by Ace Gray
“Vengeance is a heady thing. It’s the blinding need to punish. The bone-deep desire to see someone fall to their knees. It replaces your blood, thumps through your chest. It becomes your reason for living and breathing. In one second—one sentence, actually—I went from his friend and partner to the man he’d wronged. And just by living.”
The words struck a chord so deep inside me, I didn’t recognize the origin. I didn’t know why either.
“I killed him because he made my good life look like garbage. I killed her because she was his. I killed the rest of them because they saw.”
Each hair on the back of my neck stood on end. I was grateful for the bars between us, especially when his deep, rasp of a voice finished his thought.
“And I’d do it all over again.”
“And I’d do it all over again.” Danger’s voice warbled in and out of my ears, sharper then underwater, just like it had been all night.
“You killed someone. You killed him and you’re framing one of our best friends for it.” Rousse was higher pitched but still the same in and out.
“We killed someone. WE are framing Dantè. Don’t you fucking forget it.”
I tried to protest. With words, with fists, with anything, but I couldn’t move. Or speak. I was a carcass in their hands, only able to listen as my world chipped away.
“Just get his legs and let’s get this over with, Rousse,” Diego chided.
The crinkles in Rousse’s forehead were thick, and something twinkled in the corner of his eyes as he hugged each ankle in the crook of his elbows. As soon as the cool breeze kissed my face, his disappeared into shadow. The moon was the only thing I could make out anymore. Well, the moon and the treetops that it chose to touch.
“Dantè?” Mercy’s voice carried on the wind. “Are you out there? Boys do you have him?”
The world folded in on itself, swallowing her voice and the moon and blending them together in the darkness.
Cold. Wet. They were the first things that I registered after I found earth again. Hard beneath my knees and soft beneath my chest were the next. I pushed up to kneeling, this time my body doing what my brain commanded. The ground beneath me—the surface—wasn’t like anything I could place and my elbows wobbled.
“He’s coming to.” Diego’s voice was back behind the trees.
“Last chance,” Rousse begged but didn’t come for me.
“One last blood oath.” Danger was just as dark as the world around me.
“My knife.”
I could picture Diego pulling it out of his board short pockets.
“My blood.” Rousse winced, trailing the word into too many syllables.
I would have been next. A distant part of my brain tried to volunteer but my tongue was still thick in my mouth. I checked my palms all the same for the gash of a blood oath with my brothers.
Blood was exactly what I found.
Everywhere.
My palms coated. My forearms too. The whole world snapped into place with the scream that ripped from my throat.
I gasped as my eyes shot open. A cold sweat wiped off my brow onto my pillow as I turned over in my prison bed and stared at the drain in the floor.
More.
I’d wanted it so bad I could taste it.
More.
I had it and I wanted to spit it out and wretch my insides until any small bit was gone.
The memory had come back courtesy of Priest’s story. The memory of my best friends betraying me. They’d drugged me with that damn Baja fog. They’d watched me. Waited. And then they fucking framed me.
My heart cracked, and I felt the tears well in the corners of my eyes. Only this time they weren’t tears of sadness, of loss. They were fury. And hatred.
And vengeance.
“In one second—one sentence actually…” Priest’s words echoed again inside my head.
It was one memory in my case. One lucid moment amidst the moonlight when I remembered my friends, the fuckers I loved best, had tried to bury me in shadow. And why? Because my life was good? Because I worked hard? Because I was in love? Or was I? Not even Mercy had spoken up to defend me when my life had been laid at her feet.
Come to think of it, she hadn’t talked about what mattered at all. She hadn’t told the court about the convenience store. She hadn’t told them I’d left. And if she hadn’t told them that, was anything else she said even fucking real? Had she lied up there like all the rest of those godforsaken monsters?
A snarl built in my chest and echoed in the room.
“You remembered.” Priest matched my rough sound from beyond the concrete.
“I did.”
“You were framed.”
