I would do anything to save her.
Anything.
CHAPTER TWO - MERC
PRESENT DAY
Sometimes I look around and wonder where it all came from.
Not the world. Don’t be stupid. The fuckin’ family.
I need to know how I ever got this lucky. How a guy like me, who came from the Boston slums, who threw away a free MIT education, who joined the army instead and spent the next several years breaking people’s minds and hunting down runaway Company girls, could possibly end up a husband and a father.
And then I think, How long? How long can it last before someone realizes I don’t deserve any of this and they try to take it away?
Thinking is almost never good. And the internal monologue is poison. Because it always comes to this. The inherent certainty that what I have here is temporary.
“What are you so deep in thought about?”
I look away from the pool where Avery, Jacob, and Lily are playing in the shallow end. They are still young enough to enjoy the oasis I built out here in the desert. Lauren and Daphne have moved on to bigger and better things. They are inside, hiding behind the three-feet-thick adobe walls that keep things reasonably cool, talking about boys, and makeup, and all that other shit teenage girls gush about.
Even though we are sitting in a grove of shady palm trees, mostly hidden from the late-afternoon sun, Sasha’s face is pink, her eyes hidden behind sunglasses. She and Jax came down with the kids this afternoon. Just for a weekend. We get together often enough, but this isn’t a holiday and this visit wasn’t planned. It’s just some random day in July. Which means Sasha came all the way out to the Palm Springs desert because she has something to talk to me about.
Something she can’t—or won’t—say over the phone.
“These kids, man.” I sigh. “Why do they have to grow up?”
This makes Sasha chuckle. “If you’re missing diaper days you can always try for another.”
Try for another. Interesting way of putting it. Sydney and I have been together for nearly a decade now and there has never once been talk of babies. These girls—Daphne, Avery, and Lily—they’re ours. But we didn’t make these kids. They were gifts from Nick Tate. So was Lauren, Sasha’s teenager. And Angelica and Hannah, who live with James on the other side of the world.
They are Company girls. The kind I used to hunt down.
The irony is borderline sad. It’s like the world is fucking with me. And it’s all gonna come crashing down eventually. I will have to pay for my sins one day. I see it so clearly. I see what fate has in store for me.
An apocalypse of sorts. That’s what it’s gonna come to.
Sydney and I won’t be having children. I’m not against it, but she refuses to pass her bloodline along. It ends with her. She thinks Sasha was crazy for having a biological child. But Jacob is a boy.
They are different.
“Yeah,” I say, but it’s a throwaway response to her throwaway idea. “So what’s up?”
Instead of answering right away, Sasha looks around the backyard. It’s like a fucking resort out here. The massive pool, the water slide, the fake beach, the cabañas, the gardens. Having all this luxury was the only way I could convince Sydney and the girls to live in the desert. I pay a fucking mint for water. We have one legal well plus four more illegal ones. Water is tightly regulated and when the government decides to limit natural resources you have to make sure the whims and decrees of those assholes can’t touch you. I bribed the driller who made the wells with a yearly stipend to keep his mouth shut. It comes to about two hundred thousand dollars a year. But it ends with him and he’s old, so whatever.
I like it out here though. You can’t sneak up on me in the desert. I have this place wired from top to bottom. Hell, I have cameras set up on the highway for five miles in both directions. I have sentry drones to cover the sky and if any uninvited guests make it over my walls, I have four face-eaters who will literally eat off your face. If you get past the dogs—well, you don’t get past the dogs, but if you do, then we just shoot you.
Even eleven-year-old Lily can hit you between the eyes.
We have a house in Montana too. Really fucking nice log house with one of those massive stone fireplaces. It’s a dream at Christmas. But if a bear can break into your kitchen while you sleep at night anyone can break into your kitchen while you sleep at night.
We don’t stay in Montana much.
“I got a call about a week ago,” Sasha finally says.