Page 2 of The Price of Mercy
Ooookay. I clearly hit a nerve.
Sam scoffs, looking just as tense as Kane all of a sudden. But rather than explain, he pulls his cell phone from his pocket and glares at the screen. “I can handle the police. Just—” He takes a tiny breath, winces, and averts his gaze from mine. “Don’t leave without me.” Standing, he walks to the back patio and leaves the door open while he places a phone call, positioning himself so that he has a direct line of sight to me and Kane. I can’t hear everything Sam says on the call, but I can see the way he shifts his weight from foot to foot, either impatient to leave or nervous about leaving me alone with a known killer.
Or, more than likely, he’s anxious about news of tonight’s murder getting back to his father, which is… regrettably, unavoidable.
“He’s calling his dad,” I guess aloud. Or rather, his father’s hired men. Little good can come from getting Samuel Wright’s money involved, but if I had to guess, Sam is desperate to fix things. Contacting his father is a sacrifice towards that goal.
Although the father-son pair look alike, they couldn’t be any more different if they tried. Samuel is cold and calculated, always angling to come out on top of any situation, whereasmySam is warm and inviting. Or at least, he used to be.
The version of Sam watching me through the open doorway looks more like his father than I’ve ever seen before.
Kane grunts. “We don’t needdaddyto come save us.” Rolling his eyes, he chuffs. “You’re both forgetting that I’m a goddamn professional.” He takes off his leather jacket and drapes it over my bare shoulders. Warmth seeps into my skin as Kane zips up the front, rethinks it, and unzips the top few inches to reveal my cleavage. He flicks his gaze back up to my face. “We’ll handle the body ourselves.”
“We will?” I don’t feel nearly as confident in our skills with hiding a body, let alone getting away with murder. My mind blanks and reverts back to what Icando: clean. “I’ll, um, get a mop.” Before Kane can stop me, I turn on my heel and walk away, determined to dosomething.Keeping myself busy, contributing in any way I can, both are good things right now.
Standing idle means that the voices in my head start to speak.
You should be sad that someone died.
No! Fuck that! He deserved worse. Cut off his dick and shove it down his throat.
It’s not his fault that Kane’s crazy enough to shoot him.
But he shouldn’t have assaulted me.
Period.
If he is—was—villainous enough to assault a women who clearly didn’t want it, then fuck him. He deserved to get shot.
He deserved to die.
I tune out the voices as Sam’s phone call ends. From a distance, I watch as he and Kane spring into immediate action, discussing their next steps for the briefest second before working in perfect tandem to lift the corpse and carry it out the front door.
Both men hardly bat an eye at the gore. Or the death. Kane, I might expect that from, but Sam?
The boy whose cheeks dimple when he smiles—the one who holds me through the night to keep my nightmares at bay—theman I’ve grown to love more than a friend. It’s like I’m watching a stranger as he lifts the dead body into the back of his pickup truck and wipes his bloodied hands on his jeans.
Since when is Sam more comfortable with death than the daughter of a mortician?
While they strap a tarp over the truck bed to hide the body, I turn away from the window to find a mop. There’s a dirty bucket and a discolored mop stashed in the back of the hall closet, and I dump out the dead spiders and dust bunnies to fill it with dish soap and water. I stare at the suds as they appear and move on autopilot as soon as the bucket is full. Carry it into the living room. Set it down beside the puddle of blood—no, beside the fresh trail of drops leading out the front door—and dunk the mop into the steaming water. I don’t have a way to wring out the mop head, so I splash way too much water over the edge and smear bubbles in a wide arc. Bubbles and blood. Blood and bubbles. A metallic scent in the air. On my tongue. Covering the floor. The water turns red, the bubbles bright pink. Dunk and repeat.
Nothing gets clean. All I’m doing is spreading the evidence around like paint.
As I stare at the bloody mess, made worse by my poor attempt at cleaning, Kane appears from the doorway. He doesn’t try to stop me from cleaning; rather, he slinks over to me and sweeps my hair off my shoulders, bunching it in his hands and quickly rebraiding it with the finesse of an artist, his dextrous fingers combing through the knots, separating the strands, and tying my red ribbon into a bow at the end. Licking the pad of his thumb to wipe specks of blood off my cheek, he hums happily.
I can’t imagine what has him so chipper.
“I like seeing you like this,” he murmurs, answering my question on his own. He tugs at the bottom of his jacket, a small smile curving on his lips. “You look good in my leather.”
Ah, so it’s a man thing.
Sam appears a moment later, his expression stormy as he spots us. “You’re making her clean?”
“I’m not making her do anything.” Kane tosses a glare at Sam for a split second. “But he’s right, sweetheart, you really don’t need to do that.” Gently prying the mop from my hands, he lets it clatter to the floor before scooping me into his arms, damn near purring as I cling to his neck. I catch him grinning as he shoulders past Sam to step outside.
“But we’re leaving evidence,” I protest weakly.
The blood. Our fingerprints. My dress and shoes and phone, lost somewhere upstairs. Bullet casings. Witnesses. I tally up a list of potential problems based upon the crime docs my sister used to watch when she still lived with us. There are too many of them for us to come out of this unscathed. The police are going to identify us as soon as they step onto the crime scene and do the slightest bit of sniffing around for suspects.