“I was betrayed.” The ice that frosted my voice didn’t surprise me when I realized what they’d really done.
I welcomed the cold.
They’d planned to put me here. They’d worked to do it. My insides eviscerated with the pain. And with the hate. It all piled up together. And now, who I was, what I’d become, wanted to tear them into the ribbons they’d left me in.
“Are you going to tell that pretty little advocacy lawyer?”
The question hung between us, the subtext loud and clear. Was I going to trade my cell for theirs? The hot tears that still hovered against the bridge of my nose quivered as my heart rate ticked up. I wanted them to feel this. I wanted them to experience the evaporation of hope as they stared at concrete and felt time slip through their fingertips.
And yet, I wanted them to know more.
More loss. More desperation. More pain.
I wanted them to know it at my hands. And in a second—in a sentence—my purpose changed.
“No, I’m not going to tell Max.”
“What are you going to do?” There was a hint of laughter trailing from Priest’s cell.
The corners of my smile curled up, forcing the tears I’d been holding back to fall. The salt of my sadness washed away what I had been. Something dark and menacing replaced it wholly, filling up my chest. My life.
I smiled even wider as I answered, “I’m going to make them pay.”
I kept staring at the screen, wondering if Apple had a limit on unanswered texts someone could receive. Or what it looked like when someone blocked a number. Was it just an infinite blue bubble to stare at and pose the question of existence to, over and over and over again?
Because that’s what I doing.
Every day I woke up and stared at Mackenzie Relle’s name in my phone. I sent her a message every day at lunch. Sometimes those few letters were the only thing I could stomach anyway. And at night, I cried. Most of the time right over top of that screen. She was the only link I had to Dantè. She was the only link and she’d gone quiet.
For a little while, she’d given me tiny updates. Saw him. Have an idea. He was happy today. Visit cut short. But those had faded. And left me with a one sided conversation as blue as I was.
“Merce?” My name was muffled by my door, Rousse knocked a moment later. “Merce, you in there?”
I shoved my meek little tears aside and pushed my phone beneath my pillow. “Come in.”
Rousse tucked his head around the door first and fed me his weak smile. I managed one back; had it been anyone else I would have played asleep.
“Hey, I made pancakes.” He stepped in further with a plate. “They’re not as good as yours but…” He shrugged as he shut the door behind him and helped himself to the edge of the bed.
“But I haven’t made them in a long time,” I finished for him as I pushed up and leaned against the headboard.
“I get it,” he said as he handed me the plate.
The warmth of the pancakes helped heat my icy hands and the sugar syrup had a similar effect on my heart.
“I’m sorry.” I looked away, shyly.
“No.” He grabbed my leg through the comforter. “That’s not what I meant.”
I managed a small smile as I balanced my plate and reach for his hand. “I kn
ow.” And I did. Rousse was the only one that listened to the things I said. The things I left unsaid.
He slid back in the bed and leaned against the headboard next to me, letting me eat a few bites before he took a deep breath. I felt the weight of his question before he asked it.
“Are you dating Diego?”
The words were so stark when he said them so simply. I wanted to heave back up the few bites I’d eaten. And it was because of the answer.
“Sort of.” I set the plate down and pulled my knees up to my chest.
I didn’t like it, matter of fact, pieces of me revolted against it, but Danger had dug at my insides. I was lonely. I mean, God, the text obsession alone screamed my secrets. And somehow, Diego still found that wreck and revolt worth loving. Even if his brand of love was moving closer to creepy every day...
“What does sort of mean?”
“It means I’m lonely,” I whispered into the crook of my knees. His hand reached for one of mine and wove his fingers in between mine to hold my hand limply on the bed. “I don’t want to be,” I confessed.
“Then I’m glad.” He squeezed my hand. “You don’t deserve to sit in a puddle of heartache forever. It’s already been too long.”
“Oh but I do.”
