Home / Mafia / Midnight Crown / 25 — Mercy

Share

25 — Mercy

Author: Torque Stone
last update Last Updated: 2025-12-04 15:59:21

Mercy was never clean.

It didn’t arrive soft or holy. It came late—bloody, costly, and always edged with regret.

Rain battered the substation roof as Eirwen forced the door shut behind them. The metal screamed in protest, dust raining from above. The space stank of ozone, oil, and desperation—a shelter for people who knew how to hide.

Talia collapsed onto a rusted bench, breath shaky, blood soaking through her sleeve.

“Easy,” Eirwen murmured, steadying her. “Sit. Breathe.”

Talia obeyed, jaw clenched. “They weren’t chasing. Just… waiting.”

Eirwen nodded. She’d noticed.

The Várgr hadn’t attacked.

They’d allowed her through.

That was worse.

She pressed her palm to Talia’s shoulder, grounding herself before she let go. Her own pulse was still a war drum—adrenaline unfinished, nerves screaming.

A sound behind her.

Heavy, deliberate.

She turned as the door creaked open again.

Domenik entered like a storm that refused to pass—coat drenched, jaw locked, eyes dark and dangerous. He scanned the room once: blood, weapons, her posture—every detail claimed in a glance.

His gaze locked on her and didn’t waver.

“You left,” he said.

No accusation.

No rage.

Just a quiet verdict that landed harder than any threat.

Eirwen lifted her chin. “You weren’t supposed to follow.”

“And yet,” he replied, closing the space between them with measured steps, “here I am.”

Talia coughed. Domenik’s attention cut to her, sharp and assessing.

“She hurt?”

“Not badly,” Eirwen answered. “We ran into Várgr.”

Domenik’s whole body tightened, the air getting colder.

“Alive?” he asked.

“They let us pass.”

That hit him like a blow.

He didn’t curse. He just went still, the way predators do when something’s gone wrong.

“Did you see any markings?”

Eirwen nodded. “Marsel’s name, carved into the wall.”

That broke his calm. For a moment, old violence flickered in his eyes. He turned away, breathing hard, then faced her again.

“You shouldn’t have gone there.”

“I know,” she said, quiet and honest. “But it’s my name they’re using. My blood in the lines.”

“You don’t walk into a nest like that alone.”

“I didn’t,” she said, voice turning to steel. “No one tried to stop me.”

His jaw flexed. “That doesn’t make it smart.”

“No. It makes it mine.”

The words hung between them—sharp, electrified.

Domenik stepped in—not crowding, not touching, but so close his authority pressed into her, hot and unyielding.

“You think this is about choice? It’s not. It’s leverage. You’re standing in the crosshairs of three factions that would carve you up just to see what’s inside.”

Her breath tightened. “You think I don’t know that?”

“I think,” he said, voice iron and heat, “you’re bleeding and pretending you’re not.”

She glanced down—a line of red on her arm. She hadn’t felt it.

“It’s nothing.”

“It’s not nothing.”

His hand hovered, then wrapped around her wrist—firm, sure, not asking. He turned her arm to see the wound, touch deliberate and possessive.

“You don’t vanish on me. Not like that.”

Her throat worked. “I didn’t disappear. I went looking.”

“For what?”

“The truth.”

His gaze burned into hers. “And what did it cost you?”

She looked away, silent.

He let her go slowly, each finger a promise of what he could take back at any moment.

Talia spoke, voice low. “She’s right, Dom. The Widow’s moving pieces we can’t see. It’s not random.”

He exhaled hard, then nodded. “I know.”

He turned to Eirwen. “Show me.”

She pulled the parchment from her jacket, set it on the table.

He didn’t touch it.

He didn’t need to.

“I know that seal,” he said, voice just for her. “Your mother used it for commands—no witnesses, no questions.”

Eirwen’s hands curled tight. “She wants me to come.”

“And you’re considering it.”

She said nothing.

He stepped closer, voice dropping to a threat only she could feel.

“You don’t owe her a damn thing.”

“I know.”

“She doesn’t get to claim you.”

“I know.”

His gaze sharpened—hungry, dangerous, certain. “Then why are you still here?”

She let the truth cut. “She knows things. About my family. About yours.”

He stilled, something dark moving through his eyes.

“Say that again.”

“She knows about the night they died. About what really happened.”

The silence was brutal.

He finally said, “And you think she’ll tell you?”

“She will. Because she wants something.”

“What?”

Eirwen met his gaze, steady. “Me.”

Danger flickered across his face.

“Then she’s already lost.”

She didn’t back down. “You don’t get to decide that for me.”

“No,” he said, low and final. “But I get to make sure you’re not alone when you find out what she wants.”

Thunder cracked. Rain hammered harder. The world felt small and dangerous.

Eirwen’s voice was rough. “I’m not asking for protection.”

He gave her a slow, grim smile. “Good. Because I don’t give protection.”

He leaned in, voice at her ear, breath hot and final.

“I give consequences.”

Heat shot up her spine, quick and helpless.

He straightened and turned to Talia. “Can you walk?”

She nodded, barely.

“I’ll carry you if you can’t,” he said. No softness. Just promise.

He looked at Eirwen, command in every line of him.

“We move smart. Quiet. Together.”

A pause.

“And if your mother thinks she can take you out from under me, she’s about to learn her mistake.”

Eirwen held his gaze.

Something settled between them—not peace, not surrender.

Alignment.

A line drawn in blood.

She nodded. “Let’s see what she wants.”

Outside, the rain kept falling.

Inside, the power shifted, dangerous and inevitable.

