You say you like hiking huh? Well, you’re free to climb me any day of the week ;)
That was the dorkiest message I could have possibly sent, but I have no regrets.
I have one regret actually, because I think I’ve scared you off now. I do hope I didn’t make you too uncomfortable; that was never my intention. I’m just a terrible flirt, who flirts terribly when people are out of his league.
Anyways, I will shut up before this becomes creepy on my end.
(But you can always reply, I’ll still be here.)
It was, in fact,terribleflirtation, and a little bit creepy considering the space of the timestamps meant that this “R” person had come back to add a response every few days, but it was also kind of sweet that it only got dorkier after the pickup line. Mercer would never meet R. BabyCock, and he didn’t have the guts to respond just to tell him so. He also didn’t have the guts to make his profile suddenly vanish.
Why the hell had he let himself sign up for this damn app in the first place?
From the living room, Kat made her adorably melancholic beagle bay at something in the backyard. Dam squirrels were probably trying to get into the birdfeeder again. He’d have to check it later.
Mercer closed the dating app. He didn’t delete it.
Instead he swiped around his phone a bit, checking on his socials—trying not to snoop too hard on Lydia’s in the process, though the fact that she hadn’t removed him as a follower yet felt like a win—and got distracted by an update video from one of the reality stars he’d hated in the last season of the survivalist dating show, Love Cabin, before he finally managed to work his way to his professional email. Mercer had a few new commission requests, which he opened one by one, taking a moment to consider the project’s complexity and his work schedule before accepting the first two and rejecting the third.
In the middle of his draft, a new email came through. The subject alone made his skin prickle.Holy Silver.He deleted it unread and prayed it would end at that. Too many people knew where he lived, and since the news had broken that Vitalis-Barron was—allegedly—employing hunters to bring vampires into their ‘totally legal’ voluntary research studies, somehow a lot more people also knew that Mercer had, years ago, made the holy silver that had wormed its way into those very hunter’s hands.
Well, they could all fuck off.
Mercer’s stomach twisted unhappily and a slight pounding started in the left side of his head. That brought an even unhappier churning to his gut. He breathed through it, scanning his body for signs that this wasn’t the start of a migraine. No, it seemed to be just a normal flare of anxiety. And maybe a headache. His blood sugar was probably fine after the marshmallows, but he hadn’t drunk his second glass of morning water.
Mercer shut off his phone and refilled his cup, downing it twice for good measure.
He had enough stress compounding in his life as it was; he didn’t need added triggers like screen time and dehydration creeping up on him. What he actually needed was a vacation—one of the relaxing kinds where he got to sit in peace for two weeks and do absolutely nothing for the first time since before he could remember—but he’d just spent a year’s worth of vacation savings on a glass-maker’s gloryhole and Lydia’s fall term for the private school where he paid them enough to actually care about accommodating her medication routine and the side effects of fatigue and nausea it produced. The best vacation he was likely to get was a free Saturday to spend with his daughter. Now that Lydia had trashed that plan, Mercer already knew that instead of using the time to relax, he was going to be making up for the migraine that had taken him out of commission for half of Wednesday and most of Thursday.
That was how life worked. Shit happened to the people with the best of intentions, and they had to suffer through it to keep making money until they died. His grouchiness wasn’t entirely fair, he decided—his job was one of the few real joys he found in life, even if it came with a fair amount of toil and didn’t pay him for half of the effort he put in. Though, frankly, that was his own fault for not being willing to cater solely to rich folks.
He filled himself a water bottle the size of his head, topped off Kat’s breakfast, and changed into his work clothes. The t-shirt was no longer the white it had once been, marked by enough color stains and holes to be a tie-dye experiment gone wrong, but his cargo pants were in slightly better condition, and it wasn’t as though anyone but Lydia ever saw him in this outfit. He shoved back his natural curls with one of his dozen colorful bandanas, threw on his boots, and made his way into the backyard.
Kat tumbled out with him, tripping over herself to race through the yard, sniffing a path around Mercer’s barn-sized work shed at the back. The sight of her gleeful bounding never failed to bring Mercer joy. He caught her and gave her back a hardy scratch as she tried to barrel past him again, setting her back down with a chuckle as she waggled and bayed. She went right back to her snuffling.
There was no sign of squirrels, but one brave sparrow still pecked away at the feeder despite the presence of the hound cheerfully circling below. Kat was certainly interested insomething, though. Something leading her awfully near the front door of the shed…
Mercer begrudgingly pulled back out his phone, entering the passcode on the shed’s security app and—oh. Well, fuck. According to his phone, the shed traps had been activated. His nerves lit up, his mind turning back to the holy silver email he’d deleted that morning and the dozen others like it that had been arriving for the last month.
“Kat,” he called, then whistled, letting the dog mournfully romp over to him before guiding her back into the house. His heart pounded, but he pulled the largest kitchen knife from its block with steady hands. “Stay here, girl.”
The yard felt strangely quiet without her meager protection, but Mercer held his weapon at the ready as he braced against the shed’s heavy rolling door. If Leah’s traps were still functional, then he was being overly cautious. And he’d never known something of Leah’s to break without warning. Still though…
He eased the door open, stepping into the shed with his knife raised and his senses alight, the thrum in his chest echoing in his ears. As he took in the sight before him, he could feel the beat of it change.
“Oh,” said the vampire hanging from the ceiling. “It’s you.”
3
RAHIL
Rahil’s sun-poisoning symptoms had faded since becoming entangled, but he was not sure what his nerves were attempting at this point. His heart pounded and his breathing was shallow, the back of his mind fighting away the thoughts of a slow, terrible death. And then there was his dick,doingthings. Not a lot of the thing, thankfully, but enough to tell him it was fully prepared to offer far more if the circumstances allowed.
And Rahil thought, maybe, just for a moment, that if this man was the one who would kill him, that would be all right, actually.
“Huh,” Merc replied.
Because hewasMerc. He had to be, just as tall and broad as his profile pictures but wielding that weight with a presence that was unavoidable in real life, the physicality of him a breathtaking thing that seemed to fill the room as fully as his rich, sweet scent, dragging Rahil’s gaze even as the man stepped cautiously around Rahil’s suspended body. It was harder to focus on the butcher’s knife in his hands when his dark eyes were there, staring at Rahil with a hard skepticism that tightened Merc’s thick but manicured brows and pinched the mole beside his nose. The thrum of Merc’s blood through his neck sounded like music to Rahil’s ears, a delicate song that made him salivate.
