Ashes of Merciless

by Odette Michael

  Ashes of Merciless

  Odette Michael

  Copyright © 2020 Odette Michael

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission from the author.

  Cover design by: Sevahc

  For my cousin, Austin. Thank you for being the best friend anyone could ever have.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1 Twisted Memories

  Chapter 2 Risk

  Chapter 3 Caught

  Chapter 4 Evaluated

  Chapter 5 Assignment

  Chapter 6 Not The Only One

  Chapter 6 Murder Or Mercy

  Chapter 7 Fault

  Chapter 8 Traitor

  Chapter 9 The Wall Shatters

  Chapter 10 One Year

  Chapter 11 Another Way

  Chapter 12 Endure

  Chapter 13 Memorial

  Chapter 14 Enemy Of My Enemy

  Chapter 15 Trust

  Chapter 16 Confessions

  Chapter 17 Ambush

  Chapter 18 Mirror Image

  Chapter 19 Revenge

  Acknowledgements

  About The Author

  Books By This Author

  Chapter 1 Twisted Memories

  “Ashley, time to come inside!”

  “Just a few more minutes, Mama!” I yelled back. “Come here, Noodles. Come here, silly boy.”

  I reached for my golden Pomeranian. He’d stolen my shoe, and being as stubborn as any six-year-old, I was very determined to get it back.

  It only took one lap around the yard to achieve my goal.

  “Haha!” I announced triumphantly, holding my prize up high into the air. I leaned down so my face was close to the little dog. “These are my new glitter shoes that Daddy got for me. You can’t eat them, ok?”

  Noodles licked my nose in response.

  “Eww!” I screeched. “Noodle cooties!”

  “Ashley Garreth, I said it was time to come inside. Lunch is ready.”

  I squealed and turned around. “Mama, you scared me.” I picked up Noodles and held him to my chest. “Noodles tried to eat my shoe.”

  Mama tucked her pale blonde hair behind her ears and bent down toward me.

  “If your Daddy saw you right now, he’d have a fit. Just look at your dress!”

  I looked down at my purple flower dress. It was covered with dirt and grass stains, and there was a long rip in the hem.

  “Daddy will buy me a new one,” I assured her.

  “Your Daddy spoils you rotten,” Mama muttered, rolling her eyes as she patted Noodles on his head. “And let me guess—Noodles was the one who ruined your dress?”

  I giggled. “Yup!”

  Mama sighed, taking one of my hands. Noodles whined as I shifted him to my hip.

  “You know you can’t blame Noodles for everything, sweetheart. Last week you said he was the one who ate all of the oatmeal raisin cookies.”

  “But he did!”

  “Ashley, I’m not going to tolerate lying from you.”

  “What’s ‘tolerate’ mean?” I asked as she pulled me toward the house.

  “It means ‘allow’,” Mama replied.

  “Ok, then I can’t tolerate any more tuna fish sandwiches for lunch.” I wrinkled my nose, resisting against her pull. Noodles struggled against my side, and he dropped to the grass beside me.

  Mama let go of my hand and crossed her arms over her chest. “Who said anything about tuna fish? I made you macaroni and cheese.”

  “Really? That’s my favorite!”

  Mama laughed. “I know that, silly goose. But let’s go inside and wash up first, ok? Your hands are a sight to see.”

  “Kay,” I said as I followed her onto the patio, looking down to see that Noodles was no longer beside me. I glanced behind my shoulder to see him all the way across the lawn.

  “Noodles!” I yelled as Mama opened the sliding glass door. “Mama, I’m coming, I promise. I gotta get Noodles first because he’s hungry, too.”

  “Ok, but hurry up. It’s going to get cold,” she said as she went inside.

  “Yes, Mama.” I turned and ran, but then stopped in confusion.

  Where was Noodles? I’d just seen him.

  It was then that I noticed a little girl standing in the shadow of our giant oak tree, the tree that Daddy had put a tire swing on for me. She looked exactly my age, my height.

  I swallowed and went toward her. Maybe she knew where Noodles was.

  “Hi!” I said as I ran. “Have you seen my doggie? What’s your name?”

  I stopped about ten feet away from her, shock coursing through my veins. It felt weird, this feeling I’d never felt before. My stomach hurt, and my heart went faster.

  She looked just like me! Black hair, fair skin, silver eyes . . . And her clothes were the same, grass stains and all. Everything was the same.

  Except . . .

  I shuffled forward closer. Everything was a mirror except for the smile she wore. The smile was scary. Her silver eyes were dancing.

  “H-Hello? Who are . . .?”

  And then I looked down at her hands, hands no longer hidden by the shadows. They were stained red. Liquid dripped from her fingers.

  Behind her, now very much visible, was a small ball of crimson fluff. It was not moving.

  The girl’s smile widened. “My name . . . is Ash.”

  I looked down at my own hands. They were covered in blood. I opened my mouth and screamed and screamed. . . .

  I woke up with the same scream pouring from me.

  I sat up abruptly, fumbling beside me to turn the bedside lamp on. Yellow light bathed the room, and I examined the shaking hands in front of me.

