“Why are you giving me the option?” There had to be a catch, and I didn’t want to be caught out. Donovan had all but told me she owned me, and the last thing I wanted was her to own me—I didn’t mind if Donovan did, but that was very much consensual.
“Because I don’t want to compromise future work,” she said. “You two are clearly a pair. I knew this before accepting you, and I was reminded that love can do strange things to a person.”
A knock came at the frosted glass door, followed by a tall woman in a thick winter coat with long wavy brunette hair. “I’ve been looking for you everything,” she said, removing the pink-red sunglasses from her face.
“Marzia,” Mercy said, standing.
“Wait,” I mumbled. “You’re Marzia Bainbridge.”
“The one and only,” she said.
Mercy stood and kissed her on the lips. “I thought the two of you deserved to meet,” she said. “Since—”
“Well, since I told her that being in a couple isn’t a death sentence,” she said. “I worked a lot of jobs, while Mercy was my woman on the inside. She’s the voice of reason, sometimes, but not always. She can be the Devil on my shoulder too.” She pressed her read lips to Mercy’s cheek, leaving a stain on her. “But I love her.”
I understood it now. Marzia was Donovan, working, and Mercy was—me? Except I was out there in the thick of the action. “It’s nice to meet you.” I said. “So, is this place backed by the Bainbridge fund?”
They both laughed. I’d heard about the Bainbridge family from Whitespire. Maybe the reason they were mentioned it wasn’t because they wanted me to go there, but as a sign that they knew I’d been there.
“No,” Marzia said. “My family has wealth, but they’re the ones actually backed by Sanctum.” She took the seat Mercy had been in. “You don’t need to know the ins and outs of everything. I like that you’re curious.”
Mercy stood behind Marzia in the chair. “I started this agency on a hope and a dream, almost, and with—a lot of money.”
“We,” Marzia said. “We started it. Mercy sorted the hits, I carried them out. The money came in, we expanded. Right now though, I’m more taking care of our kids than I am going out to kill people.”
I stared at them, their happy faces. I wanted that for me and Donovan, and they could probably see that in my thoughts—somehow reading my mind—or the expressions on my face I was unable to control.
“Anyway, you can leave,” Mercy said. “But I’ll wipe out any debt with the money you’ve made. Alternatively, keep working, but you can’t work with Donovan. You’re both too emotionally attached.”
Marzia nodded. “Agreed. They’ll get themselves killed, or worse, have Sanctum exposed.”
Shrinking even further into the seat, I didn’t like the feeling of all my choices being taken away. I didn’t like the illusion of making a decision they were presenting to me. I shook my head. “I want the truth,” I said. “About the guy I killed. He wasn’t the main runner, he was just some random person you wanted dead.”
They looked at each other. I couldn’t read a single thing on their faces.
“I’ll take this,” Marzia said. She pressed her hands across the table, all manicured and tinted with a glossy pink polish. “Kill every bad person wouldn’t make the world better. It would just make more bad people, opportunists coming into power. You severed one trafficker, and cut off onesupplychain.”
“I want to get rid of evil people, I want to see your list, and I want to make sure what happened to the people on Maya’s list, and from my experience, I want them to know someone is out there protecting them,” I said.
“You want to be a vigilante,” Mercy said. “That’s not someone who can work with us, that’s someone who is—well, in Miami, breaking beds, and leaving lazy paper trail for the police to find.”
Now I was deflated, the. air punched right out of me, aa flaccid latex balloon. That was an exact description of who me and Donovan were. “It helped people,” I mustered. “It helped people,” I said, louder. “It did.”
Marzia and Mercy smiled to each other. “Donovan did the hits and got paid,” Mercy said. “And as for my list, you can’t take someone on from it. The people there are underground, guarded, and might have even already died from natural causes.”
Marzia giggled. “Show him,” she said. “But I know what Mercy’s offer was, and for what it’s worth, I also heard some of the things you said to Maya. Those drones have great audio capture.”
I shouldn’t have trusted anything, my guard should’ve bene up as high as it could get, and yet, they knew and heard everything we’d said—even without the comms in. They didn’t need me here to debrief, they needed me in here to test me. It was all just one big fucking test.
“So, what do you know?” I asked.
“Everything,” Mercy said. “And for what it’s worth, the list will end up getting you killed.”
“I want to see,” I said through weakly gritted teeth.
Marzia pressed something under the table, the wood panel in the center of it dipped and a glowing tablet screen appeared. “These are people who—can I tell him?”
“What do you want to tell him?” she asked.
