Page 49 of At Your Mercy
He chewed his lip. I watched the muscle move there, small and human and beautiful, and it flared something under my ribs.
“How do I know you’re not using me?” he asked finally. “That you don’t have some angle where I’m just bait and you’ll hand me off to the next problem?”
“Because you make a better ally than bait,” I said. “And because it would be easier just to kill you than go through with all of this.”
He nearly snarled, the sound all teeth and raw edge. “That’s not comforting.”
“It’s simply the truth,” I corrected.
He rose from his spot on the couch and paced the tiny space, a flurry of thoughts flickering across his face—anger, calculation, fear. He stopped near the window and looked out at the street below as if distance could give him perspective.
“If I do this,” he said, turning back to face me, “you take me out of here. You get me to disappear. That’s a promise?”
“I’ll get you out,” I said. “You tell me what you can, when you can, and we’ll build a case together. You’ll never have to see him again.”
He swallowed, lowering his eyes. “You’re sure you want to risk your life for this?”
“Yes.”
He was quiet for a few moments before letting out a shaky laugh that sounded like it scraped his throat raw. “Okay. Okay, I’ll do it. It’s fucking insane and probably going to blow up in my face, but sure, why not? He wants me to get close to you, I’ll get fucking close to you.”
I left him then, after ironing out a few more details and exchanging numbers.
On the drive back to the warehouse, the city felt different—less like a field of knives and more like a place where plans could be laid, where a network could be unraveled.
When I walked in, Ichabod looked up from his monitor and gave me the barest of nods. He didn’t need to ask. Just based on the look on my face, he got up to join me at my desk.
“We’re in business,” I said without preamble. “Ro agreed to it. We’ll get started immediately. I want you off any other assignments for the time being. Have Lena split your current work between the rest of the guys.”
He nodded, the corner of his mouth tipping up. “On it.”
“Good.”
“You’re really going to hand him over to the police?” Ichabod questioned, his eyes knowing. I’d briefed him on the plan earlier,before going to Ro’s place. He’d left it alone at the time, but he knew me too well after years of working with me.
“Probably not. I don’t want Ro to know that yet, though. I wasn’t sure if he’d agree to it if it ended in Elias’s death.”
Ichabod didn’t sit down. He never sat when he was worried—kept his hands busy, fingers tapping the edge of the desk like a metronome. He watched me with those earnest, too-wide eyes, the kind that had tracked a hundred bad actors and never yet been fooled by any of them.
“Are you sure about this?” he asked, soft but blunt. “Because Ronan—because Andreas—he’s been with Elias for twenty years. That’s not just time. That’s a lifetime of conditioning. Stockholm happens slowly. It’s… complicated. Sure, I guess you could keep the possibility of Elias’s death a secret, but it’d come out at some point. It’d have to.”
Complicated was the understatement of the decade. Ichabod folded those wrung-out fingers together and leaned in.
“He might not want Elias dead, Wes. So if you keep him in the dark, and that’s how it ends… I can’t see him being very… grateful? He very well might care about him.”
Images I’d seen replayed behind my eyes like a looping file: Ro asleep and exhausted in the hotel bed, his arm thrown over me in a way that made something in my chest hollow and hot at once; the bruise along his cheek that mapped Elias’s ownership; the picture of him as a happy, smiling child in the newspaper clipping about his family’s massacre. All of it bled into something I hadn’t planned to feel: obligation, maybe, or something worse.
“Stockholm syndrome,” I said finally, tasting the phrase like metal. “It’s a possibility. A strong one.” My voice was flat, but my insides were anything but.
“If we push too fast,” Ichabod murmured, “if we yank him out before he’s ready to understand what leaving will mean—he could snap. He could choose Elias again because it’s familiar, and hate you for his death. He could turn on us. He could break.”
The word “break” landed heavier than Ichabod intended. I thought of other people I’d tried to help. Few stayed fixed. Trauma rearranged itself into survival strategies that no good plan could completely erase.
“He’s not a child,” Ich added. “Don’t conflate fear with childishness. He’s trained, skilled. He’ll be useful—if he’s willing. But he’s also been groomed to depend on his owner.”
I pictured Ro in that cheap apartment, pacing, chewing his lip, his arguments and barbs a defensive armor. I pictured the boy in the photo and tried to reconcile the two images—the smiling child and the weapon Elias had crafted. The math didn’t line up nicely.
“I know what he is,” I said. “I also know what Elias is. I don’t want that man to keep owning people.” My tone hardened on the last clause. “I’m not doing this because I feel noble. I’ll survive it even if Ro hates me afterward. I just… I need him to be free.”
