“The sooner you start talking, the sooner you’ll be reunited with her.”
Nick turns his back to me.
It’s a mistake. Not that I have any plans to attack him, I don’t. But he should know better.
He turns back around quickly, like he’s reading my mind and this thought just occurred to him as well. “Where do you want me to start? And don’t say the beginning. This is not a twenty-minute story. It’s thirty-eight years, Merc. The beginning starts with the day I was born. The Company isn’t an organization, it’s a plan. And what I’ll tell you is just my role in the plan. The whole thing? That’s a thousand years old, at least.”
Harrison huffs and Nick turns on him. Fast. His reflexes are no joke. He’s not a kid anymore, but he’s a lot younger than both me and Harrison.
“You think that’s fuckin’ funny?” Nick snarls. And finally, the man I was expecting shows up. “I don’t really know who you are—” Nick puts up a hand when Harrison begins to fill him in. “Oh, I know what you do for them.” He nods his chin at me, indicating I’m part of ‘them’. “You’re the pilot. You’ve been around a long time. I get that, Harrison. But you don’t know shit about how this world works.” Nick’s gaze rotates over to me now. “And neither do you. You saw a lot, Merc. Hell, you did a lot. Much more than any other outsider in the history of the Company, that’s for sure. But you don’t know why you were doing it. You have no clue.”
“So fill me in,” I say. “That’s why we’re all here, Nick. Tell us why you had to break Sasha’s heart. Tell us how that pain benefits the Company. Because you’re still in, aren’t you? It didn’t go away, did it? And sure, I’ll admit that I’m out of the fucking loop. By choice,” I growl. “But that just means you’re in the loop by choice as well.”
Nick’s laugh is loud. “Judge me? Really? That’s what you’re gonna do here? I talked to Indie, Merc. I know what this is about. Donovan, right? Or should I say Carter? You’re trying to decide if Adam Boucher is gonna kill you and your family if you don’t help him out with his little problem. That’s why you’re here. That’s why you have Wendy. But you should know, Wendy is loved. Adam might hate me, but not Wendy. She is our Sasha.”
It takes all my learned self-control not to hit him when those words come out of his mouth. I rage inside for almost five full seconds. But when I finally speak, I am calm. “Our Sasha? Is Wendy the new pet, Nick? You got big plans for her, huh? Is that why you’re so mad? You need her to kill you—”
He hits me and then there’s no going back.
We fight.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN - NICK
I’ve had enough of Merc and we’ve only been face to face for about sixty seconds. But I’ve been watching him this whole time. I’ve seen him. I know him far better than he knows me, that’s for sure. And somewhere along the line in these past nine and a half years since I’ve been officially dead, I decided that I don’t like Merc.
He’s not one of us.
He cannot be trusted.
And now he wants my secrets if I want Wendy back?
My fist hits his jaw hard. Merc’s head spins a little and I’m just about to gloat about that when his knuckles deliver an uppercut under my chin. My teeth crash together, the vibration hard enough to shake my brain. Then… fuck if I know what happens. It all goes way too quick to do a blow-by-blow.
We wind up on the floor between the bed and the little table.
Harrison kicks us apart. “OK, OK! That’s enough. Get up. This isn’t getting anything accomplished.” He’s wearing pointy-toe cowboy boots, so it’s effective. Besides, the pressure between Merc and me has been released. Not eradicated, but we needed this little tussle in order to get past the anger and feelings of betrayal.
I get to my feet wiping blood away from my lip. “You think I’m not pissed?” I snarl at him. “You think I wanted any of this? Is that what you think, Merc?”
He’s back on his feet too. There’s a cut along his left brow where my ring caught him just the right way, so he’s busy wiping blood out of his eye. “You wanted it enough to keep it going, right? Because it is still going, right?”
“Do you really think the Company is ever going away? No. Dude. It’s a thousand years old. It’s not going anywhere. Do you have any idea how many people are involved? Easily two hundred thousand. And I’m not talking before we killed most of them off a few years back. I’m talking right fucking now, Merc. They are cockroaches. They breed. There are whole towns, villages, hell, even cities that are nothing but Company. They don’t even know they’re Company. That’s how fucked up it all is.”
“How do they not know? That’s fucking stupid. They know. They get money—”
“They get money from jobs, Merc. Think about it. Put yourself in their place for a moment. You are born into a small town. You grow up there. Maybe you leave for college, but more than likely you don’t. You were not bred with that kind of desire. So you stay where you are. You marry your high school girlfriend. You get a job at the bank, or the real estate office, or maybe you even own a dealership. And let’s get this straight, that’s best-case scenario, most of them end up on drugs because their minds can’t comprehend what’s happening around them.”
“What do you mean what’s happening around them?” Harrison says. “Because what you’re describing sounds an awful lot like the place I grew up.”
“Harrison,” I sneer. “You’re a fucking pilot. People in these towns, they work dead-end jobs. They get drunk at night. They wake up, they do it again. They don’t learn to fly planes. Towns like this have three classes of Company people. The ones who own Company businesses and know they own Company businesses. Dealerships. Banks. Real estate offices. Places where large sums of money get exchanged on the daily. Then you have the middle class. Business owners who think they’re in charge, but aren’t. Restaurant and bar owners. Corner stores. Garages. They exist to keep the third class happy. And the third class is everyone else. And I do mean that literally. People who know they have no power at all, they just follow orders. Cops. Mayors. City Council members. Teachers. Secretaries. Mechanics. Plumbers. Retail. Working class, get it?”
Merc doesn’t look impressed with my revelations. “What’s your fucking point?”
“I’m trying to explain how big this shit is. How pervasive they really are. An entire town can be owned, Merc. And ninety percent of them never even know about it. Because the Company is careful. They only take what they need. They breed those kids—”
“What the fuck are you talking about? I own a fleet of planes in a town just like the one you’re describing. And I’m not on any Company payroll.” Harrison is getting pissed. And I don’t blame him. It’s a lot for this guy. He’s not Company. He’s not Merc, either. Sure, he’s seen some shit, but that was a long time ago.
“Congratulations. You don’t live in a Company town. But just because you’re not part of it doesn’t mean it’s fake.”