Page 48 of Mercy Me

“By swearing allegiance while insisting that my sources would dry up if I was seen to be affiliated with any one gang in particular,” Kai kept his smile cold. “I was an exceptional bullshitter.”

He still was, when he wanted to be. But with Flick he wanted to, strangely, tell the truth. Or as much of the truth as he could.

“By the time I was eighteen, I’d sworn allegiance to three gangs, and somehow, and thank God, they all believed that I was working for them. If they’d had even a sneaking suspicion that I was playing them and that I was also feeding information to the gang unit at the police department—”

“God, Kai, wasn’t that dangerous?”

She had no damn idea. But the cops had paid him for the same information the gangs did. His entire existence had been one big game of dodging death or jail, which were pretty much the same thing. He’d lived with the daily knowledge that important parts of his anatomy could be scattered all over the streets at any minute. Yeah, he’d been rash and stupid. But life hadn’t meant as much then.

“How does Tally’s mother come into this?”

“I was eighteen, and I met Jane when I passed on some information about a police raid—that gang was paying better than the PD at that stage—and she was one of the girls hanging on the arm of the leader of the gang. She looked strung out and had a massive shiner over her right eye and a cut on her cheek, courtesy, I’m sure, of her lover’s fist.”

Flick winced and her fingernails dug into the skin of his wrist. She still hadn’t removed her hand, Kai realized, and he liked it there. He liked the...shit...connection.

“The poor woman.”

“She was barely more than a girl,” Kai snapped. “Sixteen, seventeen maybe? Anyway, I just knew that she was on short time, that the gang was almost done with her. I was right. Six weeks I saw her lampin’—”

“What?”

“It’s street talk for standing under a street light—offering blow jobs in exchange for a finger of horse. That’s heroin.”

Kai stared out the big window to the street and watched an older gentleman walking a rat on a rope. Okay, maybe it was a dog or something that hoped to be a dog when it grew a couple of inches.

But it made a cute picture, the tall man in his long shorts and silly hat walking a dog that could fit into a teacup. Kai took another look and noticed the pink, silky shirt pulled tightly across his broad shoulders and he tipped his head when he noticed his odd, mincing walk. Kai craned his head for a better look and lifted his brows at his fishnet stockings and bright pink stilettos.

Ohhhkay, whatever blows your hair back.

“Hey, come on back,” Flick said.

Oh, yeah, he had a story to tell. Why had he started this? Damn, there were a million things he’d rather be doing right now, starting with exploring Flick’s luscious, creamy skin. Time to wrap up this sob story, he thought. No good ever came from dredging up the past.

“I knew that I was taking a huge risk by helping her when she’d been tossed out of the gang but I couldn’t leave her there, strung out and shaking.” It was either help her, or pay for her next score, and he couldn’t do that, not ever again. He’d bought his last finger when he was eight; he knew, better than most, how dangerous that shit was. You learned that lesson when you watched your mother’s eyes roll back in her head as she OD’ed.

Moving the hell on.“I took Jane to a shelter for abused women across town, where I knew that she had a chance of getting clean.” He didn’t tell Flick that shortly afterward he’d seen a recruitment office for the military and walked straight on in.

“So, you kind of like...mmm…what’s the expression? Saved her life?”

She didn’t get it and Kai couldn’t explain...Jane had saved him. His helping her had somehow helped him. He had no doubt now, and he’d even kind of suspected then, that if he’d stayed on the streets he might have lasted another six months, maybe a year before someone took him out.

Joining the military had seriously upped the chances of him seeing his twenty-first birthday. And, yeah, it was slightly ironic that he’d gone from one dangerous situation to another, from one type of gang to another. In his eyes, the military was just a bigger, legal gang with government funding and more powerful weapons.

“You saved her,” Flick insisted, emotion casting a sheen over her eyes.

Kai hadn’t expected her to get emotional about this, all starry-eyed. He’d helped a junkie across town and had checked on her a couple of times. It wasn’t anything worth writing home about. Being naïve and stupid and so young, he’d also thought that helping Jane, checking up on her, and bullying her into getting better, was a way for him to redeem himself for all the shitty things he’d done up to that point. He’d wanted to enter the Navy, to start a new life, with his head up a little higher, and without dragging along all his past sins with him.

As a child and as a teenager, he hadn’t been a fool—he knew that the information he traded sometimes resulted in the loss of life, and definitely in the loss of property. His information had helped drugs move through the city, aided girls being sucked into prostitution, and contributed to young men and women dying in drive-by shootings and from drug overdoses. He now understood that helping Jane had been his first, subconscious act to balance out the scales, but he was still a long way from feeling like he’d done enough. He doubted he ever would feel that way. The crap he’d seen in the army, the crap he’ddonein the army, had moved him back into the negative column again. Helping Tally was just him placing another weight in his ongoing effort to balance those scales.

So why wasn’t Flick running? Why wasn’t she standing up and showing him the door? Hadn’t anything of what he’d said resonated with her? Where was the disgust, the distance he’d expected?

“So what are you going to do about Tally?” Flick asked.

Kai spread his hands. “I’ve suggested she stay here in Mercy for a while. I’m going to try and find her a place to stay, a job. The kid needs some time to find her feet.”

“You are so much better than you think you are.” Flick lifted her hand to touch his jaw and the tips of her fingers rubbed his stubble. “You’re a complication I didn’t expect and don’t know how to deal with.”

Emotion, lust, and need arced between them, as tangible as the cooling coffee in the mug in front of him, as audible as the low purr of the display fridge. He was about to lean forward to kiss those upturned lips when a shadow passed by the window. Turning his head, he saw a long tongue lick the window pane and bright, doggy eyes laughing at him through the wet smear.

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