness and gratitude crinkling her brow.
“I’ll pull him out of your hair.” He bent to kiss her forehead before stepping away and locking onto my forearm then pulling.
I bumped along behind him as Danger pulled me from the kitchen back to his bedroom and shut the door behind us.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he snapped.
“If you’re gonna question me in here, turn that fucking camera off. I don’t want to be on the same tape as the dude who was balls deep in you last night.” I rolled my eyes.
“Fine.” Danger walked over and flipped the small hidden switch then turned back to me. “You had her cornered bro?”
I heard the question in his statement and for a brief second, I thought about shrugging him off.
“It just kinda happened.” I shrugged. “Didn’t mean anything.”
“Oh it meant something. It meant that you’re losing what little grip on reality you had.” Danger rubbed his face and let it stretch his bottom lip.