And somewhere beneath the city, old loyalties felt the pressure—and braced themselves for what was coming.

═══════⊹⊱♚⊰⊹═══════

Next up: 26 — Marked

Continue to read this book for free
Scan code to download App

Latest chapter

  • Midnight Crown   70 — The Drop

    70 — The DropFour in the afternoon.Dom had the distribution architecture mapped across three screens — the northern quarter's communications infrastructure converted, temporarily, into something that would have made Ash's original setup look modest. Caelan had pulled the municipal archive records. Marsel's tunnel network was staged and waiting. Seventeen couriers positioned at relay points across the city, each carrying a sealed package addressed to a recipient who didn't yet know they were about to become the most important journalist or prosecutor in New Eidolon.On the table beside him, the Covenant texts. The Widow's thirty years. Her father's unfinished case.Dom was on his fourth call of the hour when Ash walked in from the corridor and set a printed intercept log on the table without speaking. Dom read it without ending the call, finished the conversation in two sentences, and hung up.He looked at Eirwen."Voss has filed an emergency petition with the Commission," she said.

  • Midnight Crown   69 — Morning, Armed

    69 — Morning, ArmedShe woke before him.That was new.Dom slept the way he did everything — with complete commitment, the operational mind finally offline, his body taking the rest it had been refusing for days. He was on his back, one arm still across her from the night before, his face in the grey morning light stripped of every layer he maintained for the waking city. Younger. Not soft — he would never be soft — but unguarded in the specific way of sleep, when the performance of sovereignty had nowhere to be.She lay still for a long moment and looked at him.She'd been in this city for months carrying a name like a wound and a mission like a weapon and she'd ended up here — in a room she hadn't known existed three days ago, in a bed with silk sheets Ash had sourced overnight, beside a man who had let go of his composure because she'd asked him to and hadn't apologized for it afterward.She thought about her father. About Lucianus. About the Widow in a grey-stone room setting down

  • Midnight Crown   68 — Ash

    68 — AshThe room the Widow had chosen was at the back of the building — old Cayde territory, grey stone walls, a table and three chairs positioned with the deliberate geometry of a woman who had thought about this meeting for a long time and had arranged it accordingly.A file sat on the table.Not digital. Paper. Real paper, which in New Eidolon meant something old or something important or both.The Widow stood when they entered. Not deference — positioning. She looked at Dom first, which Eirwen noted, and then at Eirwen with the expression she'd had in the vault, in the Tower corridor, in every moment since the war began where she'd made a decision that protected her daughter over her position. The look Eirwen still couldn't name.Dom stood at the door.Not blocking it. Just present. His eyes moved through the room — the exits, the windows, the Widow's hands — with the automatic thoroughness of a man who hadn't yet decided whether the threat in this room was physical or of another

  • Midnight Crown   67 — Three Words

    67 — Three WordsShe'd been awake for an hour before he stirred.The cipher wasn't complicated — old Cayde encoding, the kind her father had taught her before the fire, a system built for messages that needed to arrive quietly and be understood quickly. Three words decoded in under a minute. She'd read them, memorized them, set the phone face-down on the nightstand, and spent the next hour looking at the ceiling while Dom slept behind her with his arm across her front and his breathing deep and even and entirely unsuspecting.The three words were: *the fire's truth.*She knew what it meant. The Widow was offering information about the night the Cayde estate burned — the night that had shaped everything, the origin point of all of it. The night that had made Eirwen an orphan and a pawn and eventually a woman sitting in a room in Crown District trying to figure out whether to wake the man she'd chosen and tell him, or whether to carry this one thing herself for a few more hours.She'd c

  • Midnight Crown   66 — Silk

    66 — SilkHe kept the promise at ten that night.Not the silk — that took until morning, Ash sourcing it from somewhere Dom didn't ask about with the particular efficiency of a man who had learned that certain requests from Dom were simply logistics to be executed rather than questions to be answered. But he kept the spirit of it before the sheets arrived, which was: a real room. Four walls that didn't belong to a war. A bed that hadn't come out of a wolf pack's emergency supply.The new space was in the northern quarter of Crown District — not the Tower, which was rubble, but a building Dom had owned quietly for six years without ever using as his primary. A floor he'd kept dark. Unfurnished in the way of spaces held in reserve, waiting for a reason to become something. He'd had Ash's people through it by noon, and by ten o'clock it was habitable in the specific way of spaces that had been prepared by people who understood what habitable meant to Domenik Laev.Eirwen stood in the mid

  • Midnight Crown   65 — Dawn Breaks

    65 — Dawn BreaksAsh confirmed Shadow's movement at four-seventeen.Dom was already awake. He'd been at the window for an hour, the city below running its pre-dawn machinery — supply routes, shift changes, the unglamorous infrastructure of a metropolis that didn't stop moving because powerful men were sorting out who owned it. He'd watched Crown District's lights and run the board and arrived at the same answer three separate times.Reiss would come at dawn. Not midnight theatrics, not a tactical probe — a full assertion of force, everything she had, because the alternative was accepting that the victory she'd reported had been a lie she'd told herself. Reiss was too good a commander to accept that quietly. She'd come hard and she'd come fast and she'd bring enough to make the statement impossible to misread.He was ready for her.His phone was on the sill, feeds running, Ash's updates arriving in the steady rhythm of a man who also hadn't slept. Marsel's wolves were repositioned thro

More Chapters
Explore and read good novels for free
Free access to a vast number of good novels on GoodNovel app. Download the books you like and read anywhere & anytime.
Read books for free on the app
SCAN CODE TO READ ON APP
DMCA.com Protection Status