  A shuddering sigh replaced the scream on my lips. There was no blood on my hands.

  The voice came without warning; she usually did as she pleased.

  “No blood on your hands? Who are you trying to fool?”

  I sucked in a breath. I shook my head quickly, as if I could force her out. “Not right now, Ash,” I whispered.

  A snicker was my only response.

  The floor was cold on my bare feet as I made my way to the closet. I stared inside at the contents; it looked like it belonged to two people. The first side consisted of everything you’d expect to find inside a teenage girl’s closet. There were dresses in pastel colors, multiple pairs of ballet flats, and a dozen pretty purses. The other side was completely dark, the black clothes and shoes melding together in a way so that nothing was distinguishable.

  I pulled at a blue V-neck shirt, tugging it over my head with trembling fingers. I put on a pair of skinny jeans and slipped my feet into some ballet flats before glancing again at the dark side of my life.

  It wasn’t me who dropped to my knees and reached for the shoebox at the back of the closet. It wasn’t me who opened the box, shifted through the pictures it contained. It wasn’t me who found the picture, who held it up to my face.

  Something inside my chest broke as I stared at the golden Pomeranian. The image of the little girl with her arms wrapped so lovingly around Noodles made bile rise in the back of my throat.

  I dropped the photo. “Why are you doing this to me?” I whispered.

  I waited, but this time there wasn’t a response.

  The shoebox was already in front of me, so I couldn’t help myself. I picked through
the pictures until this time I was the one who found what I wanted to see.

  The picture was wrinkled, creased, and abused. Once upon a time, angry fingers had almost torn it in half. I smoothed the small tear that cut into the top left corner. A man smiled at me, his jet black hair sticking up at various angles. His silver eyes bore into mine, and a very small version of me clung to him. They looked so happy, and it filled me with a bitter longing.

  “Dad,” I murmured quietly.

  The longing was replaced with something much more poisonous.

  Anger. Hateful, consuming anger.

  I ran my index finger over his face. I didn’t know how many months had gone by since I’d last summoned the strength to pull out this old box of memories. And it hadn’t even been me who’d pulled it out this time, not really.

  “It’s because of you,” I said angrily to the man in the photo.

  I thought I felt my eyes become wet, but that was impossible. It had been so long since I’d cried that I no longer knew how to, and I couldn’t blame Ash for that—I was the one who’d lost the ability to cry.

  “It’s because of you all this has happened. Why Mom is a useless drunk. Why you’re dead. Why I’m . . .” I couldn’t finish my sentence.

  I was blaming him unfairly, but my anger still boiled to an almost unbearable degree inside of me. I crumbled the photograph between my fingers and shoved it back into the box, replacing the lid. I kicked the box into the back of my closet and leaned against the wall, panting.

  My father was murdered when I was ten years old. Not by some random hoodlum on the street or by a home robbery gone wrong, but by a man who’d beaten his whole family to death. His wife, his teenage son . . . his baby girl. The man who’d been my father’s Assignment.

  My father, Richard, had belonged to the assassination group Merciless. One of my ancestors had helped form this group far back in the past when many people hadn’t trusted the laws of the land to deal with crimes such as murder and rape. Many people had wanted to take the law into their own hands, and it turned out society wanted us more than ever in the present.

  Us . . . Because I was a member of Merciless, like my father before me. I was an Assassin, and not by choice.

  There were no choices for me.

  You couldn’t join Merciless; you had to be born into it. Every member was required to marry when they turned twenty-five, and the spouses were chosen by the Master and the Evaluator. A child had to be conceived immediately after the marriage.

  Members of Merciless held various positions. The Master, descended from the core founder Arthur George Whitlock, was the leader, and his word was law. The Evaluator was Merciless’s psychiatrist, and the Observers were our personal scouts that searched the streets for potential Seals. The Observers also watched over the Assassins and the Sealers. Even now, I didn’t fully understand how the Observers infiltrated courtrooms and police stations the way they did to obtain information—having crooked government officials and cops only went so far. Because of their skills, the Observers were the most vital members to the organization.

  Then there were the Sealers. They were the ones who interacted with the person or people who wanted the Assassination. They collected payment, and the contracts were Sealed in blood. There were other minor characters, but we were the core.

  Sealed in blood.

  I looked down at my left forearm that rested across my knees. There was an almost perfect slash marking the underside of my wrist. I ran my finger along the white scar; it was almost invisible against my pale skin.

  I remembered the fear more than anything, the fear that had been so mixed with my sadness and grief.

  The Master had given me the knife. The handle had been so cold in my small hands, hands that had belonged to a girl of only ten years. I remembered how his piercing, black eyes had mirrored the shadows in the dark room. The other members, how they’d only watched in silence. The fear like metal in my mouth as I’d slashed my wrist with the knife. No sound had come from me as I’d watched the ruby blood splatter the parchment, the contract that Sealed me with Merciless until my dying day.

  It was join or die. Betrayal was punishable by death.

  But the fear had bled into anger. Finding out who I was, who my father was, how I’d never had a choice.

  And then Ash.

