Have Mercy Read online

  “Fuck!” Cole shouts, coming through the opening leading from the kitchen. He stops, taking us all in. “Fuck,” he shouts again, running his hand through his short dirty-blond hair.

  “You want to explain this, brother,” Jamie barks, his anger finally making its presence known.

  I step past Trey, walking in Jamie’s direction. He steps backward, retreating from me like he can’t stand the nearness. He probably can’t. I glance down, hating that he backed away from me. It’s like another stab to the heart along with so many other cuts he’s carved into me. Hasn’t gotten any easier. Still hurts just as it did before.

  I see my black tank top on the coffee table and snatch it up.

  It’s the sharp intake of air behind me that stops me mid-air from pulling my shirt over my head. It’s confirmation Trey saw the ugly scar that mars the flesh across my back in a nine-inch diagonal mark. Most of the time I forget it’s there. I wear ribbed tank tops most days, but it’s rare when someone other than me, Cole, or Malachi sees it. They act like they don’t even notice it, even though I’m not stupid. I know they do. I know they hate what it represents. But I can’t change the past. They can’t change the past. It is what it is.

  I yank the material over my head, pulling it down my torso, tucking it into my pants. Then I snatch my holster and weapon out of Seth’s hand, quickly strapping it to my right thigh. Finally, I whip my body around, facing Trey head-on, and give him a look that says he better not even think about opening his damn mouth.

  “Leave it,” I order. “It’s in the past, Trey. It stays in the past. Got it?”

  He swallows as he nods, shock and guilt, perhaps, coating his olive complexion.

  I shoot a look over my shoulder, seeing Jamie’s face has hardened into stone.

  Lifting my arm, I open my hand, requesting the item of mine that’s in his. Instead of giving it to me, he closes his fingers around the cheap piece of jewelry, fisting his hand. It pisses me off, but I’m not in the mindset to fight him over it.

  I turn away, needing to get out of here as fast as my feet will go without running. My cell phone chimes with an incoming text message, but I ignore it. It won’t be Josh, that much I know. It’s either my best friend and partner, or it’s one of the boys. Either way, they’ll have to wait until I have my shit under control.

  “Jen.” Cole says my name in a way that sounds like a heartfelt apology.

  I’m not mad at him. I know he had no way of knowing they’d show up. He and I don’t talk about Jamie or the guys that much. We stay away from the topic of his band. Bleeding Hart has been my favorite band since they formed, back when they called themselves Hideout. I was their biggest fan at one time. Thing is, I still am. Jamie’s voice, the lyrics he writes, the music the guys create speak to my soul in a way nothing else ever has. Individually, all four are talented. Together, they make a phenomenal music group. They were always destined for success and they found it. For that, I’m so proud of all four of them.

  I stop in front of Cole and his hands clasp around my biceps, lightly squeezing. Leaning down, Cole’s lips brush against the shell of my ear and I have to lock my jaw in order to stop my body from reacting to his touch. “You’re shaking.” He whispers the obvious.

  “I’m leaving,” I bite out in a low tone through clenched teeth. If I don’t get out of here, I’m going to lose all my strength and breakdown. I can’t allow that to happen. Not in front of the rest of them. Cole is a different story. Between him and Malachi, I can’t say which has seen me at my worst, but probably Cole. I sought comfort in the one place I never should have—Jamie’s best friend. It isn’t right. I placed Cole in an impossible situation, but I didn’t have much of a choice.

  Fear and the need to protect that which you hold most dear will do that to a woman, to anyone.

  He leans up, his remorseful face coming back into view. His brows furrow and his green eyes cloud. “I’m sorry,” he mouths, but I shake my head, silently asking him to let it go and to let me leave.

  “I’ll see you tonight,” I force out, my tone nowhere near as light as I would have liked it to come out. My nerves are shot, and I have to get out of here fast. I raise my brown eyes up to his six-foot height, pleading with him to understand in only a way that he can.