“Mercy—”
“I should have gone down there every single day. I should have found a way to talk to him. If he could just hear my voice…” A single unladylike sob escaped me. I tried to breathe through it but my shoulders shook the way they always did. “I should have showed him none of this mattered. That I love him. That I’ll be waiting.” Each word was stilted, and my breaths were sharp and angry.
“Mercy, about Dantè…” Something in Rousse’s voice pulled my eyes up to his. There was pain there too, a different kind but I saw it.
“Are you in bed with my girlfriend?” Diego interrupted from the doorframe. Neither of us had heard him open the door.
“I brought her breakfast,” Rousse said by way of defense as he slowly slid from my side. I only let go of his hand at the last moment. I missed the warmth as soon as it was gone and felt the full ire and ice of Diego’s stare. “I was just being friendly.” Rousse held up his hands in surrender as he slunk away.
I met Diego’s anger head on and swallowed the tight knot in my throat. “He’s always been my friend, nothing more, Diego. You know that.”
“I was your friend and nothing more.” He quirked his head in that way he had. It was such a simple movement but also…wrong. Shivers ran up my spine.
“I just wanted to bring her breakfast like she used to do for us.” Rousse must have felt the same small warning.
“Fuck you, Rousse!” He lunged at Rousse with a full fist.
“No, Diego. Stop!”
I launched myself at Diego, and a few things happened so fast we must have looked like a tornado. Rousse scrambled back only to trip over his feet and my lamp. Glass shattered when the light bulb crashed against my bedside table. Diego pulled his fist back—maybe in reaction to me, maybe because Rousse was doing a good enough job beating himself up—but his elbow crashed into my chest, and the air whooshed out of my lungs. I fell back to my bed, and my head crashed against the plate I’d left and the upturned fork on top. Heat seeped at the spot that ached the most at the crown of my head, the spot that had been stabbed.
And then Diego was on top of me.
“Stop?” he asked, spit spraying across my face. “Are you taking his side?”
I wasn’t and I had to believe he knew that. Deep down, he had to see that I was trying to stop it, nothing more, nothing less. Right?
“No,” I whispered.
“Why won’t you take mine? I always take yours.” He pushed me harder against the bed.
“She’s bleeding.” Rousse’s words were garbled from his pile on the floor, and he reached for Diego’s wrist to pull him from me and left red streaks himself. A knot of fear choked my throat, fortified by the throb and pain.
“I can’t hear you, you fucking traitor.” Diego’s body shook with fury as he roared at Rousse.
“Merce, you’re bleeding bad.” Rousse didn’t back down. He found strength in his voice and his pull as he yanked harder on Diego’s wrist. “I think she needs stitches, Diego.”
“I wonder if you two can stitch my heart back together after all of this. She says yes to a date then pushes me away. She’s lonely, she’s hurt, but does she think about me? About how hurt I am?” He finally shifted his gaze from Rousse to me, but his eyes were cloudy, unseeing. “Be mine,” he begged. “I was gone for a month and it’s like you didn’t even miss me.” He bent down toward me only to freeze. His focus snapped back and his eyes went wide.
“We need to get her to a hospital!” Rousse was near desperate as I woozed beneath Diego.
“Oh my God. She’s bleeding.” His face contorted with disgust as he reached for the back of my head, gently pressing his fingertips to the aching spot.
“What do you think I was trying to fucking say?” Rousse finally dislodged Diego from my body with a lowered blow from his shoulder.
“I hurt you?” Diego pulled his fingers into my line of sight and watched the slick of my blood circle on his fingertips.
“Yeah, and you need to get off her so we can take her to the hospital.” Rousse, God love him, started to collect me in his arms.
“I hurt you.” Diego didn’t ask this time. Pain and horror marred his voice.
“It’s okay,” I offered as Rousse steadied me on my feet.
“It’s not okay!” He broke, shouting loud enough that both Rousse and I shrunk back. “You mean so much to me. I would never hurt you.” Despite being the one that was bleeding, Diego sounded like the one in agony.
