Thief

Chapter 23

---Nadir's POV---

There was no rush to head to Mercer's location. In fact, I prefered we had waited even longer than usual.

I had no doubt that Mercer's spy network was extremely busy, kept busy because of my actions. The second I so much as scratched my butt cheek, Mercer would know about it.

Which would only make his paranoia grow worse. Why would I wait to finish what I started?

After all, with each kill I made, each abuser I erased from the face of the earth... I had killed and moved on.

Knowing Mercer, he would be busy trying to analyze my kills. Trying to figure out a way to prevent his own demise. I doubted there was a true pattern to my killing.

Unless you counted ownership. Which already alerted Mercer to the fact that he was kept last. That only he remained on my shortened list.

However, he didn't know how I would kill him. What I have intended for him. Because I hadn't been using all of the Sheik's weaknesses against them.

There was no pattern to discern, no plot to unravel. And I knew that would infuriate Mercer. That man was probably pacing in his room, enraged as each carefully thought out plan of his turned out full of plot holes.

He couldn't make head or tails from my actions. Probably assumed I was thinking on my feet, acting on a whim.

But he couldn't be more mistaken.

I knew how Mercer operated. Knew the signs of his little spies, who thought they were so smart with leaving small carving around the city to communicate with one another.

An ugly carved wooden statue, a stick-drawing in the sand, made to look like gibberish from a child...

Mercer's ego and lack of empathy, his sense of grandeur, made him think he was elevated above the others. That anyone who didn't share his status, lacked intelligence.

It was why he never really questioned his slaves, why he had always spoken in a cypher with his allies while I was still in the room.

But he was foolish enough to think that a slave, someone beneath him, couldn't crack the code.

It took me a while. But after years of bringing him encrypted letter, years of him daring me to read it and mocking me for my failed attempts, I did it.

His cypher, shared with his personal spies, was now an open book to me.

I had known from the start, ever since my first kill, that I was being spied upon. And I had fed the man tidbits of information, of things I wanted Mercer to know.

Because I knew that behind Mercer's intelligence and thirst for knowledge, laid a deep-rooted fear. The man was paranoid and his actions throughout the years that I had been his slave, had proven it.

Simple gestures, as feeding his slaves a bite or a sip from his own meal before he would eat. Never directly accepting something that was handed to him, instead ordering his slaves with a snap of the finger to accept the gift.

Mercer knew he had enemies. And he also knew that those enemies would try to claim his life, in whatever stealthy matter they could muster.

And it seemed he was always one step ahead of them. Feeding his slaves a test sample of his meal to check for poisons, forcing his slaves to accept a potentially booby trapped gift.

Endangering their lives for the sake of his own.

Most, if not all of his enemies had slowly given up. Thinking that the man was all seeing, all knowing.