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“Get to the cars and get out of here,” Dad hollered with a wave of his arm, and for once I agreed with his order. Several underlings closed tight around him to shield him. They took off for his car.
Staying low with Mercy and my men around me, I hustled backward toward the other vehicles parked along the graveyard’s driveway as quickly as I could. But that didn’t mean I was going to stop fighting. I managed to take a few shots when I got an opening. One caught a charging guy in the jaw, but the attackers were moving too quickly for any of us to get a good aim.
“The Storm rules here and everywhere!” one of the other pricks yelled, and Mercy tensed even more than she’d already been beside me.
“Xavier,” she muttered, as if there’d been much doubt about who would orchestrate an attack like this.
“Let’s just get the fuck out of here,” I said through gritted teeth.
I’d come in my car, and Rowan had brought his as well so we weren’t packed in like sardines. We dove behind the statue of an angel for extra cover and then bolted for the vehicles. Mercy ended up at mine with me, the three guys at Rowan’s.
Kaige moved to rejoin me, but I motioned him to stay where he was. More Nobles were racing around us, Dad scrambling into the back seat of his own car with bodyguards around him, shots echoing over the grassy hills. I just wanted us gone, fast and uninjured.
I tossed the keys to Mercy. While she unlocked the car, I got in a couple more shots, including one to the shoulder of an asshole who’d thought he could blast away my woman. The second she yanked the door open, I shoved her inside toward the passenger seat and dove in after her.
The wheels screeched as I careened along the driveway and onto the street beyond the gates. My heartbeat thumped in my ears so hard my bones seemed to rattle with it.
“Fuck, fuck,fuck,” I spat out. “The fuckers didn’t let us have one day of peace. My brother didn’t get a proper good-bye even in his death.”
Mercy looked over at me, her own expression taut with anger. “They’re all jackasses, and I wish we could have taken them all down. But—” Her shoulders stiffened as I jammed on the accelerator. “We’ll deal with them. We’ve got the Long Night backing us up against the Storm and Xavier now.”
I couldn’t shake the anger coursing through me. The buildings beyond the windshield were unfamiliar. I had no idea where in the city we were now, and I didn’t care. I slammed my fist against the steering wheel.
“He killed my brother, mutilated him almost beyond recognition, and now this.” I shook my head, all the horrible thoughts from the last few days washing over me. “But Xavier isn’t the only monster here.”
Mercy frowned. “What do you mean?”
“You know what I felt first when I realized it was Roland in that crate? Not horror or pain or grief that my brother was gone. I wasrelieved. Because I knew he wasn’t coming back to take my life away from me and that automatically cemented me as the Noble heir, regardless of Dad’s intentions.”
“Wylder—"
I glanced at her, my grip on the wheel tightening. “I’m fucked up.”
She shook her head. “No, you’re not.”
“I am. My first reaction was to see my brother’s death as a personal gain.”
“It isn’t like that at all,” Mercy said. “Your father drilled it into your head that you had to be perfect if you wanted to be his heir. He used your brother to get to you, to mold you into what he wanted you to be.”
I laughed shakily. “And he’s got that now.”
Mercy spoke with total certainty. “Wylder, you’re nothing like your father.”
There was no pity in her light blue eyes, only concern for me. The heat of my anger started to simmer down. My foot eased up on the gas, and she tipped her head toward a vacant lot we were just coming up on, the cracked cement dotted with sprouting weeds. “I don’t think anyone’s following us at this point. Maybe you should stop and take a few breaths.”
She was right. Like she was so often. I exhaled raggedly and twisted the wheel to bring us into the lot, parking close to the shabby building next door so we wouldn’t be easily visible from the road. Then I cut the engine and pressed the heels of my hands against my forehead.
“How can you be like this?” I asked.
Mercy blinked. “Like what?”
“You’re so fierce, and you take no prisoners, but somehow you can be so understanding when it comes to me and my fuckups.”
“I’m not any more perfect than you are,” she said. “But I think that’s okay. You and I are both human, and at the end of the day, we’re simply trying our best. Neither of us had parents who made it easy for us.”
I brought my hand to her cheek and caressed it. My rage was simmering deep inside me, but I was no longer directing it at myself. I was still wound up from the encounter with the Storm earlier, and all I could think about now was finding some way to release that energy.
There was one way we’d both enjoy.
