Chapter 5 – Grey
GREY
W hen we got back to AJ’s room at the academy, we ran into Becca on her way out.
I’d been about to ask her more about what happened back at the Nest, but the appearance of her friend silenced me for the moment.
I may not have been as perceptive as the others, but I got the sense AJ wasn’t telling us everything.
She was downplaying the message, or messages , since she said there were others.
Guilt lingered long after the short-lived altercation with Corvus. I shouldn’t have taken her phone, or told Corvus to hold her while I tried to read the messages.
But…
The distress, the fury in her eyes when she read whatever was on her phone was too much to ignore. I needed to know what it was. What could possibly drive her to that level of anger that quickly. I wanted to crush it. Shatter it. Burn it to ashes.
I wanted to ask her to tell me, now that the others weren’t with us, what it was that she’d read. Of course, I could ask Corvus, but from the way he was looking at me before we left, I got the sense that I’d done something to piss him off.
He was already on edge. Best to leave him alone until he managed some shut eye. But they weren’t letting this go, either. My phone buzzed nonstop the whole run back to the academy, and I knew it was them.
“Oh, hey girl!” Becca trilled uneasily, glancing between us as we nearly bumped into her leaving their shared apartment.
“Hey,” AJ grumbled, pasting on the ghost of a smile for her friend.
“I was just on my way out,” Becca continued, jabbing a thumb back toward the door. “But,” she paused, eyes slipping toward me. “I can stay if you want me to.”
AJ waved her off, kicking her shoes off to step farther into the living room. “Nah. I’m good. You go ahead.”
“When will you be back?” I asked, earning myself a confused look from Becca and a pointed glare from AJ, who paused on the threshold to the kitchen.
AJ’s nose wrinkled. “Leave her alone, Grey.”
“I just want to know when to expect her back,” I explained, not allowing AJ to overrule me on this.
She didn’t understand the stakes here. What exactly was going to be happening to her over the next sixty days.
Her trials could happen anywhere, at any time.
Someone entering the flat could just as easily be a member of the Saints, come to attack her in bed.
Testing her ability to react in the heat of the moment.
If I heard an intruder in the night, I could at least give her a few seconds head start. Wake her up. Tell her to be ready for attack. And maybe not to kill whoever it was.
They were prepared for that, though. I’d have killed the one who surprise attacked me during my trials if he wasn’t wearing a vest and tactical gear.
“Um,” Becca replied, uncomfortable now. “I don’t know?—”
“You don’t have to answer that,” AJ told her friend.
“It’s fine,” Becca replied with a little wave of her hand.
“I don’t know exactly when,” she told me. “But it’ll be late. Midnight, maybe. One, the latest.”
I cocked my head at her. I hadn’t expected that response. That was late. Really late. Where was she going?
Not my business.
“Thanks,” I said with a tip of my head. “I have your number. I’ll text you so you have mine. If you wouldn’t mind texting before you get back, that would be great.”
“You have my number?” she asked, surprise paling her salon-quality tan.
“Have a good night,” I replied, my words punctuated by a loud groan from AJ in the kitchen, followed by muttered curses as she began messing with pots and pans in the cabinet.
“Uh, yeah,” Becca replied, in a bit of a daze. “You, too.”
She left without another word, and I leaned over to lock the door behind her, bending to unlace my boots.
A snap preceded a light sting on my forehead, and I jerked my head up, finding an elastic on the floor by my feet and AJ shooting mental daggers at me from the kitchen. “Don’t harass my friend or the next thing I launch in your direction won’t be as nice.”
The cast iron pan clutched loosely in her hand accentuated her point. I sighed.
“It’s for your own good,” I tried, seeing that I was going to get nowhere with her tonight. Not while she was riled up and still on edge about whatever was happening on her phone.
“ It’s for your own good, ” she mocked, turning on the gas burner and dropping the heavy pan onto it with a loud clamor. “If you’re eating here, then you can at least help me cook. Get over here and peel the onions.”
It was going to be a long night.
My hip bone and shoulder ached, pressed against her bedroom floor.
I shifted, trying to get comfortable with only one pillow to work with and no blanket.
