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9
Gideon
I containedmy third yawn as I tapped away on my tablet. Wylder had woken me up way too early in the morning with three simple words that had effectively dissipated any annoyance I might have felt: “Mercy’s in trouble.”
The swaying of the van made me hit the wrong digital key. I muttered a curse to myself and bit back a sharp comment toward Kaige, who was driving the van I’d just finished setting up to my satisfaction yesterday. I didn’t actually want him to slow down when who knew what might be happening to Mercy while we rushed into the Bend, and hurrying never made for a smooth ride.
Beside me on the padded bench that lined one side of the van’s large cargo area, Rowan stared at the flat-screen monitors I’d mounted all along the opposite wall. Various surveillance feeds from the cameras we’d set up around Mercy’s apartment and footage from traffic cams I was in the process of hacking into flickered across their glowing surfaces. He let out a low whistle. “You really outdid yourself.”
“And yet some bastard managed to get into Mercy’s apartment anyway,” I said, unable to keep the edge out of my voice even though it wasn’t Rowan’s fault. If anyone was to blame for a flaw in the security system, it was clearly the guy who’d set it up, a.k.a., me. I gritted my teeth and frowned at the footage before me.
As far as I could tell, no one except the cops and Mercy herself had gone into Mercy’s apartment tonight. Now I was scanning back through the earlier footage. I’d been skimming through it regularly since we’d set it up, but I could only keep so close an eye on it without Ezra or one of his men noticing that I was even more glued to my devices than usual. I must have missed something.
Damn it. I knew exactly who’d been able to circumvent my security efforts before, and it was the last person I wanted anywhere near Mercy. The image of Xavier’s X-scarred face and ominous grin flashed through my memory.
Wylder swiveled in the passenger seat to peer back at us. “Anything?”
“I’ll tell you as soon as I find something,” I said, my stance tensing even more. I hadn’t been able to defend the Noble mansion effectively, and now I’d fucked up somehow when Mercy needed me more than ever. What good were all the skills I’d built up if they didn’t fucking work when they were supposed to?
Kaige swung around another turn. Through the small, tinted windows on the van’s back doors, which allowed us to see out but no one else to see in, the darkened streets looked just as deserted as they did on my screens. The rumble of the van’s engine sounded almost blaring in the stillness. I hoped that was just my nerves talking and that we weren’t drawing every creep in a ten mile radius to our meeting spot.
The van jerked to a halt. To give Kaige a little credit, the tires only screeched a tiny bit. Almost immediately, there was a knock on the back door.
Rowan leapt up to pull it open and stepped back so Mercy could scramble inside.
She was wearing an oversized hoodie and sweatpants, and her hair was pulled into a messier ponytail than usual, several stray strands falling around her face. She flashed a smile at us as if this were an ordinary get-together, but her gaze darted behind her before she yanked the door closed.
As soon as she did, Kaige hit the gas again. The van lurched away from the curb.
“Thank you for coming so early in the morning,” Mercy said, swiping her hand over eyes that looked slightly bleary. Of course, she’d gotten even less sleep than the rest of us. Her gaze twitched to the back windows and the view behind us again, and I could tell that as nonchalant as she was trying to be about this situation, she was nervous.
Who the hell wouldn’t be? We’d promised her a safe haven, and it’d been violated by a total psycho.
I flicked my fingers across my tablet to switch the focus of a few of the screens to the cameras mounted on the outside of the van and footage from the streets around us. “I’ll make sure no one’s following us. So far we haven’t seen anything.”
She took in the array of screens and let out an awed laugh. “You’ve obviously got every possible angle covered.”
“That was the idea. Doesn’t seem like it worked out so well after all.”
Mercy sat down on the carpeted floor and leaned against the bench next to me. She reached up to give my knee a quick but affectionate squeeze that sent a flare of heat straight to my cock despite my distraction.
“Hey, I’m fine,” she said. “We’ll figure it out like we always do.”
She might not have been fine, though. The jackass had decided he wanted to frame her rather than kill her—this time. For all we knew, he could have killed her any time in the past week and just hadn’t bothered to. I jabbed at the tablet with more force, as if that would change anything.
“Here,” Wylder said to Kaige. There was a rattle of gravel against the undercarriage as the van pulled off the road.
When the engine cut out, the two guys squeezed past the front seats into the cargo area with the rest of us. The space was big enough to fit us all fairly comfortably, but I wouldn’t have wanted to hold a party in here.
Wylder crouched down across from Mercy while Kaige hovered next to him, looking like he wished he’d gotten there first. Wylder’s gaze took her in, and he met her eyes with an intensity I didn’t often see from my best friend. “You’re sure you’re okay?”
“Tired and irritated, but I’ve been a lot worse,” she said, offering another smile. I couldn’t help thinking it looked a bit stiff around the edges. This woman knew how to hold herself together, but even she had limits.
“What exactly happened?” Kaige demanded. “These cops showed up—they were looking for drugs someone had planted?” Wylder had given us a hurried secondhand explanation as we’d hustled to the van, but no doubt it’d been missing some details.
“A little more than an hour ago, a couple of cops started banging on my door,” Mercy said. “As an excuse to search the apartment, they claimed there’d been a call about a disturbance. I had a bad feeling about it, obviously, so I looked around too, and managed to find a baggie of what I’m pretty sure was Glory tucked in the couch cushions.”
Kaige let out a growl. “Fucking Glory.”
