I put up my hand in surrender. “OK. But do not kill the messenger.”
He sucks in a breath and his eyes narrow down. “Tell me.”
“Carter Couture, he’s the father.”
“The father of who?”
“Come on, Merc. Who do you think?” He knows what I’m saying, he just doesn’t want to believe it. Cognitive dissonance, man. It fucks with you hard. “Daphne,” I say. “Avery. Lily.”
I expect an outburst from Merc, but he goes pale and silent. Then, a couple seconds later, his one-word response is a whisper. “What?”
“You heard me. Turns out Carter Couture kind of… kinda made himself… I mean, what’s the right word for it? Patriarch? He bred them, Merc. All those upper-class Company women. He took that whole ‘spread your seed’ thing literally. He’s got about…” I pause to mentally calculate how many kids are in his bloodline now. “Maybe… fifty or sixty little Zero kids running around out there right now. And by Zero kids, I don’t mean girls. He never culled the boys, either, Merc. They’re out there too.”
“This is who Adam’s cleaning up?”
“Yeah… no. Me, actually. I’m the one cleaning up that fucking mess. Adam doesn’t even know about it yet. He’s still mucking about with the small-town bankers. This is what I’ve been doing since Sasha killed Santos. This is what I’ve been up to, friend. Sasha gets to live, Lauren gets to live, and I get to clean up the fucking mess. That was the deal. So you can hate me all you want, I’m just doing the best I can.”
“OK. Hold on.” Harrison is back in action. I knew he would be. “Who cares?” He looks up at Merc, grabs him by the shirt, tugs. “Who gives a fuck? Let that asshole die, right?”
“Just let him die,” I agree. “That’s an option.” Merc drags his gaze away from Harrison and looks at me, real fear in his eyes now, because he knows I’m holding something back. I wouldn’t be telling him this if there wasn’t a catch. And there is. There is always a catch. Always a worser-case scenario peeking around the corner in the life of a Company man. “You can let him die, but your girls were part of the program, Merc. You know that.”
He shakes his head. “They’re just fine.” And these words come out confident and with authority. “They’re better than fine. They’re great. Well-adjusted girls. There has been—”
“Hey.” I cut him off. “I’m not here to evaluate your girls. That’s your problem. They’re not on my list. What I’m here to tell you is—and you already know this—they’re not fine, Merc. They’re not fine because they are part Untouchable. They are me, Merc. They are Harper, they are James, they are Vincent, they are Santos, they are Adam. They are us. Well, half us. Who knows who the mothers were. The point is, Donovan—I mean, Carter. Fuck. Even I get confused about that shit. Carter, he’s got a crew, Merc. He’s been breeding little girls for his own personal Zero program for fifteen years now. They’re everywhere. But that’s not the point, either. The point is… the point is, Merc… girls like them, they don’t live long lives.”
Merc goes silent but Harrison is still with me. “But Sasha,” he says. “And Lauren.”
“And Harper.” Merc is nothing but predictable right now. I got him off his game because he falls right into the trap.
“Sasha isn’t from the Zero bloodline. Lauren isn’t either, because I’m not actually from the Zero bloodline either.” I point to my eyes. “Brown. They’re brown, not blue. My father wasn’t my father.” Merc looks completely confused. “I’m not the Admiral’s real son. None of us are the Admiral’s real children. He did this on purpose. Everyone knew this.”
“Not everyone,” Harrison says.
“He doesn’t count,” I tell Harrison, nodding my head to Merc. “What Merc knows never mattered. He was hired help. You think you know things, Merc, because you’ve got three little Company girls living in your house and tamed a Company girl once upon a time? But you don’t know shit about how my world works.”
Now he’s back. Pissed. “So fill me in. You’re what? Some kind of lesser evil because you’ve got brown eyes instead of blue?”
The laugh comes out of my mouth before I can stop it. “Not exactly.”
“Not exactly what? Spell it out for me, Nick. I’m tired of this game you’re playing. And what does eye color have to do with anything, anyway?”
“Eye color has everything to do with it. Because those blue eyes, they come with a certain gene that helps control them. The girls?” I say. Because Merc already looks confused.
“Right. I get that part. But what about James? He doesn’t have blue eyes either.”
I point at Merc. “Good observation. No. James and Vincent do not have blue eyes. Same way I don’t. Or Harper and Santos. They did experiments on this in the Seventies. I don’t understand the science, so don’t ask me how they know this shit, but certain behaviors can be tied to the gene that expresses eye color. They did all the combinations. Blue, green, brown and… hazel.”
Merc shrugs. “OK. So? What happened?”
“Not much, actually. The blue eyes were desirable, obviously. Because in girls, at least, it toned down the insanity. Didn’t work that way for the men, that’s why the Company stopped breeding boys for the Zero program. What we have now, with these blue-eyed Zero girls, that’s as controllable as they come. With either careful or sloppy breeding they come out like Sasha. See, Sasha wasn’t a real Zero. She was a mix. Sloppy breeding saved Sasha. She and Lauren, they’re the only sloppy examples that I know of though.”
Merc doesn’t say anything, but I can hear all the questions in his mind. What about my girls? Were they carefully bred?
It’s Harrison who asks the question. “What’s this got to do with Daphne, Avery, and Lily?”
“Don’t forget baby Hannah,” I add. Because I need Merc to understand that he’s not alone in this. We’re on the same side.
Merc isn’t looking at me. He’s staring blankly at the curtains covering the hotel window. “Hannah, huh.” He looks at me. “What about Angelica?”
“She’s a real Zero. That’s why we were hunting her that year. She was very carefully bred. Like this Indie girl that Adam has. Like Wendy too.”
Merc’s eyes narrow down into slits. “Spit it out, Nick. What are you not saying?”
“I already told you. Your girls came from Carter Couture’s program. They were carefully bred, but not in the same way. Carter was looking for a more… pliable… version, I guess you’d call it.”
“Pliable, as in—”
“Easily manipulated.”
Merc lets out a breath. “OK. So that’s good, right? They’ve got the blue eyes and they’ve conformed. They don’t act out, Nick. They’re not like that. They’re good kids.”
I put up my hands again. “I’m not hunting your girls, Merc.”
“Then why are you telling me all this?”