THE BLASTED CONTRACT COIN BOOK 1

CHAPTER 18 A LOOPHOLE

POV Gideon

I woke the exact second her heartbeat shifted. Even as a near-imperceptible increase in rhythm, I felt the transition telegraph through her chest and straight into my splayed palm.

Mercy's body didn't "flutter" or "race" into wakefulness like a normal person's would. It simply transitioned from the deep, slow drag that was efficient for sleep to the crisp, measured cadence required for the waking world. It was like watching a master clockmaker's finest creation click into its daytime gear.

I stayed completely still in the grey velvet of the pre-dawn light, keeping my heavy arm locked over her like an iron bar. Through our contact, I could practically feel her performing a cold diagnostic on her own flesh. Heart rate: a steady sixty-two beats per minute. Lungs: clear. I wondered if she could still feel the dull, thumping weight of the coin's tether dragging against her soul from the basement below. For now, she was functional, she was alive, and that's what mattered most.

I let out a long, ragged breath I felt like I'd been holding since the moment I'd fallen asleep. The mere thought of a world without that specific, mechanical rhythm made my own chest feel like a hollowed-out husk.

A single tear escaped my eye, hot, stinging, and entirely uninvited, while thinking of a world without Mercy. It traced a slow, silent path down my temple and sank into the goose-feather pillow.

I was a man who enjoyed the sound of fracturing bone. I was a man who smiled at the sight of a red floor. I was an absolute monster by any civilized metric in Ironspire. But for my family, entirely different feelings stirred under my scars, raw and exposed to the air. I was fiercely, violently overjoyed that she was still intact. As long as she was breathing, I had a reason to stay on this side of life.

Alistair had his grand, sweeping dreams of being a shield for all the discarded children of the city, and that was fine. That was my second priority. But my first would always be the people in this house. They were my reason to live, and Mercy was the core of it.

Mercy shifted against me, tilting her head back. Her grey eyes were clear and instantly alert, reflecting the pale morning light cutting through the valley. She noticed the wetness on my cheek. Reaching up, her thumb, dry, cool, and steady, wiped the tear away. She didn't look sad or concerned by my display; she just looked deeply, clinically curious.

"Why?" she asked, her voice a flat rasp in the quiet room.

I let out a low, rough chuckle that vibrated deep in my chest. My innocent little bird had never cried a day in her life. I liked to think I'd played a part in that, that I'd soaked up enough misery, blood, and filth for the both of us so she'd never have a reason to know the salty taste of a tear.

"For you," I said, my voice gravelly with sleep.

"So you don't have to. I'm doing the emotional labor for both of us, Little Bird."

She nodded once, accepting the logic without a fight. In Mercy's world, if a necessary task was already being performed efficiently by someone else, there was absolutely no reason to duplicate the effort. It was simply a matter of proper resource management.

"Gideon," she said, her expression entirely unreadable.

"Do you think if one of you killed me, and you and Saffron brought me back immediately, it would cancel the contract?"

My blood ran instantly cold.

A surge of blinding, white-hot rage hit me like a physical blow to the jaw. My vision blurred around the edges, and my grip on her shoulder tightened instinctively, hard enough to bruise anyone else. I closed my eyes tight and counted out loud, forcing the monster back into its iron cage before it could snap.

"One. Two. Three. Four."

I opened my eyes, staring directly into her blank gaze.

"We would never risk that, Mercy. None of us will ever actively kill you. Don't even think it. Don't even simulate it in that head of yours."

"What if I found someone else to do it?" she asked, her tone entirely conversational, as if she were discussing the market price of grain or Shimmer-Silk.

"An outside party. A clean kill. Then you and Saffron would merely be performing a standard restoration on a corpse. It could be a viable loophole with this Contract Coin."

She wasn't trying to provoke me; she didn't know how to. She was genuinely, logically looking for a tactical exit from the tether, completely detached from the horror of her own proposition.

It made it incredibly difficult not to lose control of my own weave. Unlike Saffron's elegant, flowing lines of light, my specific gift was narrow, blunt, and unrefined. I manipulated the electrical pulse of the heart itself.

I could force a muscle to start pumping, or I could seize it until it burst. I was significantly more efficient if I had my bare hands on someone, but even from across a room, I could command a rhythm to cease with enough adrenaline in me. I was the blunt-force instrument of the family, making up for my lack of a sophisticated weave with sheer, stubborn mass.

"No one is allowed to kill you, Little Bird," I said, forcing my voice to drop into a low, deadly calm. "That's a rule Alistair set down years ago. It's the highest law in this house. Remember?"

"Oh yes. The Preservation Mandate," she murmured, her mind filing the data away. "I suppose dying is not a viable option then."

"No, it definitely is not. You stay alive and well, or we will come kick your ass once we join you on the Other Side. I'll drag you back by your tail if I have to."

She shook her head slightly. I knew she didn't believe in an Other Side; she never wasted her breath arguing about things that couldn't be proven with hard facts, but she let me have my opinion without protest. She would never actively strip away a tool if it didn't negatively affect the outcome.

Instead of arguing, she sat up and slid out of the bed with a fluid, feline grace. As she walked toward the attached washroom, she began to strip, her movements efficient and completely unhurried. Her dark tunic hit the floorboards, followed by the rest of her layers, leaving her standing entirely bare in the center of the room.

I sat back against the mahogany headboard and watched her, a small, tired smile playing on my lips. She was so damn refreshing. Any other woman in Ironspire would be covering herself, playing at calculated modesty or deliberate seduction. But inside this room, and to a large extent, inside this house, the family gave her the freedom to be exactly what she chose, free of the societal rules we had to beat into her head for public appearances. Just like she let the rest of us be the monsters we were, warts and all.

I watched the lean, corded muscles of her back shift beneath the pale perfection of her skin. She had the most fundamentally amazing body of any woman I had ever known, perhaps only rivaled by Saffron's earthy, radiant warmth, or the lust-filled pores of Jasmine, or even the blemish-free, chilling cold body of Poppy.

Yet, looking at her, I felt absolutely nothing but a brother's fierce, protective pride. My loins didn't stir an inch.

I rubbed the thick stubble on my jaw, briefly wondering if I was broken. The most beautiful women in the world lived under the very same roof. We were only siblings in name, so there would be nothing wrong if I ever got aroused by any of them, but I couldn't even get hard when they stood naked in front of me.

I should probably go back down to the city soon, I thought to myself, watching the bathroom door click shut behind her. Find someone who isn't Family. Figure out what I actually like, Jasmine has assured me I'd only seen a fraction of lust and desires available in this world.

But not today. Not while Mercy was in danger.