“I promise it’s okay.” I reached out to soothe him if only so Rousse and I could leave the room.
“Let me make it up to you.”
“Yes. Fine. Whatever.” Anything to get out of the room.
He reached up and smoothed the hair off my face. He smiled a sweet smile and it was that simple, seemingly chivalrous gesture that finally made me shake. It was simple. It was sweet. But right now, right here, it was so out of place. So many things about Diego were out of place these days…
“Thank you for taking care of her, Rousse.” Diego’s smile widened as Rousse started to pull me toward the hall. “You’re a good friend to Mercy. To me.”
I wanted to scoff but something rooted deep in the pit of my stomach told me to swallow the sound. Rousse didn’t have the same instinct. Diego swiveled to watch us and his eyes narrowed for a moment. Every muscle in my body tensed, ready for round two. I held my breath, my ribs holding it until they were damn near painful, but only sincerity colored Diego’s face.
“Can you make sure you have her back in time for our date?” he asked, suddenly his normal, chipper self. “Tonight? At seven?”
“What the fuck, you’re not going on a date,” Rousse spat.
This time he wasn’t met with the same, distant and detached Diego. Fire flamed up behind his eyes, and his shoulders shot toward his ear. He took one tension-laced step toward us, drawing my attention to his fists balled at his sides.
“That sounds lovely,” I choked out. “Dinner. A date. At seven,” I stuttered but I forced the words. I wouldn’t see Rousse get hit on my account.
“You want to go on a date with me?” Just like a roller coaster, Diego had risen up from his anger again. So fast it was disorienting. I shook my head only to feel the renewed pain and throb of the wound back there. The same instinct that had kept me quiet before made me speak up now.
“Yes. Yes please.” My heart broke when I said it. Betrayal of the worst kind sharpening it’s claws and shredding at my heart. My heart that I wanted to be Dantè’s now and forever just as it always had been. Saying those three words had been self-preservation but they were equal parts self-destruction too. Something shuddered deep within my soul.
“It’s gonna be magical.” Diego smiled, a tw
inkle in his eye. “We’re gonna go to Pasta Gianna’s. See a classic movie.” He almost floated out of the room.
He didn’t even notice when Rousse scooped me up and ran me to the ER. Rousse didn’t notice that I still prayed his chest would reform as Dantè’s. That his heart would beat to the tune I still missed with each aching breath.
He just wiped my tears and figured he knew why I cried.
Two Months Later…
I was fixated on that memory. On the feel of the wind that blew on my face, the light of moon that shined down that night. On the sounds of the damning words from the people I loved most. That night played over and over and over until I could taste it.
Breathe it.
Bleed that night and what they’d done to me.
We’d been blood brothers…What had I ever done but love them? What had I ever done to deserve this? Why had they ripped my life away?
Why had they ripped Mercy away?
Or had she ever been part of me in the first place? After that memory, her voice almost complicit when she hollered under the moon, I wondered. Her name didn’t seem so sacred. And the more I played it over, the more I questioned if it ever was.
Had she really been in on it?
More importantly, could I get my revenge on her if she was? Because Priest’s story had me damn near desperate for it with the boys. Could I really be that ruthless when it came to her? She held the answer, twined with was any of it ever real?
“Earth to Dantè.” Max waved her tiny hands in front of my face, drawing me from my darkness. I smiled and her answering one was worth leaving retribution behind for a moment. “Um…ah…they, ah, brought burger.” She tripped and fell over her words.
“Brought burger? You caveman?” I quirked my eyebrows up. “Here I thought I was the inmate.”
“You’re free, remember.” She waggled a french fry at my face.
Free.
Max had done it. After two more months, motions and retrials, testimony from those I’d never met—or at least couldn’t remember I had—and endless tenacity, I was free. She’d picked me up this afternoon when I walked out of the chain link fenced, capped with spiral razor wire, and had become my soft place to land for an hour or so.