I explained after dinner how I’d need to sleep in her room. Diesel’s orders meant as little separation from her as possible. If I slept in the living room, she could easily slip out her bedroom window without me noticing. I checked it out earlier, it wouldn’t be all that difficult to climb down.
As it was, with me on the floor between her bed and the window, escape using that route wouldn’t be possible. She could sneak out the front door, but I was a light sleeper. Unless she was ninja quiet, I’d hear her.
Not like I was getting any sleep, anyway. Though, neither was she.
She tossed and turned in her bed two and a half feet up and five feet away from me. Restless. Sighing heavily every few minutes.
I had no doubt it was my doing. The fact that I was here, in her personal space.
Corvus was the same way. The only time he ever slept was alone in his room with the door both locked and deadbolted.
His phone right beside his head. The light from his studio closet left on in case he needed to see anything when he woke.
I wondered if she was thinking of earlier, when I made her sit in her bathroom with me while I showered off the sweat from our run. I thought she might turn away. Not look as I stripped down and stepped into the glass encased shower, but she didn’t.
She folded her arms over her chest and stared openly, her expression betraying nothing as she watched me step inside and then wash myself meticulously from top to bottom.
It was almost impossible not to be turned on with her watching me like that, even if it was a cold kind of stare. A stare that said, you don’t affect me, even though the slight squeeze of her thighs betrayed the feeling she concealed beneath her mask.
Ava Jade groaned slightly before sitting up in bed. I listened as she sighed again, checking my phone for the time.
It was just past eleven, and there were already several more messages waiting on there from the guys in the group chat.
CORVUS
Did she tell you anything more?
CORVUS
If she’s not going to fess up, can we hack into her phone? We need to see what else she’s hiding from us. Those messages seemed threatening. I think she’s lying about it being Becca.
ROOK
Agreed. Something’s off. I don’t like it.
Angling my phone so she couldn’t see, I typed out a quick reply, knowing neither of my brothers would sleep until I did.
Ava Jade shut down my questions all night about the texts she claimed were from Becca, making me even more on edge.
It took all the restraint I had to let it go, but only because I knew we’d find out whether she wanted to tell us or not.
GREY
I’ll look into it. Shouldn’t be too hard.
Corvus’ reply was immediate.
CORVUS
Good.
Ava Jade rose from her bed and padded to the door, stepping out into the living room, and even as tired as I was, I was grateful to have to get up off the solid floor.
Corv liked his bed hard, the mattress so over-firm it was uncomfortable even to sit on. But not me. I liked a good soft bed. Pillowtop. Plush. More like Rook’s, though fur and Egyptian cotton weren’t really my thing.
I’d take either over this, though. This floor was going to leave me with goddamned bruises.
I stretched out the kinks in my bones and went to the door, squinting out into the moonlit space.
AJ was in the sunken area by the couches, searching beneath the coffee table for something.
When she didn’t find it, she huffed, moving onto the fireplace mantle and eventually the little cabinet beneath it.
Getting more and more annoyed as she searched.
What was she looking for?
AJ paused as she pulled something forward from the back of the cabinet, tilting the box-like shape toward the light.
She pressed a button on it and it whirred to life as she leaned back, grabbing something from the top of the coffee table.
The television mounted above the slim fireplace flicked on, the blue light expanding until it coated the room with its eerie glow, making AJ reel back for a moment from its brightness.
It was clear what she was doing when she changed the input and drew what was unmistakably a controller from the back of the cabinet. She wiped the dust off the controller with her shirt and then toggled to the downloaded games as the console finished coming to life.
She chose a first-person shooter. A zombie game I hadn’t heard of.
There weren’t a wide array of choices. She wasn’t half bad, either.
It took her a few rounds, a few virtual deaths, before she hit her stride, cutting down zombies and their offspring with ease, zooming through challenges and levels.
Her hair kept falling in her face as she played, and she roughly threw it back between zombie kills. The urge to hold it back for her, to pull it up into a ponytail out of her way gripped me, and I frowned.
It was an odd thought. What did I care if her hair was getting in her eyes?
Sitting how she was, cross legged on the floor, backlit in blue, she looked like my own personal poltergeist. Disturbing my routines, throwing my life into chaos.
And yet, just like before, I couldn’t say I wanted her gone.
Or that I wished she never came here.
On the contrary, I wanted her more.