“She’s sheltered,” I say. “Not closed minded. She might surprise you.”
“She did fuck her brother.” He smiles, but it’s half-hearted. Saint’s the only one who ever really believed that.
“I’m just saying,” I say as we reach her dorm. “We’re your family, and we accept you how you are. However that is. Just figured you should know, in case you didn’t.”
“I did,” he says, quietly for once. “Thanks.”
“Cool.”
We follow the others through the back door and up the steps to the third floor, where Mercy lives. Saint hauls her up the entire staircase and only releases her when we reach the door to her room, where someone has scrawled something in runny letters that look a lot like blood.
“What the fuck?” Saint mutters.
Mercy wraps her arm around herself again, but instead of cowering, she turns to us. “I lost my key,” she says evenly. “Who here has one?”
I cast a guilty glance at the others, waiting for someone to fess up. When no one does, she sighs.
“I know one of you has it,” she says. “Do you pass it around every week, or does one person keep it unless someone else needs it?”
“We all have one,” I admit at last, pulling out my keys. “How’d you lose yours?”
“I accidentally left it somewhere.”
When I open the door for her, she goes to step in, but Saint grabs her arm, yanking her back. She lets out a grunt,wincing like he hurt her even though that couldn’t have been painful.
“Stay here,” he growls, planting her next to us before prowling into the room. I step into the doorway so I can have his back if needed but still keep an eye on Heath and Mercy.
“Where’d you leave your key?” Heath asks Mercy.
“What?”
“You said you left your key somewhere. Where?”
“I…” Her gaze flies from one of us to another like a trapped moth.
Saint emerges, satisfied that there’s no danger. “What does that say?” he asks, squinting at her door and trying to decipher the dripping words.
“Shouldn’t you know that?” she asks, giving him a look.
“Why would I?”
“Because you wrote them?” she says, like it’s obvious. She stomps into her room, and I notice for the first time that she’s not wearing her usual clogs. Instead, she has a pair of Vans tennis shoes on her feet, and when her shirt moves up her thigh as she takes a step, I can see she’s wearing bike shorts under it, so at least I know she’s not naked under there. Still, it’s a weird thing to be wearing if you’re not working out, and now that we’re inside where there’s more light, I can see smudges down the outside of her leg that look suspiciously like blood.
I eye her as we all settle in around her room. I take her chair, while Saint makes himself at home on her bed. Heath paces, as usual.
“Okay, we’re in your room now,” Saint says. “Tell us what the fuck you were doing tonight and why the fuck you’re wearing another man’s shirt. Is that Colt’s?”
“I don’t know,” she says, stepping into her closet and pulling the door closed except for a sliver to let light in and hervoice out. “I told you, I talked to someone to get information, but I didn’t know his name. That’s him. How do you know him?”
“Everyone knows Colt,” I say. “He’s… A shape shifter of sorts.”
“Everyone?” she asks, stepping out of the closet wearing one of her silky pajama sets, this one pale pink with purple roses on it. She looks from one of us to the next. We all nod.
I know him because he fucks around with my cousin Mav. Heath knows him from the street races. And Saint knows him from the other side of town, where their rich families schmooze together. Clearly, Mercy knows nothing about any of this, though, which makes me feel a little better about her showing up in his shirt.
“Look, we told you we would help you find E,” I point out. “Why are you trying to ditch us and go it alone? You still don’t trust us?”
“Is that it?” Heath asks. “You still think it was us, and that we’ll hinder your investigation?”