  There’s a part of me that wants to step into Cole’s arms, letting him wrap them around me. We may not be a thing in terms of sex or an intimate relationship, and never will be, but that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy or take from the physical touch and comfort he gives, because I do. More so than I have the right to. It’s why I was here last night.

  When I have a bad day the only way for me to have a fighting chance at sleep is being nestled in Cole’s arms. I should be ashamed of that, but I’m not. It’s the only solace I’ve had in the last ten years since he’s known the full truth, and I eat that comfort up every chance I get. The fact that he and Jamie smell so much alike due to the brand of cologne they wear is just something neither of us verbally recognize, though neither of us are that stupid, and we both know it.

  “I swear to God,” Jamie barks from behind me, stealing the trimmers from my body. “If you do not take your hands off her, I will rip them off. Stop fucking touching her!” he commands, and I swallow, my throat feeling clogged. For a moment, I welcome his jealousy. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt it, seen it, or heard it.

  The thing about Jamie is that his emotions roll off him in stark honesty. He’s never shied away from them or hid them. What you see is what you get. What you get is who he is to the core.

  “It’s not like that,” Cole says, tipping his head back in frustration that his best friend would think, even for a second, that he’d want me that way. Cole loves Jamie in a way that I used to not understand. The same way Cole didn’t comprehend the way I loved Jamie. It’s why we were always at each other’s throats as kids and teenagers. We weren’t friends like I was with Trey and Seth. Cole and I didn’t hate each other, but we certainly didn’t like each other back then.

  Cole is bisexual. He likes the feel of a man’s body against his as equally as he loves a woman’s. He hid that fact for a long time, but eventually the struggle of fighting who he is, what he wants, became too much, so he admitted it, first to Jamie and then to Trey and Seth, and finally to me. Apparently, his bandmates already knew. It was with me that it came out as a shock. Not because I didn’t approve or respect it, but because I had never opened my eyes to see what had been in front of me the whole time.

  Cole and my spats stemmed from him thinking he was in love with Jamie the same as I was. It was years later that he realized it was his attraction to men in general and the real love he does, in fact, have for his best friend. It just isn’t the same kind of soul-baring love I feel for Jamie.

  “Sure as fuck looks like it to me,” Jamie throws back at him.

  “Us too, brother,” Seth pipes up.

  It doesn’t go unnoticed that Trey has remained silent. He’s never the silent one in the group. He’s usually the loudest and most outspoken.

  “They’re yours to deal with,” I say to Cole, still peering up. “I have to get to work.”

  Cole’s head falls forward again, his eyes landing back on mine. He nods but hasn’t moved to release me. Tired of this, I step around him, forcing him to drop his hands from my arms. I don’t stick around any longer, and as soon as I’m out of the other three’s sight, I bolt out of his garage door and race to my black Tahoe.

  I wasn’t ready for this. I’m still not ready for any of it, but I know the walls are going to come crashing down around me. It’s only a matter of time—and that scares the hell out of me.

  3

  — Jamie —

  Rage.

  Anger beyond anything I’ve ever felt takes root somewhere deep inside me. For the first time in my life, I have no idea how to handle it. I’ve never been pissed off like this toward Cole before. Sure, we have our differences from time to time. He’s a dick. I’m a dick. But thi
s is something entirely different. This is a feeling I’m not used to when it comes to my best friend—the one person that is supposed to have my back no matter what.

  Betrayal.

  I’ve only ever felt it one other time, and it was when Elise left me only to return with a shit-ton of lies she expected me to believe. I wasn’t that naive or stupid. She thought my love for her would cloud common sense. It didn’t. She hurt me in a way that I’ve never recovered from.

  The question is, has he?

  “I suggest you start speaking.” I grit my teeth, trying my damnedest to stay rooted to the spot I’m standing on. Everything inside me is screaming to knock his ass to the ground. He was touching her in an all-too-familiar way. He shouldn’t be touching her at all. No one should be touching her.

  Mine.

