Mercy Snow by Tiffany Baker Read Free Book Online

teeth tearing at one of her ragged cuticles, her brow furrowed, he would give her a secret gesture from their childhood—a finger under the chin that meant
Eyes up, head up
. It was the way he’d taught her to sit in a blind, finger ready to pull the trigger, her shoulders relaxed, her back straight and strong. It was the way she should always be in the woods, she knew, but wasn’t, which was why a pair of hunters had grabbed her on that dusky evening half a year ago, when she was coming back from a spring with a bucket. Mercy still flinched whenever she remembered the wet feel of their breaths sliding down her neck and on her bared stomach, their teeth on her shoulders. What they did to her was bad, but she couldn’t imagine how it would have ended if Zeke hadn’t come along, fists flying, and told her to get up and run.
    She never saw what Zeke did to the two men, but she knew it was serious enough that one of them would never walk right again. Zeke was arrested that same night and sentenced for battery and assault. No one in the area believed his story about protecting his sister over the word of two locals.
    “Let me say what happened,” Mercy pleaded, but Zeke had refused to entertain the idea.
    “What they would do to you… it would be worse than what went down with those men. It would be like it happening twice, and it would hurt more the second time around. Keep your mouth shut, Mercy. Trust me.”
    When Zeke was finally released from prison, he exited leaner in his stomach and thighs and chiseled in his jaw, an effectheightened by the scruff of beard he’d kept and the buzz cut he was still growing out. He’d come back different inside, too, Mercy had noticed. It didn’t matter now if he was out shooting in the woods or scanning a crowded bar for lit-up women—it seemed that everything had become a kind of hunt to him.
    Never a drinker before, he started occasionally losing himself in a bottle or two, although now that they had Hannah to look after, he’d sworn to Mercy that he would stay away from the stuff, especially after the brawl he’d gotten into at Lucky’s Tavern their first week in Titan Falls. Over the occupancy of a barstool of all things, at least ostensibly. The real reason, Mercy suspected, was the death of Pruitt, but when it came to that subject, Zeke was as cool and secretive as a rock buried under snow. She knew that something sat frozen at the center of him, yet all she could see of it on the surface was a white suggestion, nothing but shadow and innuendo.
    The only time he’d let his opinion of Pruitt slip was the night of that bar fight. “He was a bastard, right?” he’d rasped, tipping himself into the RV long after dark with a bloody nose and a swollen jaw before doubling over in a coughing fit, holding his ribs, which were probably bruised and maybe even broken. He’d come out of jail with a wheeze in his lungs that wouldn’t respond to any of Mercy’s remedies, and Lord only knew what she would do to fix these new injuries. They couldn’t afford a doctor, and Arlene had died before Mercy could learn enough about healing from her. She needed her brother whole and strong, the way she remembered him before jail, not heaped in a drunken pile. She reached out for Zeke’s hand and took his fingers in hers. She kept her voice low so Hannah, asleep in the loft of the RV, couldn’t hear, and she whispered fiercely into his ear. “Yes, he was a bastard.”
    Zeke’s head lolled against Mercy’s chest. His eyes filmed over with grief. “God, I hope I’m nothing like him.”
    Mercy gripped his hand for dear life. “No. You’re nothing like him. At least not if you don’t want to be.”
    Now Zeke stayed away from anything alcoholic and mostly avoided Titan Falls unless he was looking for work—always stone-cold sober, his hands folded in front of him, hat clenched tight in his fingers as if to prove that he could hold things in check—but it didn’t help. The town had