From the dense woods surrounding the building, a coyote yipped and howled, the sound a wild combination of mournfulness and exuberance.
He pulled his cell from his pocket and hit the screen. It was 3:35 a.m. Liz was five minutes late. That didn’t bode well for Liz or him or Mercy. Or their clandestine meeting.
He had only two questions for Mercy. Did she remember drawing the symbol on the wall all those years ago? And what did it mean to her? Since Dr. God Complex refused to let Mac meet with Mercy because it might jeopardize her treatment, Cain had decided to use the back door—literally, he stood at the Center’s back door—to get answers. There had to be a goddamned reason a picture of him—in blood—was signed with the same symbol Mercy had drawn as she lay bleeding out from the wound caused by his father. He just needed to figure out that reason.
His neck itched and his body twitched. He shifted from one foot to the other, unable to stand still. Christ. He felt like an ADHD kid hopped up on sugar and trying to rein in a surplus of energy. Only it wasn’t energy pumping through him. It was anger. Rage. Fury. That’s what this place did to him. Made him into the sullen boy he’d once been who dreamed of wrath and revenge.
“Mercy.” He whispered her name to the moon, and some of the anger evaporated. “Mercy. Mercy. Mercy.” He used the word as a mantra, reveling in the taste of those vowels and consonants inside his mouth. Just saying her name calmed him.
From inside the building, a rusty bolt scraped and banged, loud as a cherry bomb. The door swung inward, the squeal of old hinges shrieking through the night. In the woods, the coyote howled as if claiming its territory against the odd-sounding intruder.
Liz backed out the door, pulling a wheelchair. Twenty-five years ago, when he’d first met her here at the Center, she’d looked like a mom—a smile on her face, encouraging words on her lips, and a stern don’t-break-the-rules attitude. Now she looked like the grandma version with her gray hair and pleasant plumpness.
“Getting her out here was easier than I expected.” Liz didn’t exactly whisper, but she didn’t speak at normal volume. “Ward A doesn’t have cameras since everyone is locked down. Thank the angels the night shift are notorious slackers. We didn’t run into anyone.” Liz turned the wheelchair to face him.
The woman in the chair slumped in the corner of the seat, head hanging as if it were too heavy to lift. Her hair dangled in limp, stringy hanks that reminded him of blond worms.
“This isn’t my Mercy.” Shit. The my had just slipped out. He didn’t look at Liz—didn’t want confirmation that she’d heard the slip.
His Mercy had always been strong. Even at ten years old, throat wrapped in a fat wad of bandages, she’d seemed oddly poised and imperturbable during all the media interviews. She had survived something worse than what he had endured and yet retained her strength. She’d inspired him, intrigued him, and tied herself to him without ever knowing.
And she’d always been pretty. All strawberry-blond hair and turquoise eyes and features that he’d just wanted to stare at because that made him feel all warm and nice on the inside. He’d never gotten close enough to smell her, but he imagined her scent to be a cross between fresh baked cookies and sunshine—not body odor and vomit like this woman.
“It is her. See what he’s done to her?” Liz’s voice snapped like a whip.
“Who?” Cain asked the question to Liz, but his gaze remained locked on Mercy. She hadn’t moved, hadn’t spoken, didn’t even seem alive.
“Dr. Payne. He’s had a sick fascination with her from the first. Probably because she was the only person on Ward B who didn’t deserve to be there. He’s been pretty harmless until three days ago, when he moved her to Ward A.”
“Why the fuck is she even here if she’s not…?” He’d assumed her past—what his father had done to her and her family—had finally caught up with her. He knelt in front of her wheelchair.
“Don’t you curse at me, boy.” Liz’s tone was all angry mom, making him feel like a bad kid. “Her official record says undifferentiated schizophrenia and post-traumatic stress disorder. But I’ve seen psychotic. She’s not psychotic and never has been.”
He’d never spoken to Mercy before, never been this close to her, never dared to. He’d been a wuss—too damned scared of her reaction to approach her. She had every right to hate him. It was his father who had killed her entire family, his father who had slit her throat, and his father’s blood ran in Cain’s veins.
He touched Mercy’s hair, feeling the damp stickiness of it on his fingers, and smoothed it back over her shoulder. Moonlight gave him more than enough illumination to see. Mercy’s eyes were half open and half rolled up in her head. A dark shadow marred the side of her face, spreading up and around her eye. His insides went arctic. “Who hit her?” The words exploded, loud and angry and conspicuous into the night. All the rage he’d suppressed came surging back into his body, tensing his muscles and nestling in his bones.
“Dr. Payne claims she was hallucinating and thought he was Killion.”
Cain flinched as violently as if Liz had struck him. It was a reflex he couldn’t subdue, even after all these years. Hearing his father’s name still had that effect on him.
“I don’t buy it. The good doctor claims he was in the process of subduing her when she fell and hit her face. And her ribs. Seems a bit odd that the bruise where he injected her with the sedative is the exact size of a man’s fist around the needle mark.”
Cain sucked in a slow breath to calm the anger revving through his muscles. He felt like yelling at Liz for everything that had been done to Mercy, but the rational part of him knew it wasn’t her fault. He metered and measured his voice to force it to sound calm. “You reported him, right?”