  I know she isn’t, not anymore, but that isn’t something my brain can compute. She was supposed to be mine forever. My fists ball, my fingers closing around the necklace still in my hand, trying to crush the metal. It doesn’t work; there is no give.

  When I gave it to her at the age of sixteen, I really believed we had forever with each other. She gave me her virginity on her fifteenth birthday. Still, to this day, it’s the best gift I’ve ever been given. I love my son, and he is my greatest achievement, even over my music career, but he wasn’t a gift I had ever wanted—at least not from Julia. I hate that fact more than I’ll ever admit, but I’ll never regret him. I do, however, regret ever stooping so low that she ended up as his mother.

  “She didn’t betray us, did she?” Trey’s voice cracks. He’s only ever sounded that way one other time that I can remember and that was right after we all moved out west.

  My gaze flashes to where Trey is standing. His ass drops down to the cushioned box below the stairwell. His face is a fury of shock and defeat. Not something I’m used to seeing when it comes to him. He’s the fun, loving, over the top one out of the four of us.

  His eyes are locked with Cole’s. My head swings back and forth between them, trying to understand the silence in their stare down. Cole finally shakes his head, and that only angers me more.

  I don’t know what Trey’s getting at by his comment. She didn’t betray us, did she? Like hell she didn’t. She betrayed me and that’s all that matters.

  I’ll hate her for it until the day I take my last breath.

  “The hell she didn’t,” Seth counters, and I’m grateful for his intervention.

  “No, brother, she didn’t.” Cole steadily shakes his head, fueling a fire that’s kindling deep inside my gut.

  “Her back,” Trey whispers, his head falling to his hands.

  “What does that even mean?” I roar. “What does her back have to do with anything or why she was here?” I direct at Trey, demanding answers from one of them.

  “She’s going to kill me.” Cole sighs deeply, taking a step closer to the rest of us as he finally takes a step into his living room.

  “Yeah, well I’m about to kill you now if you don’t start talking. Say something that’s going to make me not want to rip your goddamn head off like I do right now.”

  “There is nothing I can say that’s going to make you believe me. You made up your mind about her years ago. And I swore I’d never tell you. I agreed with her at the time, but now I wish I had told you.”

  “How long?” I question. “How long have you been sleeping with her?”

  “I haven’t,” he bites out, anger shooting back at me. “That is something I’d never do to you.”

  “And you expect him to believe that?” Seth asks. “You expect any of us to believe that when we watched her, walking down the stair from your bedroom, putting on clothes? Please, by all means, explain that, Masters,” he spits, calling Cole by his last name. He only does that when he’s pissed.

  “I’m not going to tell you, but I will show you.” He eyes me as he passes, the glass coffee table the only thing between us and the only thing keeping me from launching myself at him. I could reach out and grab him, yank him to me, but something stops me from doing so. Maybe it’s the hope, the need to have him make these raw feelings inside go away.

  How he can do that is beyond me. She did betray me, and in the worst possible way too. Everything she did had a trickle effect. It’s why I am where I am today. Why I am the asshole I am. She did that. Love did that.

  “We’re waiting,” Seth continues.

  “Yeah,” Cole breathes out. “You’ll be wishing you hadn’t when it’s all over. If you even get to the end, that is.” He reaches up, high on the shelf next to his seventy-inch TV and entertainment center. Pulling his hand back, he has a plastic compact disc holder between his fingers. A DVD I’m guessing, and that pisses me off. I want answers, not whatever game he’s playing at.

  “I don’t have time for your bullshit.” I shake my head and turn to leave, done with this. I need out of here before I actually do lay my hands on him, because I guarantee you it won’t be in a friendly manner. “I’m out of here.”

  I don’t get four steps away when her terrified voice hits my eardrums and cuts all the way down my chest, slicing me open.

  “Jamie.”

  My name on her tongue stops me, my feet are frozen where I stand. Her voice grabs a hold of me, not allowing me to walk away.

  She didn’t betray us, did she? Trey’s words come back to me.

  “Jamie,” she says again, this time my name comes out more urgent, more haunting than the first.