  Ash was my other half, the very darkest side of me. She lived for the red of my victims, for the screams in the night. I couldn’t exactly tell you when I’d discovered Ash, or when she’d discovered me. I couldn’t even remember my first Assignment clearly—not his name, what state it had been in, or even what he’d done to Seal his own fate.

  There’d been only numbness, and although my first Assignment was a blur, I did remember waking up at Headquarters. I’d started screaming so hard that the blood vessels in my eyes popped, resulting in the Evaluator sedating me for two days straight.

  And so I’d first taken life at the tender age of thirteen.

  Even my second Assignment was murky in my mind, but my third . . . I’d known something wasn’t right when I’d walked away from the lifeless form.

  I’d been smiling.

  Not too long after that, I’d realized the adrenaline coursing through my veins hadn’t been mine. The satisfaction I’d felt, or the joy. When I’d ached for a dagger in my hand or a gun at my hip. When the nightmares started mirroring a girl who looked exactly like me, but was somehow someone else entirely.

  And then she’d started speaking to me. There’d been quite a few times I’d been positive I’d only imagined her. But with every kill, Ash became more alive.

  Sometimes, and I cringed to think about it, the words that came out of my lips weren’t mine—they were hers. My actions hers, not mine.

  Sometimes, I wasn’t sure who was Ashley, and who was Ash.

  Being sixteen and an Assassin was a rare exception to the rule. Training usually started at age twelve and continued to age seventeen. At eighteen, the career would begin. But with the death of my father, it had left us with only five Assassins, and there had to be six. I’d started training immediately after my father’s death, and I’d been given only three years to prepare instead of six.

  The Evaluator had been against this, but the Master wouldn’t hear it. The Master had claimed that there’d been a child Assassin in Merciless’s past due to a similar incident, and the child had been a remarkable asset to the group.

  Because who would suspect a child shivering on a doorstep, claiming to not know where Mommy and Daddy were?

  And sadly, he’d been right. Entry to an Assignment’s home had been much easier during my younger years. Even now, I was still the only one who would dare to knock on the door and find a way to be invited inside.

  Dad had been an amazing Assassin; I’d been told this over and over again. Dad’s skills were the reason why he’d been the one chosen for that particular Assignment, as the Assignment had somehow figured out we were after him. It was rare, but sometimes our targets got paranoid. The Assignment had even informed the police.

  The cops obviously hadn’t been too eager to help a man who’d somehow only gotten a slap on the wrist for murdering his whole family, but the one patrol car down the street hadn’t been Dad’s problem.

  It was times like that when the local police didn’t go too much out of their way to stop us, as many of the people we targeted usually wouldn’t last long in prison. Of course, there were always a few detectives trying to track us down to feed their own ego. There was also a special “secret” group from the FBI specifically targeted to find us, but it didn’t matter because of the precautions we took. As of now, we had the FBI on a false trail, making it seem as if our place of operations was somewhere in Alaska.

  But the Assignment had hired six bodyguards. The Master had wanted to send two Assassins on the Assignment, but due to circumstances and location, it just hadn’t been possible. Dad had killed them all, but in the end, it hadn’t mattered.

  I sighed and rubb
ed my eyes, always tired no matter how much I slept.

  If only Dad had been there to explain things to me when the time had come. Somehow, I knew if he’d been there for my initiation and my training, everything would have been so much easier.

  I made my way out of my room and down the stairs, pausing in the hallway at the living room door. I examined the still figure on the couch. Her blonde hair was streaked with gray, and her clothes were a rumpled mess. The room was nauseatingly heavy with the scent of alcohol and stale cigarette smoke.

  I remembered a time when I’d thought my mother was beautiful. I remembered a time when my mother had actually been a mother.

  I’d been without a mother for six years now. Although Ruth had carried me for nine months and had brought me into this world, I couldn’t bring myself to call her “Mom” anymore.

  Maybe I was being unfair. Maybe Ash had hardened my heart to the point where I could no longer love. Or maybe this was just who I was now.

  Dad’s death made Ruth lose herself permanently. She knew who my father was and what he’d done—it wasn’t exactly a secret you could keep in a marriage, which was why the spouses were so carefully chosen. The spouses were also sworn to absolute secrecy. I knew she had a scar just like mine on the underside of her wrist, and she was considered an honorary member of Merciless because of her marriage.

  I wasn’t sure what the exact requirements were for the people who were chosen as spouses for the members. All I knew was that they usually had little to no family, and it appeared to me that the Master and the Evaluator weren’t as perfect as they appeared.

  Why had Ruth fallen apart this way? Wasn’t she supposed to have a steel willpower? Didn’t she realize she still had me? Couldn’t she see that I needed her, that she wasn’t the only one who’d lost something?

  For a long time after Dad’s death, I’d lived at Headquarters. And when I’d returned home, she hadn’t even noticed. The counters had been thick with dust, the food had rotted in the refrigerator, and the bills had been months behind.

  I remembered sitting at the dining room table trying to figure out how to write out checks, forging my mother’s signature. The smell of burning food as I’d attempted to make our meals. The strange looks I’d received at the supermarket as I’d pushed the shopping cart around the store, my motions like a tiny, wide-eyed robot.