Chapter 257: The Endless Copies.
The car pulled into headquarters and none of us said a word.
Melissa sat beside me carrying whatever the call about the strays had dropped into her, staring straight ahead at nothing. Her fingers stayed locked around the edge of the seat.
Mercury had gone quiet up front—all the way quiet. The talking she’d used the whole ride to bury what she’d seen at the mansion had finally run dry. Both of her hands still rested on the wheel even though the engine was dead and the car was parked, knuckles pale, like she wasn’t ready to let go of the one thing still in her control today.
My own head was everywhere except that compound full of bodies. I’d closed the door on it on purpose. There was a bigger thing waiting for me upstairs and I was already halfway into it.
"Thank you. For everything." Melissa said it quietly, a quick sideways glance at me that didn’t quite meet my eyes, and slid out before I could answer. Her mind was somewhere I couldn’t follow and didn’t try to. The door shut with a soft click.
Mercury leaned back against the headrest and watched her go—composed again, walking into that building like a woman who hadn’t been bleeding on a stranger’s floor an hour ago. Whatever the Veyrons were made of, it healed fast and it hid well.
"We going in?" Mercury asked, still watching the doors.
"Give me a second."
I stayed where I was in the back seat. I needed the second. Not for the mansion. For what came after the lift doors opened.
"You think Sinn ordered it?" Her eyes hadn’t left the glass doors Melissa had disappeared through. "The slaughter."
"I can’t tell."
I said it and didn’t believe it. Everything I turned over pointed the same direction. Sinn had promised us backup this morning, insisted on it, worried out loud about our safety. And backup had arrived dressed in black, whistling, and left a compound of dead behind it. Maybe that was what he’d meant by the word the whole time.
"You alright?" she asked, voice quieter now.
The exact question I’d been carrying for her since we walked out of that house.
"Yeah."
"You don’t look it." She found me in the rearview mirror, held the look a beat longer than necessary, then turned back to the windshield. "That about her?"
"Come on, Mercury."
"Then what’s the face for?" She popped her door with a sharp click. "You get something out of her or not?"
There was an edge under it. Not curiosity. Something closer to need. And it made me wonder, one more time, whether Sinn was actually why she was sitting in this car.
"No," I said. "I think she’s a good person, honestly."
Mercury laughed—short, dismissive—one hand still on the open door, the other still resting on the wheel.
"And how would you know that?"
"Because she knows exactly what you think of her. Sat next to you the whole ride. And she didn’t so much as flinch." I heard the words leave my mouth and the back half tripped over the front. Wait. "Didn’t burst your head open like the last one who annoyed her."
"Burst whose head?" Her eyes narrowed in the mirror.
I didn’t answer that. I was somewhere else now.
"Why didn’t she react to you?"
Something cold and unwelcome started taking shape in my chest, the first real doubt I’d ever aimed at Mercury.
"You’re putting a good question to the wrong person." She met my eyes in the mirror and held them, steady, giving me nothing. A muscle twitched once at the corner of her jaw.
"Melissa reads minds." I said it slow, watching myself arrive at it. "She spent a whole car ride beside you. A whole mission. Every filthy thing you said out loud, and she never once caught something worse underneath it. Unless." I stopped. "Unless what comes out of your mouth has nothing to do with what’s actually in your head."
"Who cares about any of that." Too fast. She brushed it off a half-second before she should have, eyes flicking away.
"Mercury... what aren’t you telling us?" The words came out ahead of the thought, and behind them the whole mystery slid back into frame. Monica’s daughter. Biological. Sealed. One of the four women from the Fallen City. "You always survive. Every time. How?"
"Fuck you."
She threw the door wide and got out, slamming it hard enough to rock the whole car on its suspension. The impact rattled through the frame and into my bones.
I sat there for a second in the ringing quiet, staring at the empty front seat.
What did I just do.
This mission was rotting something in me. Turning me into a man who pulled threads on the people closest to him because the threads he actually needed were out of reach. Mercury had driven me out of the Fallen City. Mercury had made me laugh in a week that had almost nothing to laugh about. And I’d just sat in her car and accused her of being the thing I was hunting because I couldn’t stand not knowing.
I shoved the door open and went after her.
"Mercury. Wait."
I caught up and fell into step beside her. She didn’t slow down. Her shoulders stayed rigid, eyes fixed straight ahead.
"You need to put your head back together." She still didn’t look at me. "We’ve got real things coming for us and you’re back here throwing that at me."
"I’m sorry. That was out of line."
She didn’t say it was fine. She just kept walking, which was worse. Her silence landed heavier than any argument.
We went in through the glass doors and turned toward the lift. Sinn was up there somewhere, probably behind his desk, and I was certain he held every answer I wanted about why the naked mansion had ended in a field of bodies. I pressed the button and watched the numbers climb down toward us, letting the anger find its proper target on the way up.