  I turn, coming face to face with the television, the screen green and black as if it’s displaying some type of night vision view. It’s the girl’s half-naked body that has my knees buckling, hitting the hardwood floor.

  “I can’t stomach watching this again. But a word of advice, it’s ten minutes long. Don’t stop watching even when the urge to puke hits.” Cole passes me, leaving in the same direction I had been heading toward as my eyes remain glued to the screen, unblinking.

  Elise.

  4

  — Jenna —

  Eighteen years ago

  I’m shaking, and I can’t get my body under control. I’m so cold. My feet feel like heavy, solid blocks, weighing more than my own body weight. My teeth clatter together, and I can’t make them stop no matter how hard I try. My hands sting, my wrists ache so bad from where the handcuffs are clasped tightly around them, the hard, unforgiving metal biting into my bone.

  “Jamie!” I scream for probably the millionth time since I’ve been here.

  I’ve lost count of the days, maybe even weeks since I’ve been locked inside this room, chained to only the metal pole that’s in here besides his work table in the far corner that I can’t reach. It’s pitch black, so I can’t see it, but I know it’s there. There’s nothing on it, not now anyway. The only time the surface isn’t bare is when he brings in items to torture me with.

  I don’t know how much more I can take.

  “Jamie!”

  I don’t know why I continue to call my boyfriend’s name. It’s useless. I know he’s nowhere near me. Doesn’t know where I am or if I’m ever coming back to him. Hell, I don’t even know if I’m coming back to him—and that scares me more than anything else.

  The door to what I’ve deemed my jail cell opens, slamming into the wall, jolts my body into alert mode. He’s here, no doubt having heard or even seen me on the camera attached high on the wall in one of the four corners of my room.

  Bright light assaults my vision, blinding me. I squeeze my lids shut, pulling my chained hands up to cover my dirty face.

  A breeze whooshes past me, and then he’s slamming something down on the desk ten feet from where I sit on the concrete ground. I don’t know where I am, if I’m in a house or a warehouse. I’m guessing some sort of warehouse, but this could be a basement for all I know. Basements aren’t common in the south, and I don’t know any houses that have rooms with cold, concrete flooring or painted cinderblock walls, so warehouse is more likely.

  “Jamie!” I cry o
ut again, knowing it’s pissing him off. That was my goal after all. That’s been my goal since the first night I arrived.

  He marches over, dropping down on his haunches, his hand flying out and wrapping around my throat. Cool, light blue eyes train on mine.

  “Stop. Saying. His. Name,” he yells, spit hitting me in the face. He applies pressure, squeezing me enough to get my attention, but not enough to cut off my airway.

  “Let me go and I’ll stop saying it,” I demand, even though he terrifies the life right out of me. I’ve never known evil like the man crouched in front of me. I never knew someone could be so cruel, so devious. I’d been wrapped inside a bubble my whole life, naive to the types of things that existed outside my small world.

  I’m not the perfect little good girl—far from it. If anything, I was the instigator, the trouble-maker. I push every boundary with my parents, my teachers, anyone really.

  I’ve never been a rule follower, and I’ll be damned if this monster is going to make me become one. He’ll have to kill me first, and he just might. That’s not a fear I’ve learned, that’s a likelihood of the situation I’m in.

  His hold around my neck tightens, and then he starts to rise, standing back to his full six-foot-five-inch height and taking me up with him, lifting my feet off the ground. It’s not like I weigh as much as I did when I arrived. Besides, he’s bigger and stronger than any man I’ve ever met, including my father. My own five-foot-five-inch height is no match for him. He easily picks me up and tosses me around like his personal rag doll anytime he feels like it. Today is no different.

  “You think your little bitch of a boyfriend gives a damn about you? Misses you?” He laughs, dropping me back to the cold hard concrete ground. My ass hits hard, but after all this time the pain doesn’t faze me as much as it did in the beginning. “Oh, baby. Far from it. He’s already replaced you.”